If Nickelback is butt rock, is this taint rock?

Mouse. Singular. Cat.

I forget why, but Picard and Riker are away, Data is in command with Worf as his first officer. Data wants to be analytical and consider all options, Worf wants to fire all phasers and die in glorious battle. Data comes to a decision and gives orders, and Worf says “Finally!”

Data asks to see him in the ready room, and then dresses him down for talking back to him in front of the crew. They hash out what they expect the role of second in command is supposed to be, and with the military shit out of the way, Data then acknowledges that this dressing down may have damaged their friendship, and Worf replies that no, he was out of line so it was his fault, that he acknowledges that he was out of line and if we can overlook this incident he’d like to continue being friends.

Stated problems, voiced objections, addrressed objections, no personal slights, no raised voices, actual accountability expected and accepted…manliest conversation ever filmed.

I will FEED HIM.

Okay so let’s strike a couple out of that list:

• LibreCAD is a 2D-only DXF editor. I think it’s a fork of an old version of QCAD, which is also a 2D-only DXF editor. Not very helpful for 3D printing.
• Sketchup is kinda useful for going “what would my room look like if I laid out the furniture like this?” It produces horrible 3D models. When I used to work at the job shop, I could tell the model had been designed in Sketchup because it had holes and reversed normals and other shit that wouldn’t print.
• Blender. Blender is a 3D sculpting and animation program; Be your own little Pixar, just add talent. It can be used to make models for 3D printing but it isn’t very good as an engineering CAD package.

I would also rule out AutoCAD because isn’t it like, architectural software? And like, OLD? AutoDesk’s engineering CAD was Inventor for the longest time, and they’ve been working on replacing Inventor with Fusion360. I’m personally done with AutoDesk, they’ve chafed my taint a few too many times so I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.

OnShape is actually cool tech, but it’s drawbackware. In the words of Lando Calrissian, this deal’s getting worse all the time.

I personally use FreeCAD, it could be better in a lot of ways but it’s not commercial. It’s made by the kind of people who are very good at programming computers, but they get full body diaper rash from cornhole to corneas if they try to think about software usability. It’s why every concept is replicated 2-4 times in various forms of incompatibility. May the dread god Nyalathotep smite thee should thou chooseth to make a Clone instead of a Link. It’s also developed in English by mostly non-English speakers. So you go to their forums and ask “If I need to make two mirror images of a part, what is the correct way to model the left one and then mirror it to get the right one” and they can’t get past the grammatical puzzle you just spun for them to answer the technical question.

In conclusion, learn to use a pencil.

My father once told me of an old IBM machine, I think it was the System 3 model 15D or one of its contemporaries, or maybe the original System 38. It had some amount of memory, like 32k of memory (I’m going to get these numbers wrong), and to upgrade it you could spend many thousands of dollars to have IBM come install a control board to upgrade it to 64k. The memory was already physically in the box; they manufactured and delivered it to the customer, and sold the memory control board as an exorbitant cost option, when it was the RAM (it might have even been core storage) that was the expensive part to make.

To a lesser degree, I’ve been hearing about cars that install cost options on all models, but they don’t hook them up on the lower tiers. Like apparently all Lotus Exiges have power mirrors, they’ve all got motors in them, but they don’t give you the switch unless you pay for it. You can go to a Ford dealership, buy the right switch and just pop it in and it’ll work. I suppose it can make some sense to reduce part counts, but it’s getting to the point where it’s "we installed the option in the car, it’s hooked up, it’s perfectly functional, we’ve already put in the expense, and we’ll allow the software to turn it on if you pay for it.

Let me clarify this part of my thinking: That line has moved a lot since the lifetime of Thomas Chippendale.

When you think about what it would take to build an ornately carved mahogany highboy with a high gloss varnish in 1750 versus today, including logging, transporting exotic wood around the planet, the actual woodworking…hell, just compare applying a shellac french polish versus spray lacquer today.

I could run a fairly decent woodworking racket given 10 cubic meters a year. Does that include branches and such?

Ten cubic meters of free wood a year. Huh. That’s an oak or two.

When it comes to rich people, pretty much yes it is.

On my main desktop I’m using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

Linux Mint Cinnamon didn’t run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who’s implementation of KDE?

I’ve spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I’d rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I’m not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I’ve been around long enough to go “Remember PeppermintOS? You don’t, okay.” So I’m looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

I’ve never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I’ve tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don’t know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

Wait a minute! What tools? You’re supposed to be doing theory! You’re a field psycho-ornithologist, aren’t you?

Yeah, see: when you’re looking at these highly ornate antiques, it’s not the wealth of the craftsman on display; it’s the wealth of his customer.

Are you yourself a craftsman?

I have been rendered incapable of seeing beauty in ostentatious displays of wealth.

Don’t mistake me for a scholar, now. I’m a guy with a thickness planer in his backyard shed that’s read a couple books and watched a lot of videos about building furniture. I’m confident I could defend the rank of “enthusiast.”

That said, it is something I liked about Reddit. You could post “Left-handed theoretical psycho-ornithologists of Reddit…” and you’d get at least a few credible answers.

Okay so there are layers to this question:

Why does antique furniture usually have carved feet?

First, antique furniture tends to be the fancy stuff for rich people. Modest furniture made out of a few boards for the unwashed masses usually isn’t considered for preservation, but the fancy shit rich people bought got kept.

Rich people tend to like to show off how rich they are. And one way to do that up until fairly recently was through furniture. Maybe you use exotic wood, but even if you don’t do that you pay a woodworker to waste his life carving useless intricate details like pineapple newel posts or ornate table legs.

The claw-clutching-a-ball design apparently comes from China, it’s supposed to be a dragon’s foot clutching a jewel. The British adopted it in the Queen Anne period because it’s ornate, fancy and foreign exotic. Rich people get to brag that they got their table, or a taste for the style, “during their travels.” Ball-and-claw feet specificall would fall out of fashion with the Chippendale era though fancy schmancyness would hit an all time maximum, and then the industrial revolution happened.

It used to take a skilled artisan to make carvings like that with a chisel. Now, we have duplicating machines that can batch them out dozens at a time. This episode of the New Yankee Workshop shows this off. When building his Lowboy, Norm doesn’t even try to carve cabriole legs, he buys them from a company that makes them, and we get a little footage of the factory. This is why you don’t see the Zuckerbergs of the world showing off ostentatious carved furniture: ornate carvings are commodity items now. You can buy furniture with cabriole legs and arch cornices at any of those big warehouses out by the highway with a “Going out of business forever” sign out front.

Is it only ornamental?

95% yes. Speaking as a woodworker I can tell you, people overwhelmingly like looking at tapered legs. Our own legs taper, so we tend to copy that. From fancy cabriole legs to simple shaker furniture. A flared foot of any kind is mostly ornamental because again our own feet flare out, but there is a bit of a practical purpose: A larger surface area with a rounded edge is easier to slide across the floor than a small, sharply edged end of a board. It doesn’t tend to dig in as much, particularly on carpet. Also, the rounded features are more difficult to chip and splinter.

Why are they usually webbed feet?

It’s meant to be a dragon’s foot, so somewhere between reptilian and birdlike. It is also furniture, not a statue, so it’s rather stylized and not very anatomical. Edit to add, sharp, deep crevices like you get between, say, the fingers of a balled fist, are difficult to carve; The deeper and thinner the crevice, the longer, thinner and more delicate a tool is required to carve it. A craftsman may design around the limitation of the tools he has by, say, making webbed feet rather than trying and failing to do distinct toes.

We were each given like a quarter teaspoon of grounds and a toothpick.

I was taught that Jupiter had 17 moons, Saturn has 12 and Pluto has 1. Many more have been discovered since.

Then there’s the whole “different areas on your tongue taste different flavors.” Like you only taste sweet with the tip of your tongue, the middle tastes salty, etc. I remember being given various substances by my fifth grade teacher like sugar, coffee, lemon juice, table salt etc. and we tried putting them on different areas of our tongues and we were like “…no, we taste everything everywhere.”

I distinctly remember my fifth grade teacher trying to pull that.