You don’t necessarily need to get two straight away, though. If you’ve been a couple times and used the hire shoes, sweet. You’re getting into it, you reckon you’ll probably keep going, time to buy some shoes. I’d actually advise against it. Climbing shoe rubber varies from soft to really bloody soft, and you dragging it all over the wall wears it through really quick.

So I’d suggest spending quite a few sessions in those hire shoes, really focusing on your footwork. When you can confidently stick your feet first go while climbing, and not have to adjust your feet constantly, you’re ready for your own shoes. Shred someone else’s until you are confident you can make yours last.

I understand you are trying to simplify things, and I appreciate that we, a hobbyists, need to do this to open up the field to more people. Accessibility is a great thing, but we do need to make sure that potential Roemann examples are prevented from establishing themselves in the governors ethos. There’s a whole lot to VX, and if people are using j-discs and their induction coefficient inverts due to misalignment of the rotorcore (or, god forbid, any of the main encapsulated rails), they’re going to have a bad time. Simple is good, but paradoxically, you need to have a thorough understanding of the more complex parts of this hobby before you can simplify it. The hunchback that taught me went through seventeen flange coupling cycles before they were even allowed to touch the resonance spectroscopy imaging chamber, even at the low end of hypersonic capture waves. To this day, they are still cautious when trying to simplify the pressure transducer startup sequence- and they’re using the more modern Reeistack implementation. Safety first, people. Understand what you’re messing with, because stray glycemic bonded couplings will absolutely kill you.

Ghost Love Score, the live at Wacken version, is top tier material.

My favourite is to exclaim “Shut the front door!” in conversation.

I play it the other way. I’m pretty polite and well spoken most of the time, so when I bust out with “You cock gobbling rotten foetus fucker” it usually gets a good response.

Know when to bodge a fix, and when to nut up and spend some time and money on something. Damp mouldy patch on the ceiling? Have a look in the ceiling space, see if you can spot the issue, fix it if it’s easy. Slap some mould killer on it, done, don’t worry about it. If it comes back? Get it fixed.

Writing shit down helps. I’ve got a whole todo list of things that need to be fixed. It’s shitty how long it is, but because it’s written down it’s already half taken care of and I don’t have that random stress of ‘oh good that’s right there’s a leaky shower’ and having to remember to do that thing.

List the issues, google one by one how to bodge it, decide if it’s worth it.

Somewhat related.

I was doing a winter mountaineering course in Scotland (not as epic as it sounds, but damn fun!). We had some pretty gnarly weather, and were practicing navigation in a whiteout. It’s pretty easy to lose your sense of direction, there’s no landmarks, no reference for what is straight ahead. So the lead person was trudging along, looking down at the compass, following a heading, trudging off into the blank whiteness in a straight line. Every now and then, they would start veering off to the left, then go back straight again- just enough to be perceptible to the people at the back of the line, but not to the person in front. We pulled up a couple of times, lead person kept insisting they were following the compass precisely. It kept happening, so we switched people, same compass, no problem.

It was only when we were back at the lodge and the original lead person was saying how much they loved their electric heated gloves that we figured out what the issue was.

I worked at a joint that sold 360s. The ‘towelling’ was a real thing. Apparently they used crappy solder, which when combined with inefficient components and poor cooling, caused the GPU to develop dry joints. Wrapping it in a towel and turning it on would get it hot enough to cause the solder to melt again, and reflow the joints.

At least, that was the story going around at the time. Whatever the real cause, it often worked. That hardware was such utter dogshit, I’m still amazed that the brand survived. They must have lost so much money in that debacle.

I’m not American, so not only am I distanced from what is going on there, but also from Mr Rogers. Regardless, I take his advice for children- When something bad is happening, look for the helpers. They aren’t in the headlines of the day, but they are there.

Following on from this, one of the things that I believe made me an adult was when I started helping the helpers.

Go volunteer for a cause you believe in. You’ll not only feel better about the cause, but you’ll feel better about yourself, and you’ll help other people feel better.

In This Moment

Austin Lucas

In the vein of the second one, I saw George with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Opera House, performing with Jon Lord a symphony that wrote. Fucking incredible.

Heck yeah, I use it for all sorts of macros. Especially in CAD, I’m generally off the keyboard and on the streamdeck for modifiers and tools. The per - key screen comes in handy when I switch into other programs that I don’t use so often, so don’t have a muscle memory for the keys.

The internet has totally changed how humanity works, learns, socialises, and plays. I cannot think of a more dramatic social upheaval, aside from possibly the industrial revolution, or the taming of the horse.

If you want to feel what the car is doing, it’s great. If you want to feel the clutch point, it’s great. If you want to have precise throttle control, it’s great. If you want to have protection in a fire, not so great.

As an Aussie I remember meeting foreigners when I was a youngster, and just being totally bewildered that they couldn’t swim. To me, it was as if they had said they never learnt to run, or how to open a door.

My next lesson came when I took a foreign friend who could swim to the beach. I swam out past the breakers and bobbed around wondering where they were… Turns out that not everyone grew up around waves, and they didn’t know you could dive under them. So they were still back by the beach, waist deep, just getting smashed around constantly.