Tools are a good idea. Probably should follow your lead on that…

I’m mostly looking at whether I would have made any medium sized purchases in the next two yearsl. I might buy some little things in bulk, too, but if there’s any one time purchase where the price is going to jump $200, $300, $500, it’s time to make a decision.

For me that mostly means furniture. I already bought a pair of commodity IKEA bookshelves I’d been considering buying vs building. I might still build replacements, but I would still use what I just bought and domestic lumber won’t be directly subject to a tariff. I’m looking at buying a papasan chair and a mattress as well, probably in the next week or two.

I’ve also considered electronics, but there’s nothing I would buy in the next two years short of some PC components that I’m sure I’ll want. I bought a Quest 3 a while back and it’s been a great purchase.

I did go back through some of my online buying this year to see what I used. I’ll probably buy a few pairs of work shoes and some good soap.

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Yeah, even the better boards struggled to break 3,000MT/s with Zen 1. They sure were fun to play with, though, one of the last times I felt like tinkering was actually getting me something.

I’d be curious how the more modern “default” 3600 kits do, I didn’t have a Ryzen system by the time they were popular and cheap.

Some B350m models did get Zen 3 compatibility. Not all, if I remember correctly, though I could be wrong. So whether it’s compatible I think is model dependent. Whether an old B350m has the VRMs for a chunkier CPU would also be a reasonable question.

I mentioned the R5 3600 because the prices on them are great. A 5800X3D does perform better, but I see completed eBay listings at $225+. They also needs a cooler. I see one 3600 that went for about $50 and several that went for $60, which isn’t too much more than a 16gb kit of DDR4.

I would definitely consider a Zen3 CPU for this upgrade, depending on budget.

First generation Ryzen struggles with higher memory speed. You very likely will not get the full 3600MT/s. There’s no real reason to buy slower, just be aware you’re likely going to hit a ceiling.

For gaming you might see bigger improvements from upgrading the CPU, maybe to an R5 3600. That and the memory are both going to offer big performance improvement.

Scratch patterns are in my experience a little overblown, particularly at high degrees of polish. The sharpener they linked you finishes on ceramic, which generally is fairly fine.

Pull through sharpeners’ biggest problem is that they can’t practically get a clean, consistent apex that follows the sweep of the edge. To get close the housing of the sharpening material needs to be extremely rigid, the pressure used needs to be consistent and light, the angle of the knife in the sharpener needs to be consistent from pull to pull, and the sharpening material needs to be very clean. Otherwise the act of sharpening, while perhaps polishing the bevel, drives the apex into steel residue or abrasive or shifts its angle. That will round, grind down, or rip tiny chunks out of the apex. Still gets a pretty sharp edge.

I don’t find pull throughs suffer much with regard to retention. They don’t get a knife as sharp initially, so they do start with a shorter clock. But from there retention is okay. They completely avoid wire edges, which is nice, so in inexperienced hands in a way they much improve retention.

For most knife steels and uses, pull through sharpeners are okay when used with a light hand. What I’m calling a “clean, consistent apex” isn’t practically necessary in pocket knives. The Sharpmaker and several cheap jigs can produce edges like that, though, and those edges definitely feel better in use. At the reasonable additional cost that’s worth it to a lot of people.

It is possible to sharpen a recurve edge on a waterstone with a rounded corner, but having wasted my time learning how I prefer the Sharpmaker. It’s near enough to the same speed, more intuitive, and more difficult for a new sharpener to make a mistake.

Some jigs have rounded stones specifically for recurves; I know there is a Lansky set. I haven’t used one, myself.

I suspect almost all heavy use recurve blades, carpet knives come to mind, are sharpened using pull through sharpeners. There are shaped sharpening stones specifically for recurves historically used in trade work, but they’re going to kind of suck.

Perhaps not a useful avenue for you right now, but my best results on recurves have by far been from paper wheels.

I know you asked how, but if you end up with only a few recurves paying a pro to do it is a reasonable option. Sharpening recurves is a niche inside a niche. No method I’ve tried of doing it by hand feels elegant or “right”.

I’ve had an argument with a CEC about whether brown sauce or demi-glace is the mother sauce. Quote from Escoffier:

“[Demi-glace] is the base of all the other smaller brown sauces.”

He also says demi-glace is “Espagnole sauce having reached the limit of perfection.” It’s not crazy to say they’re the same sauce, just that one is actually done.

Functionally it’s true, you just don’t use brown sauce as an ingredient for much if anything other than demi. Or more commonly just buy the demi to save space and time.

Escoffier’s version includes veal, but it is made using milk. Page 21.

https://archive.org/details/cu31924000610117/page/21/mode/1up

Millennia!

And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise.

John 2:15-16

Definitely. The texture of the canvas, the light and shadow in the room, the variations between the paints or other media, and of course the size matter a lot. All good painters reinforce their work with some of those, all great painters optimize their work using all of them.

Woman with a Parasol has particularly magnificent brushwork. It’s clear Monet was a master of blending color from the digital image, but how he blended color and texture is breathtaking, fantastically delicate and consistent.

I highly recommend checking out whatever art museums are around you. Even if they don’t have a lot of work from old masters, there are thousands, maybe even millions of paintings worth seeing in person. If it has to be Monet, entrance to the National Gallery in DC is free and the couch in front of this painting is a good place to spend fifteen minutes. Dozens of other marquee Impressionist works, too, and several Van Goghs with even more extreme brushwork just down the hall.

One of my favorite paintings. Definitely the most beautiful I’ve seen in person.

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I know this is a Reddit community, and I get the anger about Reddit going to shit, but I don’t think this sort of thing is healthy. A typewritten postcard might work people on the internet into a froth, but that’s the end. At best the person who gets Reddit’s mail is going to throw it out. At worst people will read it and mock its performative, passive aggressive outrage.

The earnest form of protest is avoiding Reddit, cataloguing its failings, and advocating for alternatives. They’re not worth this sort of mental space.

“Give me a perception check.”

“Fourteen total.”

“You don’t notice anything different .”

“I get out my shovel.”

Online sale have reduced distribution costs and unlimited scaling compared to physical media, so successful games are far more lucrative now than they were and unsuccessful games don’t have losses from overproduction and returns from stores.

Certainly a factor that should be included in determining what a game costs, as is the 30% off the top taken by Steam, Microsoft, and Sony for most digital sales. Distribution in 2023 was not a factor in determining the current max price for a standard edition non-sports game, which was set in the early 00s.

I’m also comfortable seeing games that cost less to produce carrying lower price tags, as in many cases they do, Hades and Hi-Fi Rush coming to mind.

If selling at the current rate wasn’t profitable, gaming companies would have stopped making games by now.

They continue to make $60 games, yes. No one can say whether some company would have made the greatest game of all time last year if they’d been able to sell it for $70, or $80 or $100. Maybe they’re making it now as GTA6.

The economy of scale is what lets companies operate at higher costs. According to Wikipedia RE2 cost about $1 million to make. $1m might still buy a PS1 caliber game, but the remake cost at least an order of magnitude more. Many games now cost nine figures; GTA6 apparently cost $1 billion.

I’m not saying games should haphazardly inflate with everything else for the sake of share holders, but I’m open to the idea that the formula used twenty years ago to decide that AAA games should cost $60 might be out of date.