The all-new Ikea Cjardboord.

You’re not going to find an Obama Hope edition firearm out there.

I once named the disease “The Disease From Madagascar” and it started in Madagascar.

I also killed the world with a bacteria called Red Ass.

Woodworking: I have mentioned this a couple times in my lectures on this platform. Festool has a tool called the Domino. It’s the shape of a biscuit joiner but it’s got a router bit that it wags like a dog’s tail. It cuts a deep, narrow, short mortise that pre-made loose biscuits fit into.

This tool is protected under patent so only Festool makes them. They sell two models, a small and a large. The small cost a thousand petrodollars.

It’s very easy to use, it makes strong joints quickly, it’s impossible to afford.

You’ll find there’s a crowd of purists who will spend that much on a chisel and won’t hear anything about it because it’s not “traditional joinery.” Floating tenons are thousands of years old, but okay. You’ve got beginners or hobbyists who can put together the basic tools and are upset when Youtubers use Dominos in projects. Most domino joints can be replaced with dowel joints, but okay. And you get the actual cabinet makers who go “I manufacture cabinets, this lets me do it faster, and time is money.” Which…fair enough.

If you don’t own a plunge router, you don’t care.

They did have blue labels though.

Every Zima I’ve seen was clear.

You asked five questions, none of them are stupid.

What exactly is the fediverse? What’s included in it.

I have heard two definitions in use. The first is narrower, it refers to the collection of servers running compatible Reddit-alike software including Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed which are pretty much 1 to 1 compatible and communicating with users on one from another is more or less seamless. The big, distributed Reddit alternative that allows you to post from lemmy.ca onto lemmy.world and me to read it from sh.itjust.works.

The second is the broader, simpler definition of “anything that runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is federated with something else.” Which includes all of the above plus the likes of Peertube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops etc. They are technically cross-compatible, I’ll get to that later.

Is Lemmy part of it or not?

Yes it is, Lemmy runs on ActivityPub.

Are other systems like Bluesky part of it or not?

Some are, some aren’t. A few examples:

• BlueSky. Not part of the Fediverse, it uses a different protocol, their own thing. It is sort of designed to federate but not really in practice.
• Diaspora. Similar concept of federated social media, but not compatible with ActivityPub. The Coke to our Pepsi.
• Truth Social. It is my understanding that The Church Of Trump is basically a fork of Mastodon. They don’t federate though, they turn that feature off thank a long list of random deities and WWE wrestlers.
• Threads. Meta/Facebook’s Twitter clone. IS part of the Fediverse, it uses ActivityPub and has federation turned on, though a lot of instances defederate with them on principle. You can interact with Threads from a Lemmy instance. …If it still exists. Is Threads still a thing?

Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?

Yes and no. You can kind of think of the Fediverse like the Universe itself in that there’s nowhere you can stand and see the entire thing. You and I are from neighboring star systems in the same galaxy, we’re both on servers running Lemmy, so we can communicate completely seamlessly. I see a comment immediately above you from someone on piefed.social, they’re on a server running Piefed, not Lemmy. That’s another Reddit-alike, they can communicate with us pretty easily. You might occasionally see someone on Mastodon chime in. You can usually spot this because they @ the users they’re replying to. It would be really cool if a Mastodon user could reply to this message to demonstrate. As you get farther afield, it kinda stops working. It’s difficult to interact with Peertube from Lemmy, for example. I have commented on a Peertube video from a Pixelfed account though.

It would unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman!

I remember, back in like 2005, camera phones and media phones were starting to properly come out, and I didn’t want it. I had a cell phone and an mp3 player and a digital camera, and I kinda liked it that way.

Recognize my authoritah!

That’s CAPTAIN dry ass to you.

Yeah who is out shopping for sweatpants, takes a pair off the rack and says “fuck yea my ass gonna say Juicy”?

You blamed the problem on capitalism, I used communism as a non-capitalist example to demonstrate irrelevancy. If the tire is flat, it doesn’t matter if the car is manual or automatic. That is what leading scholars call an analogy, it is a rhetorical device used to draw comparisons between relationships. Stated in full: The problem of an aging population has as much to do with capitalism vs communism as a flat tire has to do with the vehicle’s transmission being manual or automatic. I state this because I have come to believe you’re the kind of internet idiot/troll/bot that takes analogies literally out of genuine stupidity or intentional bad faith.

We don’t have the technology to eliminate the majority of the workforce. If we did, the Epstein class would have done it by now out of pure shitheartedness. And only in the fever dreams of a syphilitic moron would one quarter of the population work to take care of the other three quarters be a solution to anything.

Weird fact: Unknown Worlds Entertainment licensed the Cyclops name for the submarine in Subnautica from OceanGate.

Yes, as a matter of fact.

That has nothing to do with capitalism. How does communism solve the “we have a lot of old people that need care” issue that doesn’t divert more people of working age to the Taking Care Of Old People industry? The Soviet answer seems to be “life expectancy of 52” and the Chinese answer seems to be “that’s their state mandated 1 child’s problem.”

Capital E is yellow, lowercase e is green.

The problem isn’t the number of humans on the planet. The problem is how many of them are retirees/elderly compared to working age.

Old people don’t work or work less, still require food, and often require increased amounts of medical care. If you view the world’s economy through a detached, Sim City player eye view, the elderly are a dummy load we dump resources into out of a sense of sentimentality. In an extreme case, where a baby boom is followed within a lifetime by a baby bust, you get into this behind the power curve situation where most of the relatively few working age people are employed in the elderly support industry making orthopedic shoes, walkers, those strawberry hard candies and staffing hospice houses.

That extreme case? Actually happening right now, especially in Korea and Japan.

One I’ve heard recently was…the hair styles you see on ancient Roman art look remarkably modern. Art historians got to wondering just how they managed such complex hairstyles without modern hairspray, plastic clips or elastic bands? A hairstylist took one look and said “They’re sewn.” The historians go “NAAAAAH that can’t be it. Whoever heard of sewing hair?” The hairstylist goes “Hairstylists. Watch” and then she replicated the styles on the statues by sewing.

Here’s another one: Marine biologists long struggled to understand/describe the shapes of certain marine life, including corals. They had these weird wavy patterns that didn’t make sense to us rectangle building monkeys. Meanwhile, a mathematician studying hyperbolic geometry realized that crochet patterns that add loops with every row achieve wavy ruffles in a hyperbolic pattern. It took a few others to piece those two ideas together, to recognize the coral structures as having hyperbolic geometry as a means of maximizing surface area while minimizing volume. The Crochet Coral Reef project has been making crocheted models of sea life ever since.

As a woodworker, it amazes me how the mortise and tenon is still hanging on.

If you aren’t familiar, a mortise is a square or rectangular hole in a board, might go all the way through, might not. A tenon is a square peg basically cut on the end of a board to fit into a mortise. This produces a very strong joint.

The very oldest intact wooden structure known on earth - a well head in Germany - is held together with mortise and tenons. We don’t know the name of the man who built it, because written language hadn’t been invented yet.

There is a thing called a floating tenon. Imagine you want to join two boards, but don’t really want to cut a tenon onto either. Make a mortise in each, then make a third smaller board to fill both tenons. Floating tenon, loose tenon, there are many words for it. The Ancient Egyptians held boat hulls together this way, the hull planks were joined edge to edge with loose tenons which were then cross-pinned with dowels. One such boat was found disassembled in a pit next to the Great Pyramid at Giza; the seal on the chamber was so good they said it smelled of cedar when opened. The ship was assembled and is currently on display.

All the way on this end of history, the European tool brand Festool has a tool called a Domino. It has the form factor of a Lamello-type biscuit joiner, but the domino cuts with a wagging router bit to form a wide, short, deep mortise to insert store bought loose tenons into. This tool is so new, it is still protected under patent.

We’ve been making mortise and tenons for tens of thousands of years, and yet we’re still innovating on the concept.

Izzy is the greyest cat on the Fediverse.