NaibofTabr

Ah, but if it’s bad enough the Internet will remember it forever:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(García_Martínez_and_Giménez)

Always thought Chad guy looked like the wish.com version of Johnny Bravo.

WebKit

Sorry that’s not correct. It used to be WebKit via QtWebKit, but now it’s Chromium via QtWebEngine.

Fun fact: the KHTML code base that was developed for Konqueror was forked by Apple to create WebKit, and Webkit has been adopted by Google for Blink, so Konqueror is kind of the origin point for all current web browsers except Firefox (which is descended from Netscape).

… and there are now terminal browsers like chawan that can render images mostly correctly.

Oh good, so they’re kind of on the level of Netscape Navigator.

QtWebEngine

which is Chromium

WebKitGTK+

which is WebKit

and all the tui browsers

…yeah, and I’m sure someone out there still has a working telegraph, but I wouldn’t list it as part of telecommunications infrastructure.

Do you think any of these qualify as anything more than hobby projects?

I’m not sure I’d consider a single-threaded browser application to be relevant in 2026. IE7 still technically exists too, and if you really wanted to you could run Netscape Navigator, but I wouldn’t count them among functional current browsers.

There are 3 browsers. Everything else is just a reskin.

Oh, wait I bet we can write a decent anime plot around this…

See there’s this thing called the Waffle House Index:

The measure is based on Waffle House’s reputation for staying open during extreme weather and for reopening quickly, albeit sometimes with a limited menu, after very severe weather events such as tornadoes or hurricanes. The chain’s disaster preparedness measures include assembling and training “Waffle House jump teams” to facilitate fast reopening after disasters.

Our hero is having a normal day working the griddle, when suddenly a kaiju destroys half the town. The hero works hard to get the restaurant open, making good use of the disaster recovery planning, and helps feed people whose homes have been destroyed, as well as the emergency response workers that come to town.

Their work is noticed, and they are recruited to join the Waffle House Jump Team as a specialist on responding to kaiju incidents. From there it’s like Evangelion, but instead of fighting and killing the monsters, the hero learns about different types through experience and develops (increasingly extreme and improbable) ways to prepare the Waffle House to survive kaiju incidents and reopen quickly, eventually leading to Waffle House creating a mech to defend and repair its locations. (End Season 1)

The reveal of the prototype mech provides the hook for Season 2.

Every time you pick up a new tool, you learn things about working with it that teach what you want from your next tool. Gotta start somewhere.

When you reach that point, and you know what you want, what’s important to how you work, you should replace the tool. Just do it, because it’s wasting your time and effort, and possibly also material if it’s failing in ways that a better tool would not. It’s preventing you from doing better work.

Pass it on via Goodwill if you can’t find a better candidate.

So I want to try making my own patches

If you mean small pieces of already patterned fabric to sew onto larger textile products (clothing, bags, etc), that you can just cut and sew by hand.

If you mean stitching complex patterns or symbols with multiple colors of thread, that’s something you do with an embroidery machine. These are mechanically complex - they are more work to set up, more fragile, and more expensive than a standard sewing machine. They are also not very good for basic productivity stitches (e.g. seams) as they are intended to make very fine stitches on relatively lightweight fabric. They are not good starter machines.

For general sewing work, and especially for learning, I recommend any machine that does not have a screen like this one:

https://www.brother-usa.com/products/ps700

These types of machines are common at entry-level prices, and they offer a wider variety of stitch options, but realistically you won’t get much use out of those, and in my experience the embedded computer parts make the machine less reliable.

I prefer something purely mechanical like this:

https://www.brother-usa.com/products/st531hd

All the controls are physical knobs, dials and switches - no touchscreens or touchpads, no computer components, no vague error messages. It’s mechanically simple to the point where there is very little that can go wrong with it - it just does the job.

This model is also heavy duty, which means it has a stronger metal frame, a stronger motor, and more metal parts in the construction in general (over a standard duty machine). It should last basically forever. Other machines may be able to take heavy duty needles, but that doesn’t mean the machine itself can actually punch through 4 layers of denim without stalling or twisting the frame. Even if you don’t end up working on a lot of heavyweight fabrics, a heavy duty machine will suffer less wear and tear from normal use.

Why would you need to punch through 4 layers of denim? Because when you make a seam in a pair of pants like this:

you overlap the two pieces of fabric and then fold it over and stitch through it like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felled_seam

In the places where multiple seams come together (like where the pocket meets the side seam) there will be even more layers, and an otherwise easy project can suddenly become very difficult to complete when your machine just can’t handle 8 layers in a double-over seam.

Um… one possible downside of a heavy duty machine is that it will sew through your finger if you’re not paying attention, where a lighter duty machine might jab you and then get stuck. It’s also heavier to pick up and move around. It may also have less throat space:

than a similarly priced standard duty machine, because the longer the frame pieces are the more flexible they are. More throat space makes every kind of project easier because there’s more room to feed the fabric through, but it also makes the body of the machine more fragile. If you think you might work on larger projects (like blankets/quilts) you may want to prioritize larger throat space as a feature (dedicated quilting machines have longer arms to accommodate larger pieces of fabric).

Don’t be afraid to buy a used machine, but try to find a copy of the user manual for it before you buy it. Especially starting out, you’ll want the instructions for how to set up your particular machine, and how to do basic maintenance and troubleshooting. All mechanical devices require occasional maintenance. Looking at the manual should also help you figure out if the used machine has all of its parts.

Whatever you buy, keep in mind: simple is good, simple is reliable, simple is difficult to break accidentally and easier to fix if necessary. Extra fancy features do not make a better machine.

*Edit: also don’t buy one of these cheap portable/handheld type machines:

https://sewingmachineguide.co.uk/guides/best-handheld-sewing-machine/

Don’t waste your money. The little handheld ones can have a use to get into weird angles or small spaces that would be impractical with a normal machine, but only in very specific situations. They aren’t general purpose machines.

Wait a minute, supposing two birds carried it together?

I’ve seen some discussion around magister with the short form mage and the abbreviation mg. Allegedly both ms and mr come from the Latin root that magister comes from, so lexically it makes sense.

No one is going to start a professional email “Dear mage” and be taken seriously, no matter how linked the etymology.

I suppose just avoiding gender and professionalism altogether is better though. Instead of “Hello sir,” a polite “Good afternoon” could suffice.

“To whom it may concern…”

So… still just alone in a room?

How exactly does one prepare for a tree flattening their car?

hmm

It’s a story, you know, fiction, printed on cheap paper made from cheap wood pulp… maybe we could call it pulp fiction?

You are the product of 4 billion years of ancestors who fucked.

…

C-C-C-Combo Breaker!

That is a very short amount of time to organize a nation.

O’Neill cylinders solve most issues using 1970’s materials science.

On paper. No one’s actually built a rotating space habitat to simulate gravity with centripetal force (yet).

We must reach the final technology of fully understood biology

We are so, so far away from this… biology is one of those fields where the more we learn, the more questions come up. We barely have a surface grasp of some of the mechanisms of the brain. Blood gets more complicated with every study. We’ve mapped the genome but we have little understanding of what most of it actually does. And the link between gut bacteria and neurological health… we kind of just know that it exists, and not much beyond that.