This is how swordfights in movies should be done.
Open thread, talk whatever you want, just don’t be an asshole.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
This is how swordfights in movies should be done.
Open thread, talk whatever you want, just don’t be an asshole.
Today I stumbled upon these two videos during my breakfast and I listened to them at 1,5 speed. At least this story has a good-ish end:
As an outsider, I have always considered UK laws about knives absurd. The same goes for similar daft laws that are active worldwide (like for example in the USA, Canada, Germany, Japan, and more). If laws were made based on evidence and logic, these would be significantly revised and reduced long ago because they are doing diddly squat to reduce actual crime. Instead, it seems that the UK is going in the opposite direction – more and more vague restrictions that do nothing to solve the problems, but make it easier for the police to harass innocent people.
Vague laws that are difficult to not break and/or that can be interpreted in a dozen of ways some of which can criminalize ordinary people on a whim are a staple of authoritarian regimes. What baffles me is that when it comes to knives, they appear to be a staple of even democratic-ish regimes. I completely do not understand it. And in the UK, allegedly, both of the ruling parties in their ludicrous non-representative voting system agree on this one thing and both parties propose these nonsensical laws when they are in power.
I am not in opposition to regulating carrying certain types of knives in certain situations or areas, although they are not necessary in my opinion. There is no causal link between the crime rate and the availability of any type of knife whatsoever. If there were, the Czech Republic would be absolutely riddled with knife crime. It is not. I was capable of only finding approximate statistics of stabbing deaths and CZ is not an outlier within the EU, there are countries with knife restrictions that are both above and below. I would argue that there is even no correlation between how restrictive knife laws are and how high is the knife-related crime rate, although both of these factors are difficult to quantify with any degree of accuracy.
Inventing ever more ridiculous knife laws as a response to rising crime in some areas (allegedly in the case of the UK to rising knife crime in gang fights in London) is pure “performative governing”, i.e. one that pretends to do something to address a problem without actually doing something that actually would effectively address the said problem.
It is raining for over a week so I went to the forest last week to check whether the mushroom season has started. It has not, but it keeps raining still so I will check once a week from now on, and I hope I will manage to get some boletes at some point. We ate already all that I picked a few years ago so we need to re-fill the pantry.
I did not take the camera with me, and I did not encounter many things worth taking pictures of anyway. But I did take a picture of my favorite beech tree with my phone.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It is not particularly huge, but it is not small either. It managed to keep the ground around itself clear of undergrowth for decades and I always stop by when going to that part of the forest. It has beautiful roots and all in all, is full of character. One can imagine this to be one of those trees that dryads inhabit and protect.
Hello folks!
School’s officially out since last Friday and I can tell you. I’m very fine mush. First of all, the last two weeks are some of the hardest, contrary to popular belief. For one thing, my school wisely decided to turn those last two weeks into project weeks under the “Education for Sustainable Development” goals of the UN, which are so broad that you can basically do whatever you want (though each year has one topic they need to touch).
I absolutely love those weeks. Instead of watching one movie after the other because the grade are written and the books have been collected, we do fun things that are really, really good for our underprivileged kids: visiting the library, the zoo, planting, painting,… It also means long days, not just for the projects, but also for the conferences at the end of the year, but lots of activities outdoors, with a pretty heatwave (that thankfully broke this week). As a result a bone deep physical exhaustion came on top of a bone deep psychological one.
You may remember that after my teacher training, I basically stumbled into special ed. I discovered that I like it and that I’m good at it and that I could imagine staying there. Unfortunately, the ministry of education claims that there’s no shortage of special ed teachers, I was just filling a temporary vacancy. For 5 years in the same school… I kept trying, the union kept trying, but the last phone call with the nice woman from the ministry made it clear that while I could probably always get a temporary contract, I’d not get a permanent one. But she’d send out a new temporary one. That was weeks ago, I kept waiting. Now, since I didn’t go to university for nothing, I kept applying for the regular teacher jobs, though me and my fellow “totally only temporary long term regular ed turned special ed” colleagues suspected that the two departments were keeping us in a loop.
On Monday I got a mail from the department overseeing regular teacher placements that they have (another temporary…) position for me. It would have been at a comprehensive school quite near, which doesn’t only have a bit less underprivileged clientele, but which also would knock off 2/3rds of my commute. But…, you know there’s always a but, they also have a joined high school branch* with the school my kids go to, the high school branch my kid enters next year, a high school branch I’m qualified to teach. Also, I like my school and I know that the principal there is fighting tooth and nail to keep me. Give her another year and the ministry will give me a permanent contract just to get rid of her. That’s an asset you don’t give up easily, so i texted her that unless she was able to work a miracle, I would have to take the offer. Well, she did work a miracle, I could switch with a teacher who was due to start at “my” school. So goodbye KWS (our school Instagram Account), hello, KWS! Another 6 months safe, and at least now I have a prospect of getting a permanent place. Also, I’ll be turning 45 next year, that’s the upper age limit for tenure, so I’ll become cheaper to hire, staying an eternal employee (no problem there). Oh, do I need to mention that my position as special ed teacher there is now vacant?
And with all those good news, I’ll fuck off to Ireland on Monday. Let’s see if I manage to post some sightseeing pics.
*Germany doesn’t have middle and high school. We have primary school (1-4 (6 in some states)) and secondary school (5-13), though some teachers are only qualified to teach until year 9 or 10.
The time flies again and I feel like I managed to do exactly nothing. This is not true, of course, only I managed to do just enough to be ever so slightly behind what needs to be done. I was in part hampered by the extremely hot weather, but mostly by the fact that I only have two hands, and by now I do all heavy work around the house solo. Thus I am in a perpetual state of frustration and a feeling of inadequacy.
At least I have managed to repair half of the walkway to our house.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The tiles sunk in the middle about 2 cm over the years since it was built in 2017 so I need to dismantle it piece-by-piece, add some gravel underneath, compress it, and re-assemble it. I have finally some use for the stones that I managed to collect in my garden over the years as well as the leftover gravel from house renovations. Here you can see two buckets of fine stones and a wheelbarrow full of gravel, all collected from my vegetable patches and flower beds and sieved from the soil when preparing the substrate for bonsai. This gives you some idea about the natural state of topsoil around here and why fields were replaced by meadows as soon as centrally organized agriculture stopped being a thing. I can run out of a lot of things, stones not being one of them.
The other thing that is half-done is firewood for winter.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I wrote about this wood last year, these are offcuts from making palettes and furniture, and it is a lot of work, and I mean a lot of work now as well as in winter when I will need to carry each of these sacks down to the cellar. But it is very cheap – about 1/10 of wood briquettes or paletted firewood. Since I am not good at selling knives, I can more easily afford to spend time doing this than to spend money on better fuel. Even though I spend with it about two months’ worth of labor, at this price it actually saves me about two months’ worth of living wage, so it is worth it. I really do not need to go to the gym, I get my workout at home – I just bagged 3700 kg of firewood in three weeks.
I do not know when the other half will be delivered so today I took a little break from all my work and I made shrimp for lunch. I like shrimp, but they are a treat that I eat only a few times a year. I did not do anything fancy, just french fries, deep-fried shrimp, and some steamed vegetables. The steamed vegetables were from the first harvest of this summer, the first pattypan squash and a few bean pods.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I planted five different kinds of beans this year to get some variety. Shame, really, that the red pods lose color in steaming, they do look quite appetizing and colorful when raw. The result was good anyway – each type had a slightly different texture and taste, so the final dish was quite delicious.
I do hope to manage to do some work on knives before the next batch of firewood arrives. I would also like to take a few photos of my bonsai trees for the Bonsai for Beginners series. We’ll see.
I encountered Vaush on YouTube through his pro-LGBTQ+ videos and it was I guess just a matter of time before I stumble upon these as well:
I am torn on this issue. I have argued in the past on this blog that overzealous weapons regulations and indiscriminate bans are nonsense (-click-, -click-). For example, there is no practical purpose to be served by banning the sale and/or possession of some knives. I have also argued that liking firearms for their aesthetics or technology or enjoying exercising the skills needed for their use is not, in itself, a sign of a pathological personality (-click-). But I am also a proponent of proportionate regulation of weapons – the more dangerous a weapon, the more difficult it should be to obtain it for private use, and the barriers should not be financial ones or at least not purely financial ones. There should be some basic proficiency and background check for guns, as well as mandatory psychological exams and licensing for them. I do consider my home country (Czech Republic) to have a good and sensible legislature in this regard.
On the other hand, I do recognize that in the USA there are two strong barriers against the implementation of such laws and Vaush mentions them both.
So it is not simply possible to look around the world at what works there and implement it in the USA. The issue is, unfortunately, much more complicated than that.
If Vaush likes guns and wants to shoot them at the range or enjoy them aesthetically or both, I have no issue with it. Those are perfectly valid reasons to own guns in my book, and I think mentally healthy people should have lawful options to indulge in.
I also agree that some amount of packing heat on the left is reasonable, otherwise, there is nothing to stop the American right to have their version of Nacht des langen Messer and eventually Kristallnacht in the near future, it’s not as if parallels to these did not happen in the American history ample times in the past. And the armed right needs to be counterbalanced with something and flowers simply won’t do. Although I do fervently hope that it never comes to actual shootouts between neonazis and leftists in the USA. If the situation deteriorates that much, there probably won’t be a way to stop the civil war and the odds are that the police, army, and judiciary would side with the nazis – there are recent precedents for that too.
I do completely disagree, however, with one of his stated reasons – that having a gun might be useful in the case of a widespread societal collapse. In my opinion, in case of a widespread societal collapse in the USA or EU, not having a gun would be the least of the problems for most people. The topmost will be keeping yourself fed and warm, and guns can only help very little with that. Our current society is heavily dependent on infrastructure, logistics, and division of labor. In case of societal collapse, no electricity, no food and medication distribution, and no clean water will probably kill most people. Having a gun in such a scenario might marginally increase one’s short-term chances of survival, but without farming the land and distributing the food, any modern country will quickly starve. There is not enough wildlife left for those with guns to get sustenance by hunting. And stealing from others by force will be only of very short-term benefit. Bushcraft is a nice hobby but it can’t keep alive dense populations of hundreds of people per square km. Not to mention that I won’t live long without prescription medication and no amount of gun-waving will give it to me if pharmaceutical companies stop producing it. And in the case of Vaush personally, as well as millions of others – if he breaks or loses his glasses and there is no infrastructure to get him a replacement, his guns won’t help him with that either.
Other than this one thing I find his videos, especially on LGBTQ+ issues, reasonable.
Last week I finished with strawberries. I spent two-three hours working on them for a day for nearly two weeks and in the end, I harvested over 30 kg. 22 kg I managed to dry, and the rest converted my mom into marmalade (-> cellar), pies (->freezer) and puddings (->immediate consumption). And just as soon as the strawberry season has ended, the raspberry season has started.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
There is a huge patch of wild raspberries just outside my garden. My neighbor cannot mow the meadow this close to the fence, so they thrive on a strip of land approx 1 m wide. And the law in CZ is that wild fruit on publically accessible land can be picked by anyone, so I can use it – I just need to go out of my garden and walk all the way around, about 100 m. Last year we did not have any because I took a chainsaw to the whole growth to rejuvenate it – which it did.
Since these are wild raspberries that grew there from seeds some decades ago, the fruits are relatively small. They are even smaller due to seven consecutive drought years, but they are still tasty and I managed to pick over 600 g yesterday in just half an hour. I will pick a few kg over the next few days, try to dry some, and make others into jam since we run out of raspberry jam some years ago.
And to post something pleasing to the eye after a long while, the first sunflower of the year has blossomed.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It is not particularly big sunflower, in part due to the drought and in part because I did not buy F1 seeds this year and I simply planted some of the surplus seeds that I fed to the birds during the winter. But it is pretty and the sunflower patch looks promising.
Today I was etching blades and listening to the YouTube channel LegalKimchi and I must recommend it so far. I especially liked his last video:
But his other videos that I managed to see today were good too. I haven’t yet seen everything and I am unlikely to see everything he has made, but so far he seems to be on the side of social justice, especially with regard to people of color.
My Sharpenatrix was working well enough but having to tighten the screws holding the blade each time was a bit annoying. So I bought some stainless-steel non-magnetic screws and a bunch of neodymium magnets to play with. And some of those magnets were small cylindrical magnets with a screw, and those were ideal for a quick upgrade of the Sharpenatrix.
Here is a composite picture of the upgraded thingy.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I screwed three magnets into the end of a 5 mm strip of aluminum, glued on it another strip to make a continuous plane with the magnetic side of the magnets and I used the non-magnetic screw to make an end-stop to lean the back of the blade against. Spanning the blade is now a matter of seconds and whilst the magnets do not hold it extremely strongly, they do hold it strong enough to keep the constant angle during sharpening. And they allow me to adjust the blade position slightly and quickly, giving me greater versatility.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The screw can be adjusted to the thickness of the blade but its purpose is not to hold the blade firmly – that is done solely by the magnets – but to avoid levering/twisting the blade off the magnets when I lean it against the belt. The side with the screw is now significantly thinner than the side with the magnets, which allows me to sharpen at a constant angle blades that were too narrow for the previous version.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I have not actually tested it yet, I do not have any knives that need sharpening right now but I see no reason why it should not work.
I have also bought 500 5x5x5 neodymium magnets for making more sophistimacated magnetic chucks in due course.
It is the Time of Strawberries again and I am spending several hours daily picking, sorting, and processing strawberries.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
However, since we still did not eat half! of the various strawberry, figs, and other jams and marmalades that we made last year, I have decided to try and use the fruit dehumidifier on them.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I was worried a bit they will lose aroma and/or color, but neither happened. They are still bright red (that might still change over time) and very aromatic. Enclosed in jars they should hold for years in our cool dark cellar. And unlike marmalade – which is way too sweet for me to eat regularly – I can add them to my breakfast yogurt together with other dried fruits from our garden (prunes and apples) almost daily without adverse effects, so they should disappear over time hopefully quicker than the marmalade (which we cannot manage to give away, let alone eat). Even running 24/7 at 60°C, the dehumidifier cannot manage to dry all strawberries that I gather daily and the smaller and unseemly fruits still have to go into marmalade, which thus will continue to accumulate. Next year I will plow over some of the strawberry patches, this is simply too much.
Blast it. I wish that more useful and edible foodstuffs grew here as well as strawberries and walnuts. I had no luck with sweet corn or red beets this year, most seeds did not even germinate. With garlic and onions, I had zero luck for several years too. And this year’s pole beans were partially destroyed by voles and partly by the too-harsh sun (although I still have enough plants to hope for a reasonable harvest), and my only apple tree appears to be dying from water vole damage. And those little fuckers ate all of my tulips as well, so I did not even have pretty flowers in the spring. I still had no luck in finding a remedy that works on these pests.
By Diacritica – Wikimedia Commons
In my 20s and 30s, I loved playing pen and paper. We had a really great group of friends, and even after the kids were born, we simply kept playing at my place, putting the kids to be in between looting and adventuring. Somehow life got in the way, two members of the group had a fall out, our group kinda died in the middle of the campaign. I’m not sure if my kids remember those gaming session or simply grew up with a steady tale of them, but they’ve been bothering me for a long time, asking to play some adventures.
In the end I recruited my two other friends and last week we had our first gaming session. Oh boy, that was fun. Since none of them ever played any pen and paper, I dmed, not my favourite thing, but since they’re also completely newbies in the world of The Dark Eye (Germans don’t play DnD, we play DSA), I also created a character to go with them, thus “giving birth” to “Salida de Emergencia*”, a priestess of the goddess of wisdom and magic, to give them some background information and also to get the roleplay going. If it comes to the last, she can also always disperse a bit DM wisdom, but that’s something I’d like to avoid.
I really had forgotten how much fun it can be, especially with completely green characters being played by completely green players. For one, the group is badly balanced. Neither of them carries an actual sword or has decent fighting skills. One of them, our nimble elf, carries a smallsword, which she kept losing by rolling 20s (in that system, 20 means failure). In the end, she resorted to wrestling with the Rodents of Unusual Size in a lot of bat shit. The archer kept missing, of course, because when you’re a starter character you have a 50/50 chance. Now the rest of them is suspicious of her because they barely survived the final fight while she was unharmed. Oh, and the mage didn’t learn the spells, so magic was not used at all. Playing by the rules, we would all start the next session by making new characters because these would be dead.
However, the good thing about playing together is that you can say “fuck the rules”. The combat rules are too complicated anyway. There may be people who do keep track on whether somebody is wounded, exhausted, their exact distance from the opponent. I have enough trouble keeping track of which bandit is dead and which is alive and killing which hero. I firmly believe that the rules should serve the game, not vice versa, so I’ll apply bonus and malus with some common sense. If the players also developed some of it, we might actually make it. ;)
*That character has been waiting in the back of my mind for a long time, ever since my beloved saw a sign saying “Salida” (exit) in Spain and remarked that it would be a nice girl’s name.
I got a small commission and I have decided to make a series of blog posts about it. It will repeat a lot of the same things that were already said in my series Making Kitchen Knives and subsequent projects, streamlined and with as little technical jargon as possible. That is why I have decided to not publish it on FtB and I have started a blog on my website specifically for this series and it will be published there both in CZ and EN. If you are interested in reading it anyway, come over there, my website could use some traffic at least. I have not figured out how to add comments yet, I might need to use Disqus for that and I haven’t used Disqus for several years now and I forgot how to implement it. The service provider only offers implementation of Facebook comments and I ain’t got Facebook and I ain’t planning on getting it. I do, however, have a Twitter account and I will tweet my articles there. So if you are interested in being notified about them, follow me on Twitter.
I will continue to post my art projects, including knife-making projects, on Affinity too, but I think I do not need to repeat myself about the manufacturing process so I will only post here genuinely new things.
This is the little one’s fault (yeah, the little one. Almost as tall as me). She saw something like this on the net and asked if there was a place near where you can paint your own ceramics. I found one and invited the kids for Easter. While I dislike making huge presents for Easter, you can basically always get me to spend money on making memories. If there’s a place like that near you and you have kids ages 5 to 99 who enjoy creative stuff, I can only recommend. The nice thing is that since it’s professionally fired in a kiln, you get lasting designs, not like with other paint on techniques.
So, here’s what we did:
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
The little one’s haul: lots of dots there. And a kitty, because she loves cats.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
#1 worked painstakingly on her Sakura blossom tree. The picture doesn’t do it justice, since it doesn’t show the many layers.
Well, and what did I do?
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
My new favourite mug. I love, love, love Totoro. It’s such a wonderful movie and I identify with Totoro: We’re both fat, grey haired and love naps, children and gardening.
I also did a plate which turned out completely different than planned.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
The place offers you a lot of materials, like stencils, and also an introduction: you can always paint dark on light colours, but not vice versa. When fired in the kiln, they turn transparent and the dark colour underneath comes through. What I wanted to do was to use a mandala stencil to add a geometric pattern in black and then paint the spaces in between with vibrant colours. Buuuuut, well, with the curve of the plate and the clumsiness of the artist the black colour ran and smudged. If you look closely above the whale, you can see it shine through. I needed to save it and painted layers upon layers, smudging the black, drawing it out, creating a deep sea and the scratching out the whale with the help of another stencil. It turned out nice and I’ll try to create the other plate another time.