UK petition has less than 5k to go!

Can I say the entire Discworld series? Sure they’re funny fantasy stories, but I reckon Pterry’s view on humanity formed a lot of how I think about the world.

Also Dark Money by Jane Mayer.

It might, but correct me if I’m wrong here (not a USer) but isn’t the military/GI bill a huge tool for social mobility in the US?

Chinese curry, however, is a British invention, bizarrely.

You can reduce anything like that if you want.

Italian food is tomatoes, meat and pasta or tomatoes, meat and bread.

This is a surprisingly divisive topic every time I see it or suggest it. I reckon the divisor is “people who use and work across timezones a lot” and “people who don’t”. Fuck I hate timezones.

Old post of mine, I need to get round to making a comm for this stuff - in terms of European BlueBrixx and Cobi are all that I’m aware of, BlueBrixx use Chinese bricks too though, there’s not much avoiding it. As for a particular set, I’ve got a tallneck in the backlog that’s largely technic, is huge and is well under £200 delivered ~7k parts if I remember right.

So, as far as I’m aware BlueBrixx use a brick manufacturer called gobricks in China - these are generally considered top tier. Mould King also use gobricks - they do some good start wars/space/car stuff (not clone kits, Mould King are pretty legit, as far as I’m aware they license/pay MOC designers for plans for the most part as well).

Other brands I don’t have experience with (but have a really good rep) are CaDa, Pantasy and Rastar. CaDa and Rastar both license IPs.

IMO JieStar are also a pretty good brand, they are a brick manufacturer and a set manufacturer. I’ve never had an issue with a JieStar set, their bricks/clutch is a little tighter than Lego which is sometimes beneficial, sometimes a little annoying, but it’s never caused an issue. (I’ve build a couple of 5k+ brick sets from JieStar - worst I had was a single malformed brick that I just hid). They make clone kits and original IP. (Some cool little 50 pc sets you can pick up for £1-2.

Reobrix is the other brand I like, they use JieStar bricks but make their own sets and license MOC designer work. Have some interesting aircraft/vehicles. Their cars are good, their B2 bomber was a bigger set, some of it was a little fiddly, but it holds together - it had 1-2 bricks missing, but I picked up replacements on bricklink for pennies.

I also pick up the odd no-name brand from AliExpress, tbh they’ve mostly been fine too, a couple were mediocre (I didn’t have high expectations £15 for 1000pc sets, they were fine for the price tbh, the bricks were fine for one set, a bit too little clutch on the other - but honestly both look fine when they’re assembled. I wasn’t disappointed considering the price).

In terms of ordering -

YOURWOBB

Youmko/Barweer

Marstoy

I’ve ordered from all 3, they’ve all delivered what they said they would. YOURWOBB doesn’t do clone sets, all original IP (and you can sort by brand) youmko are a mix, though mostly original stuff. Marstoy officially don’t sell clone sets, however they do sell “Brick kits”. If you go on the site you’ll see a lot of stuff with names like M12345 - take M off the name and reverse the number, this is the corresponding Lego set (eg. M12345 would be Lego set 54321)

There’s loads on AliExpress too - usual rules apply here, but choice, buy an item that has a lot of buyers with good reviews. If you buy a MOC off AliExpress chances are the original designer isn’t being compensated - many people will go and buy the design off rebrickable to compensate the designer, but no obligation.

For minifigs there’s:

RebuildVenus

This is the same company as Marstoy, free shipping over $17.

Just wrap it in bubble wrap.

Uncut Gems was a damn masterpiece, pure stress and anxiety from start to finish. He deserved an Oscar nom for that at the least.

I’d also suspect humans on a plane will follow a normal distribution in terms of weight. The aircraft weight/loading is done on an average sized person (which used to be 75kg if I remember correctly). Conversely every motherfucker will load their luggage with as much shit as possible if it’s not limited.

The average worker wasn’t buying a table with carved feet 100 years ago. You’re experiencing survivorship bias.

Good advice, thanks! I took a washing machine apart the hard way a few years ago, wish I’d been more minded to figure out the circuit back then too.

Dishwashers worked fine as electromechanical devices too. This is all fucking nuts. Mine blew up recently (electromechanical and probably 30 at this point) and I’ll be replacing it with one a family member no longer needs. When it gives up the ghost and if I’ve cleared some garage space by then, I’m minded to take it apart and see how hard it is to reverse engineer the damn thing.

I’m beginning to think he’s a bit enamoured with class, Sir Keir seemed to come out of his meeting with Trump relatively unscathed too. Almost like he sees posh people as his social superiors?

Well, basically if I find myself procrastinating at work I go do something that’s interesting but also needs done and that everyone else is ignoring. I quite enjoy fixing issues with obscure root causes and building tools for other people to use when there’s not a huge looming deadline on it, so I chip away at stuff when I’d be procrastinating. Nice bonus side effect is the wins earned procrastinating sometimes gives me the motivation to actually do what I’m supposed to be doing.

Well, no, it’s the TLD for Mali

Sunday roast

I’ve made a career out of this.

Oi, we had a restaurant so good they had to stop it entering the world’s best restaurant competition because it kept winning.

Also Sunday roast is the food of kings.

Can I make my Linux Minecraft talk to my Xbox Minecraft?