Saturday!

26 thoughts on “Saturday!”

1. I’m playing a game called “Kitchen Remodel”. At the beginning of the game you’re allocated a limited amount of cash and you have to determine the best possible kitchen within that budget. Exciting!

   We opted for a farmhouse sink, concrete countertops and new backsplash all around. To stay within budget I chose the “build yourself” option for the countertops so today I’ll be finishing up the forms and pouring the crete.Report

   1. Be sure to check out the let’s plays that are on the youtubes for that sort of thing.Report

      1. I have. That’s where I went for help. Over the last month or two I’ve spent several hours watching concrete countertop videos: building forms, the right type of mix, rebar vs wire mesh, floating, finishing, staining, sealing. Youtube is has become an absolutely indispensable resource for me.

         The good part of the project is that I’m not pouring the countertops in place, a virtue of getting the farmhouse sink. So in that sense I can eff things up pretty badly without it meaning even more time without a kitchen.Report

         1. I played the “change out a garbage disposal” game last year and I went from “how hard can it be?” to “perhaps I would benefit from a lecture on this sort of thing” by the time I emptied the box.

            Good luck!Report

            1. I’ve never found the plumbing genre to be fun games. A couple years ago, just as I was leaving for work, I noticed a puddle on the floor. So I unexpectedly found myself playing the “replace the hot water heater” game. I don’t recommend it.Report

               1. “Aw, come on! The Romans did this sort of thing. It’s been around for thousands of years.”Report

               2. You need to eat more magic mushrooms, then your power as a plumber grows exponentially.Report

            2. Good luck!

               Thanks. But to take that aspect outa the equation a bit, I’ve already done two practice runs on the whole countertop thing. The finish floating is the trick. My skillz is improving. But the two I’m pouring today are much bigger and the real deal. I mighta practiced a bit more but I thought, “Why? Fuck it, I’ll do it live”.Report

   2. The problem with that game @stillwater is the judging/scoring is often quite tricky.Report

      1. Exactly. During the game it’s really hard to determine if you’re actually winning.Report

   3. ‘ don’t believe you, because all creters are liars.Report

      1. The Paradox of the Owner Built X: if it turns out well no one believes you did it; if it sucks no one believes you when you say you didn’t.Report

         1. I redo the kitchens of all men who don’t redo their own.Report

            1. Good to know! Right now, it’s like we’re in a state of superposition regarding the kitchen remodel: do I claim credit for it, or do I say Schilling did it? The wave packet hasn’t collapsed yet. Observer dependence and all that.Report

   4. All your countertops belong to us.Report

2. BTW, has anyone else been paying attention to the “Russell Saunders wins $100,000 from Robert DeNiro” game? Fascinating. And via an essay printed in WaPo. The dude’s winning even if Bob doesn’t pay up. (Add: this may not be the best venue to praise Daniel Summers success as a writer given the content of his pieces, but it’s still pretty damn impressive.)Report

   1. I’ve been seen all the twitter twitting. Very good stuff. Bob isn’t’ going to pay up. He’ll never admit he was loudly and publicly wrong. But the push back is doing the work of the agnostic angels.Report

      1. This is a good example of what we lawyerly types call an illusory promise.Report

   2. I despise twitter but I can’t help but be intrigued. What’s going on with the doc?Report

      1. The Good Doc wrote a stridently well argued denunciation of the anti-vax poo from Bobby DeNiro and RFK the Lesser. Those two had offered 100K to anyone who could prove vaccines are safe. Based on the twitters he’s getting threatening phone calls to his practice but is still waiting for his check.Report

      2. He recently wrote as close to a proof that vaccines aren’t harmful as long-form essay-writing can allow.

         This got him in the crosshairs of the people who see that sort of thing as an indicator of some dark conspiracy.

         He’s been tweeting about what it’s like to be noticed by the nutballs.Report

3. Powered by Lincoln City’s win over Burnley in the FA Cup 5th round – only nine teams outside the league had even made it to the 5th round in the 145 years (the last to actually win in this round was during the war – no not that one, the First one, in 1914) in which it has been contested – I’ve dusted off Championship Manager 97/98 (CM 01/02 is freely distributed, but you need to be able to make mounting a virtual CD work, which I can’t). I’m not sure where this ranks on the list of greatest upsets of all time – USA Olympic hockey vs. CCCP, USA World Cup 1950 vs. England, Super Bowl III… But, damn.Report

   1. Hang on to that…the way Arsenal are playing right now Sutton United may have you rewriting that comment tomorrow. And I am seriously conflicted right now. I’m not a “Wenger out ” guy–I think the man should be allowed to choose when he leaves–but I would love to see some new ideas and new energy injected into the club and…well…a loss to a fifth-tier club would almost certainly help him make his mind up, wouldn’t it?Report

      1. On the down side, the reason the old joke with the punchline “The bull, Senor, he does not always lose…” is a joke is because the better side actually can sleepwalk over the lesser side 99 and 44/100 percent of the time.

         On the bright side, Lincoln City in the next round, and one more chance to get Wenger out!

         Mind you, my team is spiraling the drain on its way to the Conference, so the whole “Losing in the FA Cup round of 16 gets the manager out” thing is alien to me.Report

         1. Sadly, there’s just no way to have Chelsea and United knock each other out of the competition.Report

4. Also, my oldest surviving friend and I played Shadow Warrior 2 multiplayer for a couple hours, and I can definitively say that even the “campaign” should be played co-op, since that was how the game seems to actually have been designed. A lot of the frustrations in single player just fall away in co-op. Mind you, I still consider it distinctly inferior to its predecessor, in large part because of the design decisions that made it so multiplayer-friendly.

   Of course, my experience might not be typical – my friend and I have been playing first-person and third-person games co-op since the original Hexen(*), so we just might take to co-op better.

   (*) Because we were lagging so badly when I was running my first computer as a Hexen server, I upgraded from 4MB memory to 8MB memory for over $80 in at-the-time dollars. And we still had almost unbeatable lag in one of the more memorable boss fights.Report

Comments are closed.