There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?
the fediverse.
weirdo
Yea, I wouldn’t want to be seen there either.
Yes. That could get embarrassing.
A truly sick and disturbed individual.
That’s a lot of hitmarkers
Needs more jpeg
Earlier this year I tried out a Steam demo of a game called “That Time I Found a Box” and got hooked on it. It’s a very unique card game where you create and enhance the cards as you play. I played it for days and eventually beat the demo - the devs told me I was the first person to beat it.
The full version just came out on Steam - I’d recommend taking a look. It’s a bit janky and not for everybody, but it does something unique that really clicked for me.
Sticky Mustache, is that you?
Uh, I don’t think so…
Okay, there just was a review that had pretty much the same content you wrote :)
That reminds me, I need to write a review for the full version, thanks!
This was funny because I went back to see if the review I just read was Sticky Mustache, and it was actually pruwyben!
Thermodynamics, specifically refrigeration cycles.
Its probably my autism showing but the fact that we can just move funny fluid around and make heat move is absolutely fascinating. I can spend a lot of time making theoretical refrigeration cycles with different fluids, thermoelectrics, heat capacities, repurposing car junkyard AC systems, etc.
Millions of people do it for work, sure. I doubt any of them are “into it”.
I bet you also enjoy Technology Connections.
:)
Ohh yeah! Though I do wonder: Why limit themselves to the guy who is evangelizing (and rightly so!) when he could also hang out with crazy swamp guy HyperspacePirate who not only thinks of the crazy cycles but actually builds some as well?
Gee, what gave it away?
I popped an edible and watched his entire catalytic converter video last night. Shit’s great.
The video or the edible?
Both in their respective departments :)
I really loved the decal he put on his lift to make it seem like the brand name of his one armed car lift was “TIPPI.”
Now that’s a proper special interest 🤌
What’s your favorite refrigerant
I touch r134a the most in my day to day life, cuz i fix a lot of people’s car AC… But I have a soft spot for propane (R290) or propane/butane blends. Yes it’s flammable to a degree but it’s naturally provided, cheap as hell, zero ozone depletion and very low GWP. It has usable pressure/temperature curves that are easy for compressors to handle and can produce temperatures as low as -30C.
I’ve refilled old farm trucks with propane from a BBQ can and gotten good AC out of them. It’s kind of cool.
It’s kind of cool.
I’d say it’s objectively cool
You’d get along great with my dad. All he’s talked about for the last year is heat pumps.
If you haven’t before, you should play Stationeers. It sounds like you’d love it.
Oh god I already play both Space Engineers and Factorio, don’t give me another 500 hour logistics game time sink…
But this one simulates the refrigeration cycle! It has proper phase changes and everything.
Empire fucking booked it to steam and has been playing it for the past 10 hours, for sure.
I have a lot of obscure interests, but not as obscure as yours.
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Finding former Pizza Huts in North America. It’s just such an iconic building design. There’s a documentary out now on them, but I’ve been fascinated for almost a decade now.
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Meshtastic
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John le Carré novels. He was huge decades ago, but basically nobody knows the name now besides Boomers and genre fans.
Meshtastic
If someone could find an extra 8 hours a week, I would so make this one of my hobbies.
What do you need 8 extra hours for? Affording the 8 other nodes you buy after your first one?
My experience with DIY home networking and self-hosting has been “This is going to eat up your weekend if you want it to work as intended”.
Ah, well the good thing is its pretty easy to set up. Most nodes are already flashed with recent enough firmware, so you just attach antennas, connect to your phone, do some quick setup for your region and go for a walk.
Then you realize you want a node that stays at home.
Then you want one on your car.
And reachable from work.
Then you see that hill in the distance and think “that’d be a good spot”.
Then you see the mountain on the horizon and wonder if you could hit a node up there.
Then all of a sudden you realize you’ve single handedly set up the infrastructure for your part of the state and are out more cash money than you told your partner and need a side hustle to afford to finish the second mesh you’re building out.
Oh god I feel seen.
(Meshcore rather than meshtastic but tomato tamato)
😮💨
You can buy premade nodes on AliExpress or Etsy that are easy to use and portable. Pair it to your phone and start war driving.
We started a meetup group in my local area. Someone put a node on the mountain now the entire city gets longfast. Its so cool.
!meshtastic@mander.xyz in case anyone else is interested!
I’ve been thinking of setting up a node at my local ski area, both for others to use, but also to make custom timing equipment that can send start and finish messages to the timing computer and keep us from having to haul wires up icy race courses all winter.
I’ve never actually set one up or used one yet though, so it’s probably a few years off.
It doesn’t take too long to set one up but hooking into the python can sometimes be a pain. Sounds like an excellent use case!
I was going to ask if you were in my area, because we recently got some nodes on mountains, but I figure at this point if there’s a mountain, it’s got a node on it at this point.
Now that I live in a dense urban city, the number of nodes is wild.
The amount of Pizza Hut buildings I’ve seen turned into Lions Den adult stores is too damn high. In second place, is the local wing place Jerk N Go.
Jerk ‘n Go sounds like the adult store. Just sayin’.
In my area every single one is a Mexican restaurant and I’m not mad about it.
Finding former Pizza Huts in North America.
Wait, I have a meme for this! (Forgive the lack of crop lol)
I’ve seen a bunch of old Pizza huts turned into Chinese food restaurants and I saw two that became small used car offices. They are always so easy to pick out. I legit loved old Pizza Huts with the sit down pacman machines being a common fixture when I was a kid.
Pizza Hut in my hometown is still going. Do you go to operating Pizza Hut restaurants too?
Probably more in Edmonton, but this one came to mind. Pretty heavily modified.
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Well… I’m using an instance that has 10 active users according to https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list :)
I wanted to move from Lemmy to PieFed, because its development is faster than that of Lemmy’s and because its maintainers have values I have nothing against and because I want to help a cool project grow.
And then I had a bunch of criteria that I wanted my instance to fulfill, and piefed.ee was the only PieFed instance that fulfilled all of my wishes. So, now I’m apparently one out of ten :)
You’re one in a million to me
i.e., there are approximately 1,400 people in China just like you.
Glad you found a happy cozy home. Appreciative that I can reply to you from heart of the old beast!
Relative to all the well known commercial social media platforms though aren’t we all into something here hardly anyone else knows about, whether 10 users or a few thousand?
nice!
What was your criteria?
I’m the only person I know IRL who uses lemmy (lol) and openstreetmap :)
Whenever I’m going abroad within Europe, for a bit over month before that, I start buying stuff only with banknotes. I put all of the coins made in Finland or (other) Baltic countries in a separate pocket and then make sure to use those during my travel.
It feels nice that people get to see coins that they don’t see that often. And at the same time, I’m increasing the relative amount of non-Finnish coins in Finland, which I also think is good, as that helps people here notice that there’s more to the EU than just Finland :)
I would guess it’s unlikely that all that many other people do the same.
I like checking what kind of Euros I get, but never thought about purposefully taking coins with me. You convinced me to try it next time =)
I’m really, really into what I can only call technological bootstrapping. Like, we started out on this planet with nothing, and then built everything. How did that happen? Primitive tech is another name, but the emphasis is usually on the very first stages.
That itself has gotten me into obscure things like metrology, greenwood working and small-scale semiconductor fabrication.
Wait, I work in cleanrooms professionally. Fabricating my own semiconductors at home always seemed like a cool idea, but really out of reach. I kind of always wanted to keep old machines from the labs I worked at, but with such expensive things they never threw anything away (of course)!
Isn’t it prohibitively expensive and/or noisy? What type of projects do you do?
Have you seen the Sam Zeloof videos? He’s the main person I’ve seen actually build a chip in a garage.
He buys his wafers, which is critical. Given a hot furnace you could refine your own metallurgical silicon in a crucible, but cleaning it will be a whole thing. The machine needed would probably be based on spinning band distillation, which you could make in a pre-existing machine shop. To avoid toxic gases and explosion hazards - which are the two things chemists have told me not to mess with - you’d want to use SiCl4, which is a bit different from the standard approach which uses hydrogenated species. The Siemens process back to silicon and monocrystalline casting is all that’s left, and I wonder if they could be combined in a step if scalability isn’t a concern.
What type of projects do you do?
If only I had space for a workshop, so it’s all theoretical ATM.
Which machines are noisy? Polishers?
Ah, not to worry, even professionally it’s very common to buy your wafers. I am on mobile data right now so I’ll check out those videos later!
Basically, every single machine that needs a vacuum chamber - so almost all non-wet processes, like physical/chemical vapor deposition, reactive ion etching, scanning electron microscopy (although a good optical microscope will do if you’re not at the nano scale… Which is almost certainly the case if you’re doing things at home).
Honestly maybe I’m just too used to the lab setting and am underestimating how much you can actually do without vacuum processing. I’ll take a look later: this all looked so out of the reach of an ordinary person that I never even considered following content creators who do this. Thank you!
High vacuums are tricky. The first high vacuums were achieved with mercury-based Sprengel pumps, but mercury isn’t available everywhere. Maybe you could make a small, slow turbomolecular pump work if it was mandatory (it’s all about the bearing) but it seems anything that needs sealing is going to struggle without either that or a massive petrochemical industry to supply the needed high-quality synthetic oils. If you’re doing technology all over again, I’d skip the vacuum tubes stage because of this.
If you can get away with a low vacuum, a piston-type pump with castor oil as the sealant will do. It seems like a low vacuum would work for at least some kinds of VD. Maybe you can help clear it up a bit.
(although a good optical microscope will do if you’re not at the nano scale… Which is almost certainly the case if you’re doing things at home).
1 micron features is as ambitious as I’ve bothered to think about. For basic computing, like to run a CNC machine, that should do.
I should mention I met someone IRL who makes their own vacuum tubes. You can own your own pump, although I don’t know how it would stack up against what you’re used to.
That’s cool! Can you recommend any resources on this? I’ve thought a lot about this sort of thing. I’m guessing semiconductor fabrication requires a lot of complex upstream tasks and isn’t the sort of thing that’s feasible at home. Would love to be wrong!
“The Book”, is a book that uses illustrations to explain how to recreate civilization. Dunno if it is good. That said, you can also try “How Things Work”, which explains the workings of many inventions, with many wooly mammoths interspersed throughout.
Ha! Is that the one that explained buoyancy by saying the elephant/water was afraid of the water/elephant, so they had to build walls on the side of the raft so it/the water couldn’t see each other?
Man, that’s one of the books I most distinctly remember from my childhood. I’ve looked into getting a copy, but a quick look indicates the original edition is actually pretty pricey now, probably because I’m not the only one.
I think I can draw a pretty direct line between reading the logic gates section of it, and the CPU design project I still have going semi-separately from the bootstrapping. Although it’s possible I learned about gates somewhere else first.
Depends where you’re starting. If it’s sticks and stones, yeah, you’re going to spend a lot of time building up. Even getting to the prerequisites for the Gingery-esque machine shop will be a trick, and you definitely need machining first.
Sam Zeloof is the guy that actually did the semiconductors bit. He makes a transistor in the linked video series starting with a commercial wafer, some basic chemicals, a spinning piece of tape and an electric furnace. I read papers and just Wikipedia to get ideas for the parts he doesn’t cover. The standard ways of doing things are heavily constrained by scalability, which as an artisan you don’t care about, but will breeze past other things you really do, like ability to work in a small space. And, if you’re starting from scratch, using only common, locally available elements.
This sounds like the entire premise behind the manga/anime Dr. Stone.
All humans on earth get turned to stone, and a young scientific supergenius teaches survivors how to essentially restart civilization from scratch.
It’s an absolute joy to watch. Maybe you’d dig it? :D
I’ll keep it in mind, although it might be that I know too much to enjoy it now. Kind of like anyone in IT watching TV hackers.
That’s fair, although to use that analogy, I hope it’d be like Mr. Robot as opposed to something like NCIS. 😉
I really like killing invasive plants. I think that’s probably my most niche passion. Like when I have some free time I’ll just go into the woods behind my house and cut down wisteria, ivy, Chinese holly… I just find it extremely satisfying idk. I love the idea that I’m clearing out space for native plants (and in turn native animals) to grow.
There’s a lot of Robotech/Macross stuff out there, but I rarely see anyone post online about it, and I’ve never met anyone in person who even knows what it is.
I can’t even fanthom this but it was pretty popular in the 90’s. Maybe not as much anymore.
Never hear it spoken of, nor any online comments. We teens were hooked. A serious animated series about young adults?! We called it “japanimation”, maybe we just made that up, never heard the word elsewhere, but we had never heard the word “anime”.
Haven’t revisited as I’m afraid I’d be deeply disappointed.
Yeah, I called it Japanimation, too.
Oh you’re that old. I’m that old.
Ever watched Votoms ?
This looks amazing…I was literally thinking of the robotech books today because I heard some music that sounded like the background jazz and was thinking how Jack McKinney bio mentioned he played in fusion jazz bands! Also called it japanimation back then… how cool!!
I don’t recognize the name. I’ll have to watch it and see if it ignites ancient memories.
Man, the gamecube version of it was a lot of fun. Definitely not the most polished game, but it got me into the actual show.
and I’ve never met anyone in person who even knows what it is.
I guess it doesn’t exactly come up randomly in conversation.
But I intend to be the change I want to see in the world.
I usually mention it fairly soon after spending any amount of time with anyone. I’ve even got a nice big RDF roundel pin on my shoulder bag.
That is cool.
Death metal. I’m pretty clean cut and tat free so people are really taken aback when I tell them one of my favorite acts is called Cattle Decapitation.
My wife discovered “Powerwolf” recently. Not death metal, per say, but I’ve yet to meet anyone else whose heard of it. Worse still, this lead her down a rabbit hole to Dwarf Metal and the accursed song Diggy Diggy Hole which has bored its way into my brain.
The fact that Diggy Diggy Hole exists is such a wonderful thing. It was fun to watch the original, and then various evolutions of it. Its what the internet should be instead of the corporate, pay to play garbage we have ended up with.
Also Powerwolf and Wind Rose are just fun bands to listen to. Metal that doesn’t take itself too seriously of great.
Thats epic haha.
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Blind Guardian is another good one that makes songs inspired by fantasy. Their Wheel of Time album is pretty great. My personal favorite is Ride Into Obsession, which is sung from the point of view of one of the series’ main antagonists, though the last section of the eponymous “Wheel of Time” is also a banger.
Blind Guardian was in an older PC action RPG Sacred 2. There was a whole quest to find their lost “weapons” (wand was a microphone, axe was a guitar, etc) and then there was a full in game video of them playing in front of orcs. I am not a particular fan of theirs, but it was so awesome.
Everytime anyone mentions Blind Guardian, Mirror Mirror starts playing in my head
Ah yes power metal is quite a thing in and of itself! Feel free to do whatever you want with this knowledge, but there’s also Goblin Metal, my most favorite being a band called Necrogoblikon. There’s no doubt some band singing in Tolkien Elvish to round out the trinity.
A search has given me the band Summoning (atmospheric black metal) whose theme is Middle Earth and they supposedly have passages in Elvish in their lyrics. I’m not in a spot to listen to them at the moment but it seems to be one I will definitely check.
A second place would be a band called Battlelore, seemingly.
Skin Thief probably my favorite Nekrogoblikon song
Lol, an ex introduced me to necrogoblikon. I was playing it for everybody who would listen for a few weeks afterwards.
Powerwolf is German Power-Metal and they’re not a bad band, I’ve heard lots of tracks from them. I’m into Sabaton which is another power-metal band who sing about historical subjects and figures. Oden Organ is another power-metal band.
The best part about Wind Rose is all of their songs are based off from Middle-Earth legendarium.
I mean, demons are a girls best friend
🎸
I got sent down a weird musical rabbit hole that started by letting my kid play some k-pop on my Spotify account. The AI DJ added “foreign music” to the list of tags I guess, and after finding a couple k-pop songs I liked, it bronched out into other genres & Landed on Melodic Mexican Metal, which I didn’t even know was a thing.
A buddy of mine and I used to play this game where one of us tried to think of an absurd metal concept and the other tried to find a band that actually fit that description. The game ended the day that the challenge was Maori folk metal and we discovered the band Alien Weaponry. At that point we pretty much decided that there must exist a rule similar to the internet’s rule 42 along the lines of “if there’s a genre of music, there exists a metal subgenre influenced by it.”
The one upside of The Algorithm. Wish that kind of Internet was the norm
I love singing powerwolf at dive bar karaoke. Resurrection by erection always gets people going.
Depending on what she’s into, there’s tons of fun power metal bands that I feel are kinda like Powerwolf. Gloryhammer and aramanthe are two that I really like that are in the same genre
I don’t know if I’ve heard one or both. Wife’s real love is for Ghost, but that’s hardly a “nobody else is into this” kind of band. I’ve definitely seen one of these in the Recommended For You feed
I gave my son some of my old CDs last year. In them was a mix metal cd I got somewhere, and there is a powerwolf song on there. I wish I could remember which song, but for nearly a year he’d put that song on repeat and fall asleep to it every night. It was absurdly amusing
The only positive things I can say about Death and Black metal is that, the instrumentals go hard. It’s always the vocals that I can’t ever get used to.
I hit a similar wall back in high school but the instrumentation was just too good to stop listening. Now I love harsh vocals
My husband doesn’t have tattoos, but a beard. He loves all metal but definitely death metal.
There was a woman at my work, she was in the office side pretty high up. I always played my music, she soon found out I was (at least in part) a metal head. One time we found ourselves in a meeting room just a few of us, and shared she is massively a metal head, even citing death metal. I was so taken aback. She is highly professional always, and become the coolest lady in the office to me that day.
My dentist’s favorite band is Led Zeppelin. My son asked, that answer surprised me too. For an older woman, close enough lol
I am the only person I know IRL who reccomends browsers to people in-person
Ok, I’ll bite. Which one’s your favorite?
If I was an Apple user it would be the Orion browser. There’s just no downsides to it other than it being only available for Mac and Iphones.
Everything else i have to add disclaimers when talking about them. For example, I use Brave as my daily driver and I’ve had an easier time getting other people to switch to Brave than any other browser becuase having an awesome adbocker integrated into the browser itself is just that good. However, Brave is run by crypto bros, so it comes packaged with a crypto wallet and some AI bloatware. Thankfully there’s a setting to turn the integrated crypto ads off, but the fact that those things are there at all is a BIG red flag. But it’s an easier sell to normies because it’s built on Chromium and works with the Google ecosystem in a way that Firefox-based browsers don’t.
I would love to push Librewolf more, but it doesn’t have a mobile version, and apparently installing UBlock Origin on your own is just too scary for the normies. So now wherever I meet a person and see they have an IPhone, the next words out of my mouth are “Have you heard of the Orion browser?”
When I find out a thing I like is the preferred option of someone whose niche fixation is that type of thing, it gives me life.
All I really want from the internet is to have a council of difficult nerds telling me what all the best shit is so I can become the perfect being.
I’m never leaving Lemmy lmao
I think IronFox comes with UBO. Its the successor to Mull. The LibreWolf equivalent on Android. From what I understand.
Ooh thank you
Edit: i think this is going to be my new daily driver on mobile.
Yes, absolutely, 100% yes. Using Orion + Kagi is absolutely the best change I’ve ever made to my browsing experience on Mac.
I play single player video games and I roleplay and tell stories about my characters. I’ve done it with BG3, Elden Ring, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fire Emblem, and Pokemon. I take notes and write little stories for myself. I cultivate a little headcanon universe for each game, and I even let my roleplay alter my gameplay in meaningful ways. I don’t know if anyone else plays these games like this but I haven’t found much community for it.
I’m addicted to buying crappy antique and vintage shotguns and restoring them. Have so many now I can hardly justify another. I know, I’m ruining the antique value by stripping the metal and wood, but they’re ~$150 items, not exactly rare.
Look at this $119 ($160 by the time I get it home) piece of crap!
https://www.guns.com/used-guns/p/companhia-brasileira-de-cartuchos-151?i=571883
Never even heard of that brand, let alone the model. Bet I could make it dance and sing for a week’s worth of evenings. It’s a single-shot, can’t be too fucked up. Probably.
That’s pretty neat! Can you describe the restoration process more?
It’s a piece by piece thing. First I strip the wood down, assuming that’s needed or wanted. Hella work, many blisters, stain as appropriate. Wish I had pics, but one 60s ERA (Brazilian make) single-shot was stained in what I call Confederate Blue, sort of a blue/gray mix. Girlfriend’s eyes popped when she saw it. “You told me about it, but I didn’t imagine this!” I’d take a pic, but it’s in the shed at camp. :( The single-shot hanging over my door is from the 60s or 70s, deep red, silver metal, nickle sling swivels, $20 buffalo-leather sling from eBay. Took that pic just for you OP!
That last one took over 2-months! Broke a piece fucking with it. Ordered. Waited. Tried again. Lost a spring. Ordered. Waited. Found the original spring, now have two. Refinished the wood after the first clear coat peeled off, dumb mistake, took a week of sanding, staining, drying, coating. Just about my favorite. Long barrel for full force and accuracy, tight pattern, kicks like god’s own mule. Too broke to buy more low-power shells, stuck with the monsters another gun required, bruisers, not fun. But still fun. :)
Back up. First I make sure everything is mechanically safe and sound, actually works, no “oops”, and not interested in “wall hangers”. Parts are an adventure, but Numrich gun parts has loads of old parts for cheap, diagrams for reference. “WTF is this part even called?!” Need a weird spring or piece of metal? They got it. LOL, I’ve used a ball-point pen spring!
Once it’s mechanically sound and the wood is done, time for accessories! That usually means a matching strap and some way to affix shells, maybe a sight or a new bead on the end. I like the “grab and go” way of the gun. Got a solid source for leather wraps if anyone cares, Polish outfit on eBay. I will scream to the heavens about their quality, service and pricing. Got about 6 of those, want more, too broke. When they say “20-gauge”, it ain’t a loose 12-gauge that sorta fits. Left-handed merchandise as well! :)
Not many pics, but here’s a single-shot 20-gauge I gave a dear friend for (FINALLY) graduating high school. He’s now happily married and moving up in the US Air Force! Got to hold it again at his house warming party. Gods I miss that one, want another to fix up.
This one’s new, not exciting, but I wanted a cheap, light, 12-gauge for hiking. Sawed off (legally!), stained, upside down flag nailed on. But ain’t my AR cool!
Not my work, except for adding the shell carrier and rough grip, but very much my style. 1900s (?), double-barreled, side-by-side, 12-gauge, sawed off (legally!). They stripped the blueing (blackening) off all the metal, chopped it, sanded and stained, wonderful. Can’t use modern loads, and both barrels trip at once if cocked, still fun as hell.
Wish I had more pics! Got a 90s Remington, made in Russia. You read that right. A tiny 410 with the most beautiful wood furniture I own. When my FFL handed me the box, and he usually doesn’t comment much on my purchases, “Wait till you see the wood grain.” It shines like amber in the sun.
Anyway, I better go pay attention to my wife, but your triggered my trap card! Be glad to say more!
EDIT: Stumbled on a pic! Confederate Blue shotgun on top. The colors really pop IRL! Next one is a Revelations brand from 70s/80s Western Auto Stores, first thing I ever gunsmithed, got me on this road. It’s a common Remington 500, simply rebranded. Yes, you could buy guns in auto parts stores in the day, no ID. Two Turkish POSes. First one works fine, second one’s going in the swamp. Next up is a Remington 1895, same year as the make, didn’t do much of anything to that one but clean up the wood. And the aforementioned “red”. Love that thing.
And no joke, the bug blaster on the bottom works. It’s a salt shotgun for flies. It works.
EDIT2: Found the Russian 410! Looks better in the sunlight, but you might get the idea.
This is the first thing I’ve seen here that feels like it meets the OP’s ask. What a cool hobby!
That’s so cool! I’m not at all into guns, but I love seeing other people’s expertise and the before and after of trashed to treasure, would be amazing to see.
I’ve not done much before and after, and so wish I had. Turned some real junkers into art. My kinda art anyway.
Here’s my comment on the shotguns.
I try to curate zines from around the world into local exhibitions, do hand translating alongside if need be, imitate the original paper best I can.
It’s kinda fun lol. That and kinda similarly, but I love♡ spending time on online software radio sites, just listening into different channels like I was there myself.
