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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • My best guess is to use a spray lacquer for enamel, such as this:

    https://a.co/d/ixJ7knW

    I suspect the “brass” over zinc that is on that clip isn’t just brass - if it were brass plated zinc, I’d be totally comfortable using that spray lacquer over it. Instead, it’s probably some type of brass colored paint (or paint containing actual brass.

    This means that you have mystery paint (and mystery “enamel”) that you are trying to coat. Because of that, no matter what top coat you choose, there is a chance it won’t work well and the solvents in the top coat could melt/harm the clip.

    But… if I were in your situation, I would try the spray above and cross my fingers.

    If you go that route:

    Gently dab a bit of rubbing alcohol somewhere that you won’t be too sad if it hurts the finish. Give it a little rub. If it doesn’t mess with the finish, then you’re probably good to use rubbing alcohol to do final cleaning before top coating with lacquer.

    Spray a tiny bit of the lacquer on a something (like the corner of a paper towel. immediately rub it on a spot on the clip to do the same type of test. Is the finish ok? Then you’re probably good to proceed.

    Before spraying, clean the clip gently but thoroughly with dish soap and water. Rinse well. Dry well.

    Give the thing a good rub with a soft cloth and rubbing alcohol to get any other remnants/grease off the clip before painting.

    Give the clip a light coat of spray enamel. Follow directions for ambient temperature and recoat time. Give it another coat a bit heavier. Maybe even a third.

    Let it dry and cure for a long time. The lacquer will seem completely dry and “done” after a day, but it won’t be fully cured. Giving it time to fully harden before messing with it too much.

    Other notes: dust is your enemy. It’ll stick to your top coat while it’s drying. Try to minimize dust and similar nasties.

    If you haven’t done used spray cans much, learn to use them first. Do a practice pass on something you don’t care about. It’s really easy to put on too much and have your clearcoat run. No fun.


  • This person is correct.

    I’ve finished, painted, sealed, and repaired enough stuff to know that “maybe try clear nail polish” is a terrible idea for OP.

    Nail polish is very hard to get to go on smoothly over a large area and OP is very likely to end up with an uneven or marred finish. If you just put down nail polish, you are not going to get a lasting finish on much of any material without cleaning and degreasing it first.

    I would clean/degrease (I don’t know what to use as I can’t tell what the material is). I would lean toward using some type of spray top coat (again, I don’t know which product because I don’t know the material). You still need to know how to spray on finishes, but I find it much easier to do well than brush on finishes.


  • Just to make sure I have the situation correct:

    You filled a tub that you don’t normally use with water (for an emergency supply). A day or so later, the ceiling and wall directly below the tub are soaked. You then drained the water. 20 minutes later you still hear dripping so wonder if it was the water in the tub or something else.

    It’s possible the supply line to the tub faucet cracked or otherwise started leaking when you filled the tub, but it seems much more likely that the water in the tub was the source.

    The drain was plugged when the leak occurred, so the drain lines themselves are unlikely to be the issue.

    This is a fiberglass/plastic tub, right? I think the tub itself is slowly leaking either from a hairline crack or from around the outside edge of the drain. This leak slowly soaked and pooled on the floor beneath the tub. Now you are hearing that pooled water drip down.

    I’d do a careful crawl of the tub and see if you can find anything that appears to be a crack.

    I’d keep listening to the drip rate in the wall and see if it’s subsiding. Hopefully it is. At that point, it’s figuring out what, if anything you can do for mitigation. My first thought is heat and airflow in the room with soaked walls/ceilings.



  • Hello, 30-years-ago me. My sister and I had a similar age gap. We had an amazing relationship/friendship throughout our childhood and it was really hard when she left for college. The good news is that we still have an amazing relationship and she is still the best sister I could ever ask for.

    It’s a funny thing that when we are young, everything feels so permanent when in reality, your life is changing incredibly quickly. When you get hit by something like this, it’s uncomfortable as fuck to see that reality. Change is hard, but it also leads to and comes along with growth… and growth is good.

    I don’t say this to be dismissive of what you are going through, only to say that change happens. It is a part of life that we learn to deal with because it can’t be avoided. What is happening in your life probably hurts. It’s probably scary. The uncertainty sucks. All those feelings are valid.

    She will be farther away. You will see her less. She is going to be incredibly busy at times. But she is also there for you and you two will still have each other and have time together.

    Of course, I have no guarantees — your life isn’t mine. But for me, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed (it’s easy to imagine the worst). Just like it was awesome having an older sister as your friend while at home, it’s really awesome to have an older sister in college to talk to and visit get to experience bits of that life with.






  • Lefty here. I’ve been playing guitar for almost 30 years. I play “right handed” and always have. It felt way more natural to me to fret with my dominant hand, and my family had a right handed guitar, so that’s what I went with. I never really experimented to figure out if I could be better with a left handed guitar (and now it’s much too late).

    I also bat right handed and used a regular (what ever you call not-southpaw) stance when I did martial arts.

    On the other hand, my dad is a lefty and started learning guitar about 10 years ago. He found holding a right handed guitar unnatural and got a left handed model.

    My 2c - even if you don’t know how to play, go to a guitar shop and see which way feels better to hold. It’ll feel awkward either way, but I’ll bet one way will fell less awkward. And if it doesn’t, I’d lean toward right handed because I know it’s a pain to find left handed instruments (and it’s nice to be able to play/try friends’ guitars).

    Edit: here’s another 2c: consider trying a ukulele. They are a lot of fun and much easier to learn and get a lot of the basics down. Then pick up the guitar once you have a little bit of experience with that. I recommend this because a vast majority of people never get over the hump when trying to learn guitar. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s frustrating. You can make something that sounds like music so much more easily on a uke, which means you’re more likely to keep at it. And you’ll get a lot of the guitar basics from it so when you start learning that it’ll be an easier process to once again feel like you’re making music.

    … if you do get a uke, make sure you aren’t buying a toy, though. There are a lot of unplayable toy Ike’s out there. People buy them from places like Walmart for their kids all the time thinking that it is a beginner instrument. It isn’t. It won’t stay in tune for more than a few seconds of playing and is nothing more than a noise maker. You can get a real-but-cheap beginner uke for well under $100.



  • On this train of thought…

    OP, if you don’t make it clear that you want to date her, then make sure you accept the ambiguity of the situation and that she might have no idea that you want to date her (romantically). It can feel like your interest is obvious if you ask her to hang out one-on-one. But she may not immediately see that and could accept, assuming that you are strictly going as friends.

    It’s totally ok to ask her to hang out, just don’t build up the situation to be more than it is. If she says yes, you’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe she’ll consider it a date. Maybe she’ll consider it a strictly-platonic hangout. Or maybe somewhere in between.

    Edit: and if it goes well —even if it just ends up being a platonic hang out—I’d lean toward specifying “date” when you ask her to go out again.





  • Agreed. I strongly dislike Elon and think he is a thin skinned trust fund baby who is destroying Tesla and already destroyed Twitter. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out he is using sock accounts to praise himself… but in this article all I see are people making accusations without solid evidence. Yes, it appears he banned the guy accusing him but we already know that Elon will ban his critics whether or not those critics’ accusations are real. There is nothing here showing that the account is anything but one of his braindead fanboys.

    It’s one thing to take these accusations and try to find solid evidence. It’s another to treat the accusations as solid evidence itself. Let’s be better than the conspiracy theorists.



  • Here’s my recollection from my limited research on this a few years ago (in the US):

    -High premiums

    -Insurance company can cancel coverage or jack up premiums if your pet becomes expensive

    -needing pre approval for coverage, so you may be dealing with an extra layer of beurocracy when you need to get your pet treated

    -Notable risk of insurance company rejecting claims

    -Maximumum coverage seemed rather low (ie they cap the amount insurance will pay per year or lifetime, so your coverage may dissolve if you end up having serious pet health issues.

    -high copays, so you’re still paying a lot in the event of large vet expenses.

    Basically, overall, it seemed like a scam in which, even for those that end up needing a large amount of vet care, you are likely to get less benefit from insurance than premiums.

    All that said, I don’t think I did much research. I think I looked at a couple of pet insurance companies that seemed “legitimate”, looked at the details of their policies, did some math, and concluded “lol, fuck no!”


  • Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

    It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

    We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.