George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past.

Governments are not the only ones, of course, but they are certainly the greatest practitioners. The term of art is "active measures", a direct translation of the term used by the Cheka. The first active measures campaign was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a badly transliterated version of a diatribe against Napoleon III riven through with blood libel in order to gin up support for the pogroms.

Put a pin in that for a minute. I am 1/4 Belarusian Jew. My ancestors had means and had emigrated from The Pale to Moscow so experienced most of the second pogrom second hand, in the accounts and losses of their friends and relatives to antisemitic terrorism and genocide. They decamped for Boston in 1891 because they saw the proverbial writing on the wall; thanks to the work of the Okhrana, the active measures of the Cheka had a circulation of 900,000 a week thanks to Henry Ford. As a consequence, this discussion is academic to me? But also not academic. There are no more Belarusian jews. Prior to the pogroms, Jews were 15% of the population. There are now fewer than 20,000. American antisemitism and its propagation delayed American entry into WWII and objectively made the Holocaust worse.

There's a term coined and used by the Bolsheviks that is relevant to this discussion: fellow travelers, or those with similar goals but no formal alignment with the Communist Party. And there's a term coined and used against the Bolsheviks that is relevant to this discussion: useful idiots, or those who lack the intelligence to not serve the purposes of adversarial political forces. Donald Trump is a useful idiot. Jeffrey Sachs is a fellow traveler.

Thomas Rid, in his seminal work Active Measures, catalogs the distortions of public perceptions of the past and future from the Renaissance (when it wasn't practiced) through the 2016 election (where it was practiced extensively). Aside from one Japanese example (a false Soviet battle plan between wars) and two American examples (a CIA-published fashion and lifestyle magazine distributed in East Berlin and material support for an underground Ukrainian independence movement through 1991), all catalogued examples of active measures have been practiced by Russia under the Okrana, the Cheka, the nKVD, the KGB and the FSB. Rid goes one further by pointing out that democratic governments have a poor risk/reward ratio with active measures because if they are discovered, the democratically-elected government loses credibility and, therefore, power. Totalitarian governments suffer no such misfortune as their actions are not constrained by popular will. A democratic government operates with the permission of the populace and Watergate breaks the government. A totalitarian government can spread the rumor that AIDS was genetically engineered against the Africans to cover up systematic Soviet poisoning of Afghan wells to cripple the Mujahideen without experiencing a single hit to its agency.

Now that we've set the scene, let's continue:

Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

This is more a diplomatic measure by the United States than anything else because if they call it February 2014 then the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of Dutch tourists would arguably have triggered Article 5 and led to continental war. If you examine the conflict as a whole, the Russio-Ukrainian War is generally accepted to have commenced with the Russian invasion of Crimea In response to the Maidan on February 20, 2014.

In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

"Provocation" was the justification for the Munich Agreement, whereby Britain opted not to "provoke" Nazi Germany by defending Czechoslovakia against invasion. This was the basis for Nevill Chamberlain's "Peace for our time" speech, now widely considered to be the greatest diplomatic failure of the 20th century. The Tory government bargained that Hitler would be satisfied with annexation of Czechoslovakia and thus would not jeopardize the West-leaning Polish Republic. Poland, of course, was invaded less than a year later.

As outlined in The Gates of Europe, a history of Ukraine from the Scythians to the Maidan, "provocation" has been the fundamental justification of war in Ukraine, Poland and Belarus since the dawn of empire. The plain between the Urals and the Alps has always been considered a "buffer state" for whomever is more civilized at the time against whoever is less civilized and in general, the stretch of land between Armenia and Sweden is the first to betrayed and the first to get overrun. Despite this extensively bloody history, the only polity to routinely practice genocide against the Cossacks, Slavs and Tatars are the Russians, first under Ivan the Terrible, then under the First Pogroms, then under the Second Pogroms, then under the Russian Civil War, then under the Holodomor, then under the Deportation of the Crimean Tartars..

"Provocation", then, has historically meant "letting authoritarianism do what it wants when it wants where it wants" and any act that defies the authoritarian is seen as justification of authoritarian behavior. By the authoriarians, anyway. And the fellow travelers and useful idiots.

A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism.

Note the careful use of the words "might have been" here - speculative passive voice. It's never worked before, but maybe this time would have been different.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement.

In no small part because the FSB has flooded the zone with the word "provoked."

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order).

Worthy of note: Russia was participating in NATO at the time.

The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014.

Right - the same Yanukovich who defied his own parliament and shot hundreds of the 800,000 protesters that demanded his resignation? Speaking as an American, "free elections and the defeat of tyranny" are big on my list of core values. If the price of freedom is "provoking" Putin, gimme the stick.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date.

(By allowing a pro-Putin despot to take over a nascent European democracy)

Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement.

Just so we're clear: the argument here is that if the US had allowed the FSB to overthrow Ukraine unimpeded, there'd be no war in Europe. Let's not look away from that.

Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

And just so we're crystal clear: It is my firmly held opinion, as an avid scholar of The Deep State, that the 2016 election cemented and prioritized the destruction of Russia by Western intelligence services. An uneasy detente has existed between Russia and the USA since Yeltsin but the benefits of this relationship have diminished yearly while maintaining the fiction of diplomatic alignment has grown ever costlier. Once the Russians attempted to provoke the collapse of American democracy, American operatives dusted off their operational plans and set about to negate Putin. The CIA holds a grudge. The Iranian regime will never be allowed to thrive until the CIA feels satisfied that justice has been served for the barracks bombing and Bill Buckley. There is a straight, bright line between Vladimir Putin and January 6 and whenever Russian mouthpieces talk about American plans for the destruction of Russia, the only thing I can say is "damn right."

But that's not about Ukraine. That's about a criminal organization that thinks nothing of murder, torture and genocide.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance.

Yeah and they show a mutual defense pact between Ukraine and Russia in exchange for Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons, too. That didn't exactly work out.

The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Worthy of note: Kennan basically established The Cold War by arguing that The Russians were too crazy to be reasoned with. Furthermore, Ukraine in 1997 sure as shit wasn't Ukraine after two Democratic revolutions. Kennan is two decades dead; considering how he felt about democracy I suspect his opinion would be different but Sachs doesn't get into that.

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

He's still saying it. His primary concern, however, is Russia's nukes:

The bitterness that emerged from dismissing Russia as irrelevant created a climate ripe for the rise of an autocratic leader who would instead demand respect and power through force. And there is no force greater than possessing a nuclear arsenal capable of bringing about the end of humanity. For those who had asked, “what could this defeated nation do to us?” the newly installed President Vladimir Putin would soon have an answer.

Perry, of course, has exactly fuckall to say about his engineering of the Budapest Memorandum which saw Ukraine disarmed, or about the fact that a document he wrote obligates the United States to defend Ukraine against Russia ("Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used").

Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

Arestoyvich was merely parroting Wallerstein, Kaplan, Zeihan, John McCain and others. For reasons of demography, the geopolitical rationalists have been predicting a Russian invasion of Ukraine before 2025 since the early 2000s.

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion.

During 2010-2013, Yanukovich acted as an agent of Russia and suppressed anti-Putin dissent. This is why 800,000 protesters took to the streets to depose him.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea.

"The war broke out." Not "Russian special forces stripped of insignia or flags invaded Donbas in order to kidnap and murder elected Ukrainian officials in furtherance of the future annexation of a sovereign nation."

The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO.

Under the terms of the Budapest Memorandum - see above.

Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022.

It's worth watching that meeting:

...and it's worth watching the template for that meeting:

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.”

"Peace for our time" where "our time" turned out to be exactly 334 days.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war.

This is historically inaccurate. For over two thousand years, peace in the geographic area we call "Ukraine" has occurred only after the destruction of the invading empire. As a territorial buffer between regions more easily defended, the invasion of Ukraine has been the first step in over a dozen wars of territorial expansion. For over a hundred years, peace in Ukraine has come at the cost of genocide. There will be no peace in Ukraine until Putin is out of power and Russia is under a new regime. Full stop.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

The above is two hours I didn't have to spend. If you were not a friend, I would have responded with a simple "lol eat shit tankie." As it is, I see you neither as a "useful idiot" nor as a "fellow traveler."

So I implore you to think a little, investigate easily disproved allegations and exercise caution before putting the words of fellow travelers on your lips.

Kid's teacher came to work with COVID. Took out about 60% of two classrooms. Kid came down with it Thursday, is mostly doing better now. I started feeling like shit Saturday, tested positive Sunday morning, have been feeling super not-great ever since.

This is the first time I've tested positive for COVID. Of course, so have half the families in 3rd and 4th grade so that's nice.

not gonna lie. Considering how badly it fucked me up the first time I'm a little terrified. I feel worse this time around. I had good days and bad days last time over the course of maybe a month. This time? "I have successfully taken a shower, now it's time for a nap." I would say my body devoted about 36 hours Sunday and Monday to fever dreams. Sense of smell went away this morning. My ability to regulate my temperature is slowly coming back, at least. With any luck, three years of evolution have taught those shitty little critters what to do with a human body; this time around it's a bad fuckin' flu rather than "your head is going to explode from earaches."

But fuck, man. The delta between "bikes 30 miles a day" and "walks 6 miles a day, can't really run anymore" is a pretty fuckin' shitty place to be when you're already at "walks six miles a day, can't really run anymore."

___________________________________________________________________________

My wife pointed out that childhood trauma is really shitty for your immune system so it's not surprising that I get sick easily, considering I spent 18 years in fight-or-flight. And maybe it's because shapella went through with no drama? And my staking adventure unwound with no drama at all but a great deal of profit? And the fact that if I were still talking to my parents they'd still call me a criminal rather than congratulating me? It made me wonder what the origin of my recurring childhood nightmare of being set on fire by my mother was.

'cuz she used to encourage me to play with matches.

And idolized her brother for "burning down a barn" that he didn't actually burn down.

And she fuckin' luvvvvvvvvvvs fires.

And although my aunt doesn't have much credibility either, the fact that the cousins all agree "your mom put the heater under her sister's covers and turned it on" has more credibility now than my mother's version of the story ("I woke up to smoke because my three-year-old sister solved her cold feet by getting out of bed, picking up the portable heater and stuffing it under her covers").

There's an 18-month period leading up to about my 2nd birthday where (1) my dad decided he couldn't leave me alone with my mother (2) they moved in with friends because she couldn't be left alone (3) he wanted to leave her but figured I'd die but for some reason nobody talked about committing her again. I'd ask him what the fuck was going on but he'd lie.

Maybe when I'm feeling better I'll ask his sister. But I probably won't. There was a lot of family drama about when exactly the spelling of our last name changed. I have seen census records, where she's fucking seven years old, with the whole fucking family spelling their name differently. Fuckers all changed the spelling of their last name in the '50s and fucking forgot or something. Unreliable narrators, the lot of them.

I should be dead nine different ways, across four geneologies, as well as poor, as well as crazy, as well as a criminal. Instead I'm a millionaire with a beautiful wife and an awesome kid. It would be so fuckin' typical if a goddamn Chinese gain-of-function experiment took that all away from me.

Working on this movie. Dialog is a wreck. Money ran out shortly before filming so their skeletal sound package got split up into two not-worthy-for-spares packages to be operated by unskilled crew. I'm tooth and claw on this thing, battling by inches. A machine gun fight on a sailboat took me half a day to synthesize out of whole cloth but I can do about two to three minutes a day of dialog cleanup.

The movie needs to sell for more than 3x its budget for my friends to get paid. It will; the last time I dealt with this shit I took an unsellable movie and created something that sold in 27 markets. But it's trench warfare.

Last night I dreamed the producer, a good friend of mine, had been convinced by Tom Morello to traffic biker meth. My friend huffed it instead, went paranoid and murdered his wife and baby daughter. It then became my job to bring him groceries and companionship while the LAPD kept him chained to a Peloton. Since they were the LAPD, they didn't restrict his access to methamphetamine (my dream my rules).

Probably 50% of my day is dealing with other peoples' bullshit. It's usually okay because the way I make that terrified, depressed, suicidal, bulimic teenager on the inside feel better is by making other people feel better. But when the only thing you can do is prevent failure, and the only way to do it is invisible, and there is absolutely.no.one you can turn to when shit isn't working?

I'm probably looking at three months of unpaid work to get this movie to the place it would have been automatically if they'd chosen to pay me to fly out and fucking record it as well as mix it. It's like that subplot in Argo - eventually, the Iranians will have pieced together the shredded documents but all you can do is watch them do the most pointless, demeaning, ridiculous bullshit in an attempt to murder our heroes. "Security through tedium" - if you chop it up enough, no one will bother.

You aren't supposed to do it to your friends.

I shattered a switchplate yesterday by slapping it into the wall. My daughter was giving me attitude about peeling potatoes. She's the one who likes mashed potatoes, I fucking hate them. When you're spending months toiling in obscurity for a movie that will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars if you don't, the simple approval of making fucking dinner counts for a lot. She's ten, though, what does she know. And her friends are spoiled rich brats. "You spent the weekend on the boat, that's nice, where did you go?" "I don't know." "Well, what did you do with your time?" "stayed in my room and watched Youtube." "your room... at the hotel?" "my room on the boat."

I'd hand over the dialog on this thing to someone else except I don't know of anyone else who could fix it. Which sounds arrogant AF but fuck you I've earned it. I'm fucking good at my job, have always been fucking good at my job, and no one will ever fucking know or care. "Why can't we understand dialog in movies and TV anymore? It must be because we secretly enjoy reading!" No, fuckers, it's because the entertainment industry is run by entitled manchildren whose principle qualification is Daddy Pays For My Shit. "ZOMFG you mean you need to MIX it after you edit it? but nobody made us do that to our recently-cancelled show!"

Friend who likes to shoot the shit with me about the history of the American watch industry is giving a paid lecture about the history of the American watch industry in front of one of the most esteemed groups in horology. Of my friends? He's probably the least educated about the American watch industry. This is the second time that organization is having him back.

Meanwhile I'm at a standstill so that I can Bakhmut the dialog on this movie.

On the plus side, we found out two months ago that our competitor to the north was going out of business, a month ago that our competitor to the south was going out of business, this morning that a competitor to the southeast of us is retiring in the spring and that a competitor directly north is retiring in the summer. We gave out bonuses. The year sucked and only the strong will survive, and we fucking survived. On the minus side, the pitocin shortage is getting way worse so not only are there about to be a bunch of pregnant women clogging the hospitals, they're that much more likely to bleed out and die.

Which makes it hard to justify giving a fuck about - wait for it - movie dialogue. But since I'm basically the quasimodo in the belfry of the birth industry around here, it's all I'm allowed to give a fuck about.

This was the first christmas I didn't have to have an awkward conversation with either of my parents. On the one hand, that was nice. On the other hand it would have been nice if they'd tried.

The kid was sick from Friday before last to last friday. Saturday she had a swim meet. Sunday she had company. Tuesday we got a notice that there's COVID in the classroom. Today she's vomiting all day (but passed a COVID test this morning, at least). Me? I was sick from last Monday to this Monday so I'm stoked for whatever the vomits are from.

Soundminer now comes with a sampler with eight voices, a quad voice mixer, a surround panning engine per voice, granular synthesis per voice and a global FX rack. I literally built up a 5.1 cloud of swirling zombies in two minutes. Fed an Atari into it and transcended into eight bit valhalla.

I thought I was mixing this movie for free. No, I'm mixing it for producer points so only probably mixing it for free. Fortunately, I'm extremely good at my job, it's actually a good movie once you peel away the poo, and I have the tools to make swirling clouds of zombies. Who knows, I might get paid.

I don't even remember what I was looking for but I stumbled across a phat stack of horological wheeling hobs for a pittance so I went through the "what sizes do you have" through "I wonder what sizes i need" through "I wonder if I have any random books that talk about how to calculate modulus from leaf count and diameter" through "when did I buy Malcolm Wild's Clock Wheel & Pinion Cutting" through "how the hell am I going to measure that accurately" through "oh yeah I have an Olympus microscope with a Mitutoyo stage and a metrology camera and software package" to "huh these are mostly pocket watch and carriage clock wheels but they're such a screaming bargain I should buy them anyway" in about 45 minutes and you're just finding out that in horology, it's not gears and teeth, it's wheels and leaves.

Then the guy who taught me watchmaking called me up to ask for advice about learning CNC for an hour.

This week I realized that my fundamental outlook on life, as taught me by my parents, is "no one actually wants to talk to you." I found myself actually noting, for the first time in five decades, that I fundamentally assume anyone making conversation must have an ulterior motive... rather than simply acting on that assumption.

Called my dad for his birthday two weeks ago. Relayed how my daughter's chess timer broke for stupid reasons, and how I had it apart, had a component designed, had it printed and had the thing back together better than new in under an hour. His response? "Yeah, I never thought you'd be any good mechanically but I guess you're a halfway-decent repairman."

Intellectually? I know the man has spent the past five years playing FREECELL. I have left him utterly in the dust from a tinkerin' standpoint. Emotionally? The ability to measure and calculate the modulus of a Seiko 7009 keyless works wheel from -go- in 20 minutes is, by definition, not worth doing anyway.

fucks off to construct parakeet tornadoes

this was also a long time coming

Worthy of note: those numbers are bullshit. The counts per rev on the motors isn't vaguely right, there's a 9:1 gearmotor between the motor and the ballscrew, and the ballscrew calcs aren't even incorporated. And uhh obviously the motor and the ballscrews aren't even physically connected.

But that's the software, cheerfully controlling a servo motor to a tenth of a micron.

The backlash of the gear motor is under 3 arc minutes, or under 0.05 degrees. The backlash of the GT2 belts is 2.7 arc minutes, or also under 0.05 degrees. two of the axes are 4mm/rev ballscrews, one of them is 2mm/rev. .1 degree at 4mm/rev is 0.0011mm, or 1.1 microns.

The machine originally used closed-loop control via Heidenhain glass scales that were totes stolen by the brigand that sold me the machine. With that closed-loop control the machine managed 1-micron precision. I can buy Mitutoyo scales that will work with a module for the servo pack that will get me to within 0.01 microns, or "a coronavirus." I don't think it'll take that. To assume mirror finish for any waveform you need half the wavelength. Visible light starts at around 370nm, so half of that is 185nm, or around 0.2 microns. The motors, for their part, are 24-bit encoders, so 0.0013 arc minutes per pulse or 0.077 arc seconds. 0.073 nanometers per pulse at which point you acknowledge you're measuring absolute fucktons of noise. 4600 pulses just in the combined backlash of belt and gear motor.

But I've taken this creature from "is it possible" to "do I want it."

I got the motors to wake up yesterday. They appeared in SigmaWin and I could jog them. I choked up like I was watching the end of Babe. I've got at least one dead servopak; I paid $190 ea for them because the local guy told me they were $3k and fuck him. I could buy another for $190 used or $400 new out of China or, apparently $1100 out of any scrupulous North American distributor who isn't giving me the fuck-you price. I found this out when I inquired about getting mine fixed and was told they won't fix it if it'll cost more than 70% of the new price or "around $800."

Here's a $4500 mill. Like that surface finish? Here's its stepper motor. A B C D, baby! Mine have 1500 parameters, life-cycle monitoring and not one, not two, but five thousand-page manuals. Which allow fancy moves like this fucking voodoo at 3:30.

I'm literally at "the plane flies." It's not ready for passengers? I wouldn't take it across the Atlantic? But the proof-of-concept has proven out and this fucker IS GOING TO WORK.

'sup Pabs.

I got sick enough with COVID that the studios told me I couldn't work, and in not working my job, a couple friends who substituted for me kept their houses, so I retired. It took like two years but my pulse-ox is back up to 99. Still not as healthy as I was by a long shot, but there are lots of dead people and I'm not one of them.

I taught myself casting. Then I taught myself cloisonne, well enough to know I hate bending those little silver wires. Then I got an opportunity to buy a $70k cnc machine in broke-ass condition for like $10k and have been spending the year turning it into a $200k CNC machine.

I cut out my parents, but not before discovering the FBI still has my grandma's phone tapped.

The in-laws are getting inflexible, cranky and awful in their dotage. It's taken eight weeks but we're going to counseling with them next week. Counselor is concerned that the mother-in-law thinks an hour session will solve every problem, so my wife promised her that if they bail, we'll stick around. On the plus side, my wife and I are supportive and loving enough that we absolutely don't need counseling. On the minus side, I'm learning just how little responsibility my in-laws feel they have for the happiness of the people around them.

Healthcare sucks now. We're realizing that our demographic at work is about 95% Karens.

I just unwrapped a cable that's been sitting in the closet for a year. I was checking fit. I discovered it has the exact same magic crimp terminals I never knew about until like a month ago, which shows how much attention I've been paying to that stuff. it was sitting on top of a $15k box of servo amps that have mostly been taking up space.

I grabbed it, put it in a raceway i designed, and said, aloud, "this is going to fucking rule."

This little fucker is gonna be packed like a goddamn fighter plane. And from every indication I have, it's going to work. Not that I can even explain it. Most of the people around me don't even know what a CNC machine is, let alone know they can be built. That 400-piece black brick is mostly cable management surrounding six servos. It's all bolted to a cutting board because it's cheaper buying Delrin slabs as "cutting boards" from Amazon than it is to get the material from an industrial supplier.

I know one guy who reacts with a "holy shit" because he knows what he's looking at. I guess that should count for more because he uses these tools for a living. The fact that nobody else even has the vocab to figure out what I've been struggling with is pretty goddamn frustrating tho.

In my head I've been building legos for a year and I can't get the goddamn spaceship canopy on. I forget that most people don't view legos conceptually as something you can make from nothing.

if you change the hole spacing to 12.9mm the assembly is modular

I just finished Ed Niedermeyer's Ludicrous, which is basically "Tesla is a piece of shit, let me count the ways." I have an engineering degree and it's the first time I've heard of tolerance stacking as a concept, which is pretty much shame on my alma mater 'cuz it explains a lot. Like why Teslas are pieces of shit with fit and finish that would embarrass Tatra.

This fucking thing was welded with a harbor freight mig welder on my cousin's garage floor with vice grips for jigging. No proto. No dry run. Dimensional transfer through printing to an Epson inkjet, then cutting out profiles with an X-acto knife, then rubber-cementing the paper dolls to the metal, then using a hand punch and a ball peen hammer to mark centers, then holes drilled with a donor 40-year-old nameless Chinese drill press.

You know what? Of the 896 parts on this cart? THREE screws didn't line up.

Fuck you, Elon Musk. Fuck you, tech industry. Fuck you, dad. I'm actually pretty fucking goddamn good at this shit.