I haven’t flown in ten years, so…yeah.

guillotines are renaissance era.

The operating phrase there is “in my kitchen area.” Kitchens are heavily influenced by the practical demands of life so they remain fairly well optimized. Surface, cabinet and drawer space in kitchens is always helpful. I have a hutch-like microwave stand that stores my cat food, my bartending and coffee accoutrements and some lesser used kitchen tools. My soup crocks, a keepsake growler and a couple other vessels live on top of the microwave.

On the other side of the wall from this is a decorative cabinet full of generational clutter I am required to maintain because “It was your grandmothers.” The second my father is no longer able to check, that cabinet is going elsewhere.

I’m a millennial and a woodworker, and I kinda need to rant a little.

I hate dining room hutches/cupboards.

My parents asked me to design and build a cupboard for their dining room. As I started looking around on the internet for design ideas to mash together into something that fits their whole deal, I started noticing a pattern. There are three kinds of pictures of hutches on the internet:

1. The cabinet is empty floating in a white void or has a few props on it in a sparsely furnished room, for marketing the cabinet itself.
2. Grandma’s old cabinet full of floral print china that may not have once ever served a meal in 70 years.
3. A diorama of basic bitchery, typically hosted on Pinterest, featuring distressed white chalk paint, several pieces of Rae Dunn crockery, a word like “Gather” made of scroll sawn wood, and a ceramic pig.

I cannot find any photographic evidence that 21st century Americans use dining room hutches to store things they regularly use. And I fucking hate it. It’s nothing but a trophy case to consumerism. “Here’s the thousand dollar cabinet we keep dishes in that will NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES touch food.”

It’s one facet of my “household furniture has cancer” belief. I’ll show you another of those facets:

There will never be an antique computer desk because no one really makes new heirloom computer desks. The woodworking traditions that gave us things like the shaker table and the morris chair kinda died during WWII and are now practiced the same way we practice jousting or flint knapping: something something living history. When PC’s became widespread in the 90’s, you see three kinds of computer desk arise:

1. Just a table someone already had that doesn’t have enough room so there’s another table next to it and stuff on the floor.
2. An abstract stack of laminated particle board slabs held up by steel tubes designed for the purpose but still didn’t have room for everything.
3. A stack of laminated particle board slabs designed to look like an executive pillar desk, a weird combination of a pillar desk with a dining room hutch, or an armoire for some reason.

Then the laptop era happened, then the phone/tablet era happened, now look back at what PC gamers are using with their monitors and towers: A wooden slab with metal T shaped legs.

I could say the same for other electronics-related furniture such as television stands. No notable crafts movement has emerged to fill the needs of 21st century lives, everyone buys flat packed particle board crap that is meant to look like one kind of furniture while being something else, like an “entertainment center” that looks like a credenza or the aforementioned computer desk that looks like an armoire.

I hate it, and I plan to take to my table saw and do something about it.

Amazon certainly helped.

The stagnation of several anchor stores like Sears also helped. Sears was in serious decline well before Amazon became a major player in the market.

Having a pool doesn’t make it easier to hang dong, just marginally more plausible.

He has published his audio book about the airship R101 under a creative commons license, if you haven’t seen that yet I’d check it out.

I am okay with some billboards that advertise services that are relevant to motorists, such as fuel, food or lodging near the road.

Product placements in television shows where the ad becomes part of the fiction.

I officially stopped watching Eureka when there was an episode about Degree For Men. I similarly gave up on Bones when the characters started delivering Toyota ads to each other.

I’m okay with there being a stick of Degree For Men label out in Sheriff Carter’s bathroom, or if the cast of Bones drive Toyotas. But when they stop to talk about long lasting anti-wetness or zero percent APR financing I’m fucking done.

That’s exactly what I was referencing. They pissed off Sony by working with Phillips on the CD-i. Hilarious.

Man I haven’t heard the name RocketBoom in so long. Wonder what ever happened to MeMe Molly?

The Engineer Guy just stopped uploading.

Same with Afrotechmods. TOP NOTCH electronics tutorial videos, he just stopped posting.

Pushing Up Roses, as she explained it herself, has pretty much said what she wanted to say about retro video games and largely does TV now with the occasional modern adventure game review thrown in. I wish her well but I’m no longer her audience.

DistroTube. Did Linux related content who might have an 88 tattooed on his neck by now.

Scott Manley. Similar to PUR, the content he makes kind of drifted out from under my interests; I became a fan of his Kerbal Space Program playthroughs and demonstrations of space flight concepts, but as far as I know now he basically does space news stuff now, which is perfectly cool but my attention wandered elsewhere.

Bright Sun Films. Once again there wasn’t a “nope not watching this anymore” moment, I think I just had my fill of Abandoned.

(dis)Honorable Mention: The Escapist. I no longer watch that channel but I am still a fan, viewer and patron of the talent themselves. Their new channel Second Wind is the most hilarious instance of owning the means of production I’ve ever seen.

The Modern Rogue certainly had a heyday. Past tense.

You know what’s funny? Nintendo put expansion slots on the bottom of all of their consoles prior to the Wii. In Japan, they were used for the Famicom Disk System, the Satellaview, the N64DD and the Gameboy Player. The latter was the only one that made it to the West. They never released an expansion for a console outside of Asia. They even had to retool several games that were released on Famicom diskettes for cartridges in the West, including inventing on-cartridge save files via battery-backed RAM for The Legend of Zelda in order to release them in the West.

Given Sega’s track record with console expansions, Nintendo might have been just as well off. Well, except for how the SNES optical drive add-on played out.

A Dell Inspiron laptop.

It just kept dying. Typing a Word document one moment, black screen the next. I bought this thing in August because I was going back to school and I needed a new laptop. By December I finally convinced them to replace the machine outright. I got a different model that lacked a lot of the features I had ordered.

I’m no longer a Dell customer.

I am completely done with the “male character says something chauvanistic, female character slaps, that’s the joke.”

Futurama did it quite a lot, Leela hit Fry a lot, Amy hit him a few times. I done with shows that do that. I see that joke happen again I’ll stop the playback right then and there and cancel whatever service I’m watching it on.

A mix of grains consisting of not less than 51% corn, water, yeast and oak. That’s what you need to make bourbon.

Aren’t there already? Surgeon General’s Warning: Do not drive a pregnant woman under the influence blah blah blah

And after the war he went on to become an early pioneer in surfing!

I spent enough time in aviation to know how much drilling it actually takes to teach people emergency procedures. If it’s different than what they usually do, it takes hours of practice. Even something as simple as finding and pulling a different door latch. If you’re stressed, even as stressed as “the doors won’t open the way I’m used to them otherwise everything is okay” your brain will just fail to pivot to the alternate procedures.

Cars got so simple to use in the 90’s. Sure they were simpler machines in the 60’s but fuel injection eliminated chokes and other carburetor issues, automatic transmissions became ubiquitous, children can handle vehicles of this complexity. And now we’re making them more complicated for no actual reason, with electric door latches with manual backups and such, and it’s causing problems.