My multimeter
Why is it a holy grail? Also what is it?
It’s an instrument like this. It can measure voltage, current, resistance and continuity in electrical circuits. Mine is a cheap 20 euro model but it does its job well so I don’t complain. I actually don’t mess with circuits very much, but when I do, this thing is very helpful.
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My dude. $1,200 is not all that much if it’s something that is going to be part of the rest of your life.
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I’m curious as to what makes it so nice? My gut reaction is to say “It’s literally a rod of metal with some checkering”, but I’ve been in enough hobbies to know that there are some very fine details that make a world of difference.
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3 other cool nerds to play board games with consistently.
I was going to say Glory to Rome but your answer is better.
Are you calling yourself cool? That’s so not cool.
Maybe he already has one cool nerd and is looking for a few more.
Self confidence is in fact very cool. And I’ll convince you over a game of Agricola.
Oooh, hey!! I have that game but haven’t played it yet. It looks freaking dope. Any suggestions? If I can’t convince my family to play I was just going to try it solo
It’s the “revised edition” if that matters
It’s a fantastic game. If you’re playing with less experienced gamers I would probably leave the occupation/improvement cards out at first.
And seconding what Cile said. You show up to a gaming meetup with Agricola and I can pretty much guarantee someone is going to want to play. It’s a classic for a reason. Way easier to convince someone that already likes board games.
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organize a “games night” and see if people are interested: “Hey, on Friday night I’m inviting people over to play Agricola. Do you want to come?”
Board Games, in particular Euros that take can take over 2 hours to play are not something that get pulled out on a whim during social gatherings. -
find a board game meetup near you (try meetup.com for example). It’s easier to turn board gamers into friends than friends into board gamers.
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I like your moxie. Very cool of you to be so graceful towards an unkind comment
Cool is what you make it, dude.
Meanwhile, I keep ending up in rooms with board game nerds, and I only kind of like board games.
For example, in the headphone world, the Sennheiser HE-1 headphones are said to be like the pinnacle of headphones and most expensive, costing $59000 for a pair.
Out of curiosity, what would you plug those into to get the best use of them? I couldn’t imagine the headphone jack on my motherboard would be able to take full advantage of them.
You’d use a dedicated audio setup with it, yeah. I don’t know if the 59k is the headphones only or if it includes an amplifier, but a hi range amplifier can cost thousands too.
I’m not an audiophile tho, ain’t got the money, and even if I did my setup would at most cost €1000. So if anyone wants to post some real numbers go ahead.
They’re super special electrostatic headphones, so they have to be run with a special type of amplifier, and the one they come with come is absolutely insane, and is a huge part of the cost. Honestly, I bet you could cost cut the whole thing down to under $20k, but you’re paying a LOT of money for stuff like the fact that the amplifier case is made of marble and has one of the coolest boot sequences imaginable, where all the tubes and knobs rise out of it and retract back in so the whole thing is seamless. It’s very much one of those things that get built when engineers are handed a blank check and told “We don’t care what it costs, have fun”
Cadillac 16 energy imo. I think part of what’s wrong with the world today is all companies suck, have no fun anymore and don’t care if things are actually cool. I know it sounds stupid but everything is black, white, or grey on the road and everything is a shapeless blob. Oh you want nice headphones, or computer case, etc? Enjoy our exciting options of black or grey, and fresh new material of cheapest plastic we can make shiny.
where all the tubes and knobs rise out of it and retract back in
what the fuck
One of my favorite audiophile youtubers, Crinacle, just bought these headphones for 75k. Here’s the video if you wanna watch it
That thing has an inbuilt DAC, as well as S/PDIF and USB inputs, so I’d imagine any device with enough processing power to play lossless audio files and has the proper drivers should be enough.
I had the pleasure of using some at Sennheiser’s booth at CES a few years back. They sound VERY nice, but I don’t think they’re worth $59k. Maybe 8k or something, although I know a lot of the cost is in the tubes and accessories.
The irony with those is that once you’re at a stage of life where you can afford those, you probably can’t hear anything over 14kHz anyway. At least there’s that sweet midrange!
In the typewriter community, the “holy grail” differs from person to person, but for me it was a 1930s Royal P equipped with a rare typeface called Vogue. Very, very rarely they’ll pop up from people who don’t know how significant that is, and that’s the only way to get one at a reasonable price - because those who do know what it is will ask thousands of dollars for it.
Eventually I found one for a comparatively cheap price (sub 1k), and the only reason someone else didn’t snap it up before I saw it was because the guy refused to ship it. Local pickup only. So I took the chance to drive the 10 hours round trip to snag it, and it sits proudly as the crown jewel of my collection:
Hells to the yeah
Woodworking: An entire log of American Chestnut.
About a century ago, the species was all but wiped out by a blight that came from Japanese chestnut. Some three billion trees died. The blight actually survives in the forest living on but not damaging oak trees, so American chestnuts are struggling to reclaim their historic habitats. The species is critically endangered and efforts to rehabilitate the population are underway, including trying to breed large surviving individuals or to genetically engineer blight resistant trees. Logging is of course completely out of the question.
American Chestnut is an excellent lumber, with many of the properties of white oak in a faster growing tree. It is straight grained, hard and strong, easy to saw and split, rot resistant due to tannins. A fantastic choice for indoor and outdoor furniture, structural timber, even telephone poles. Reclaimed chestnut timber from old buildings is highly prized, and what woodworker wouldn’t love access to a few hundred board feet of freshly kiln dried American chestnut…if it was possible to ethically source.
Why can’t they just be grown here instead of japan?
Because the disease has become endemic to American forests.
The American Chestnut was the dominant tree in the ecosystem of the forests of Eastern North America. Per Wikipedia, “it was said that a squirrel could walk from New England to Georgia solely on the branches of American chestnuts.” In the late 19th century, Japanese chestnut trees were imported, and they brought with them Asian Bark Fungus. American Chestnuts are quite susceptible to this fungus, and it largely wiped out the population.
The fungus infects the above ground portion of the tree, killing it. New shoots will emerge from the stump as the below ground portion of the tree isn’t affected by the fungus, but the new growth doesn’t get very far before the fungus kills it off again. We have no hope of eliminating the fungus from the forests.
So we’ve got these zombie tree stumps that will grow enough of a plant to keep the fungus alive and running (it also survives on other species of tree), but not enough to grow large and reproduce. There are some remaining adult trees here and there but the species is considered functionally extinct in the wild as it really isn’t able to thrive because this fungus is among us. So unless we can hybridize or otherwise breed fungus resistant chestnut trees, we ain’t got no American Chestnuts.
American chestnuts are also susceptible to ink disease and the Chinese Gall Wasp.
A lot of problems were caused by importing plants to North America; tumbleweeds aren’t indigenous, they’re Russian, and a massive fucking problem.
An extra upvote for “fungus is among us”.
American chestnuts will die here, but I have a magnificent large Chinese chestnut tree in my yard. It’s not the same, but at least we get to harvest some 10-15 gallons of chestnuts every fall.
This is really interesting. A few years ago I bought this American Chestnut salt and pepper set. The guy who made it did tell me that he got the wood from a beam out of a barn built before the Civil War but I didn’t realize why. I just thought it was a really good looking salt Shaker and pepper grinder…
Thanks, now I want one too. Is there any feasible way to start trying to grown some of these myself, while obviously attempting to prevent infection of my crop?
This would be an excellent question to ask The American Chestnut Foundation.
A couple more things about American Chestnuts:
-Chestnut forests used to cover a shitton of the northeast before being reduced to basically nothing
-“Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire” is about the tradition of eating American Chestnuts in the winter…
-… Because for some, it was a treat. And for others, it was practically a staple food! They were an extremely abundant resource
-Seriously, look at the size of the original American Chestnut forest:
What is growing there now? It sounds like a pretty shitty situation.
Stumps and other trees. And of course, a ton it was leveled for housing/infrastructure/etc
Captainaggravated had some great info a few comments down about the remains of the forest if you want to know more!
The surviving forests are often oak, hickory, ash, pine. A different blight is working its way through the Eastern Hemlock, which are truly the giant sequoias of the East. Humongous old trees.
Also, corn, wheat, rice, tobacco, towns, cities, suburbs. Probably a third of the US population lives in that green area, to include Washington DC, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Altoona, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Memphis, Charlotte, Asheville, Atlanta…looks like it misses Colombia and just barely grazes Raleigh.
Farmers used to just let their critters loose into the forests to eat the chestnuts off the forest floor because there were just so many. Now I think every American chestnut tree alive has a name.
If I could time travel, I’d go see the chestnut forests first. I only learned about them a few years ago but I think about it a weird amount (maybe because I have a huge elm tree in my yard)
Like can you imagine entire states covered in them? I don’t think they were quite the size of redwoods but they were ancient and well-established forests. And it makes me sad that most people don’t even know what we lost because some rich asshole just HAD to have foreign trees on their estates.
Christ, it’s ALWAYS the fucking rich assholes!
because some rich asshole just HAD to have foreign trees on their estates.
Blight would have happened at some point. Global travel made it inevitable.
This made me immediately sad
This is one thing that I really hope GMOs allow us to counter. We need chestnut trees back. Natural and farmed ones. Perhaps we will find a gene for blight resistance someday.
My hobby is Chess, and to me it would be to beat a Grandmaster(impossible under normal context). I have beaten only once a National Master in a simul, to put things in perspective.
So historically speaking, when people have managed to beat a Grandmaster in chess, how often was it because they discovered such a novel new chess technique that even the Grandmaster wasn’t familiar and thus pushed the boundary of the “martial” arts of chess, and how often was it because the Grandmaster made a mistake that gave their opponent a sufficient advantage to beat the Grandmaster?
Getting a novel technique is impossible, there is less and less new theory, and they know all the tricks, but the only way one can possible gain an advantage on a Grandmaster is baiting them into an opening line they they do not know well and you know very well, which again is very unlikely considering they study the game for life and even then, converting said advantage would be very difficult. The difference between International Masters and Grandmasters is big enough, but the difference between Grandmasters and amateurs is abysmal. You can see this with the Elo System (rating system), players under 200 Elo points their rival are expected to win almost never. They can even beat amateurs with their eyes blinded, and this is not a joke, one can just see the many videos of Grandmasters giving opponents odds like this.
How tf does blindfolded playing work?
They can hear the moves in algebraic notation, and then they play their move(either someone plays them physically for them or they have invisible pieces in the computer interface).
They have to remember the whole board position though, which is what makes it harder.
I’d kill or die for a WWII or pre-WWII Colt .45. One I would especially love would be a Singer (yes, the sewing machine company) made for the war. There’s a rare one that even Forgotten Weapons hasn’t seen, forget the model.
TTRPGs. A cleared schedule
And friends with matching ones
In cycling I would say the tools needed to replace a flat tyre.
Pair of tire levers and a new tube is what, $20?
Exchange diary, please don’t make me explain 😅
That sounds very nice.
A surefire way to get people to ask is to tell them not to ask.
OK, but explain?
I edited it.
I understand most of the individual words in your explanation, but it doesn’t really tell me what the point is. About all I got from it is people writing back and forth to each other, and since you mentioned ‘otaku’, probably a Japanese fandom thing?
I could google for ‘exchange diary otaku’ and maybe find a better explanation, but tbh I’m not that invested.
Underground Japanese idols and their fans. It’s a whole scene. Look up groups like KissBee, AIBECK, 100-YOKAI, etc.
KissBee
First hit, confusingly, is this:
Further down I see a group of girls – Japanese pop music? That would have been more informative than ‘idols’.
Explain!
I edited it.
I never knew they had merchandise for Big O.
From my personal collection:
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I don’t care what the other nerds say. This is the Holy Grail for me:
Waaaaagh!
My holy grail is that i have an actually painted army
Respect
In the world of synthesisers, I’m going to say the Yamaha CS-80. Anyone who was introduced to synthesised music by listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack will recognise it. With its many tactile modulation options, it’s arguably the pinnacle of the synth as a performance instrument.
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The 2600 is definitely a worthy nomination. The 2500 is even more grail-ish.
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Gunpla. That one rare, out-of-print kit that is only available on ebay for like $500. I have 3 grail kits, and fortunately, 2 of them are going to get reissued in the next 6ish months, and there’s a fair chance the third one may be reissued in the near future as well.
Another one for me is Godhand SPN-120-L. They are considered to be the best nippers on the market, and this is the left-handed version. Unfortunately, they’re only available on Godhand’s official site, and they only ship to Japan.
$500 isn’t even that bad tbh. Csgo skins get sold for more than that
Sure, but it’s hard to justify when the retail value is a fraction of that, and I can buy several other nice kits for the same price. I have plenty of other kits to build, so I’m fine with waiting.
