Recent submissions

Comment · 7 years ago
I also have perfect pitch, and it was actually an article posted here on HN that made me realize no, I'm not crazy, my perfect pitch has gone flat with age (I'm 29) and having not played violin regularly.

Me and a friend figured it out, I've pitched down from the 440 Hz standard to 428 Hz.

Comment · 7 years ago
I'm a sculptor who specializes in math and physics visualizations, I have two Prusa printers and they are invaluable tools for me. I 3D print a lot of sculpture parts and things like sculpture bases that would be difficult and time consuming to make on a milling machine (grids of tapered square holes, etc), in addition to lots and lots of tooling like jigs for setting the back stop on my model railroad chopper to precise lengths.

I love my two printers. They enable me to achieve the kind of computer precision my artwork requires in a way I don't know I'd be able to achieve otherwise, at least not in such a short amount of time.

Comment · 7 years ago
I have a calling/passion, I'm a sculptor. And the marketing thing is what I seriously struggle with. I'm working on it and slowly pushing myself out of my comfort zone, but I disagree with passions only mattering if you make it visible. I'd love to be left the hell alone to be lost in my work forever, but I regrettably have to start making it visible if I want it to start paying for itself or at least break even. Art supplies aren't cheap. I want a laser cutter one day and that money isn't going to appear out of thin air. Making it visible is how to make it sustainable. I'm not in it for other people's approval and validation, the person I'm most concerned about impressing is myself.

This is kind of the harsh reality of being an artist though: how successful you are is less about the quality of work you do and more about how hard you can hustle. The person who makes unoriginal garbage art but is good at selling themselves is gonna beat the recluse who does high quality, innovation work but doesn't put themselves out there every single time.

Comment · 7 years ago
I'm gonna have to disagree, I live in East Tennessee and Dolly Parton opening Dollywood right outside Great Smoky Mountain National Park created a booming tourism economy here when we used to be one of the poorest places of the country. And now Big Moonshine, who got big on a lot of those tourism dollars in the past decade or so, is turning around and dumping money into revitalizing lots of East TN cities that used to be total dumps (who knew Johnson City could be so cute?!), as well as pouring tons of money into boosting Knoxville's already strong arts and crafts scene. Tourism has absolutely been East Tennessee's salvation. All you gotta do to see that is cross the border into eastern Kentucky, left behind and still one of the poorest parts of this country.

Sure, tourism ruins a lot of shit, but tourist dollars have improved the quality of life for millions and millions of people all over the world.

Comment · 7 years ago
Dying jealous of your Desoxyn rx, I've been on Dexedrine my whole life (after trying everything and always crawling back to it) but my shrink would never let me try Desoxyn.

Desoxyn is not front of the line because it's literally methamphetamine lol.

Comment · 7 years ago
What makes you think it's only corporate power companies out to make a profit that are the bad guys? It's all of them, including the public utilities. I live in the Tennessee Valley, TVA is consistently the WORST utility in the South in terms of green energy initiatives, and they're a quasi-governmental agency with a complete monopoly over the region they serve. They don't make profits. Their green power program is a sham and in fact they killed our budding green energy manufacturing economy back around 2005 with absurd, arbitrary restrictions on who could get solar panels and hook them up to the grid because those were a threat to their coal buddies' bottom line. Freaking DUKE POWER, whose history includes the blood of who knows how many coal miners, blows us out of the water. (Not that TVA doesn't have blood on its hands, either, but that's another story.)

Anyway, to all the people who wonder why Appalachia won't do the obvious and just replace coal with green energy: oh, we tried, and the powers that be shut that shit down cuz they weren't gonna have none of that. Coal owns us and they aren't gonna let go without a fight.

Comment · 7 years ago
As a woman: no, this comments section is a sexist dumpster fire of the usual "but false accusations!" variety that paints women as generally being out to get men, because... Who knows! I still haven't figured out what our motivation is for all the alleged false accusations we apparently enjoy making, and I'm pretty sure in reality we all just want to live our lives and mind our own business. But also, you know, have some protection or recourse if some co-worker thinks it's cute to grope us or make gross comments about our boobs or something.

I enjoy reading HN, but it absolutely has a sexism problem and it shows everytime an article about something like this is posted. You know how to not get "falsely" accused of harassment? Don't be a creep and don't treat your woman collegues as being lesser-than. Really not that hard. I promise.

Comment · 7 years ago
Could you not cut your own cards with a hobby die-cutting machine? I have some old punch cards and a Sillohouette Curio, I don't see why it couldn't work given a good sharp blade and a fresh cutting mat. That kind of cardstock cuts like butter, too.
Comment · 7 years ago
Living in rural southern Appalachia and occasionally getting stuck behind the school bus dropping off the [white] kids who live in the trailer park that butts up to my property, I absolutely beg to differ. There are more white people living in poverty than all other races combined, it's just not sexy or cool to advocate for them. There have also been studies that show Appalachians are often discriminated against in the college admissions process because of where they're from.

I'm all for this. There is untapped genius in trailer parks and backwoods hollers and at the end of long and winding gravel driveways, just as there is in inner city black neighborhoods and the far more invisible rural black communities in the Deep South. All are absolutely deserving of a little extra help in breaking the cycle of systemic poverty, be it urban poverty or rural poverty.

Comment · 7 years ago
This is exactly what's happening and it's not even the first time.
Comment · 7 years ago
Tennessee had a budding green power sector back around 2005. TVA nuked it with absurd, arbitrary restrictions on who can put up solar panels on their houses because TVA is in bed with the coal operators and green power was competition they didn't want. It kills me to think about how much more money this state would have in its economy now if that hadn't happened.

There's reasons the whole "just replace coal jobs with solar jobs" thing has never played out. It's not for a lack of trying or because nobody here ever coming up with the idea. It's because the powers that be sure as hell weren't gonna let it fly.

(TVA continues to be the least green utility in the South btw. Promotion of the welfare of the people of the Tennessee Valley my ass.)

Comment · 7 years ago
Coal continues to "thrive" because it went out of its way to keep those people impoverished and unable to fight back while it bought their state governments from governors down to school boards and sherrifs.

You should go read about the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Coal Wars. Big Coal more or less committed genocide in Appalachia and not only got away with it but had some assistance from the US government. That's how powerful they are. The number of senators these states have is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme.

Comment · 7 years ago
Better yet, put them to work reclaiming mine sites where possible. Rape is not too strong a word to describe mountain top removal. I don't even care if it comes out of my taxpayer dollars instead of the pockets of the coal operators who need to be held responsible, I just want it done. It has to be done, there are places in West Virginia that have been on boiled water warnings long before Flint. And so much of Appalachian culture is having deep ties to the land, so it'd be very meaningful work in the same way being an nth generation coal miner is meaningful work, regardless of how misguided that seems to outsiders.
Comment · 7 years ago
Oh, no, the regulatory authorities are there. They're just paid off by the entities they're supposed to be regulating or don't give a shit.

See: the entire state of West Virginia.

Comment · 7 years ago
Lmao for real, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what rural black communities in the Deep South are subjected to because they do not have the political clout necessary to stand up for themselves and their hardships are out of sight, out of mind, so no one else tries to help them fight for better like with Flint. Go do a Google about the sewage infrastructure crisis in Alabama.

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