Karen C

Karen C

@silver.phoenyx.net

Midwesterner in South Jersey, tired Gen Xer, sometime Perl developer, doing weird things with sewing robots. I probably follow you in my RSS reader. Once and future gamehawk.bsky.social She/her, generally.

566 followers88 following12.9K posts

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Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

I made a South Jersey feed, because the Philly feed is nice but Philadelphians will be quick to tell you that just because I can see the Linc from my neighborhood, and it's closer to City Hall than Chestnut Hill is, doesn't mean it's a Philadelphia suburb: bsky.app/profile/did:...

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

Amazon driver just looked at our dumb doorbell (which admittedly has a round black button with concentric ridges) and told it "you have a package." (my desk is a few feet from the front door and the windows are less-than-soundproof)

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

Thought someone was dragging something down our street, peeked out, and they sort of were: their tire was so flat they were running on the rim, as in direct metal contact with the asphalt. Mental note: remind the kids that driving on a flat can make it much more expensive.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

"It was in my hand and then it wasn't in my hand": the ADHD story.

Micah@rincewind.run

I got a fork out to eat my lunch with and managed to misplace that fork within fifteen seconds, the week is off to a great start

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

It's been working on this project for a long time: intermittent print failures progressively working the nozzle out of alignment, which cause it to have more trouble clearing the nozzle, which pushes more filament into the boot, which pushes the nozzle further out of alignment, round and round.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

What I need to do is: put this *back* on the printer and heat it up, take the boot off and clean the guck out while it's softened. What I'm going to do is: let the printer sit until a second entire assembly arrives tomorrow. (Aside from the bent hotend I will clean up the rest so we have a spare.)

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

I explain it a bit in the alt text but... I was just gonna replace the hardened-steel nozzle with the original stainless nozzle for the time being (I just won't print with e.g. glow filament until I get a new one) but the thermistor wires there are thoroughly embedded in hardened filament blob.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

🫡

Jesse Thorn@jessethorn.bsky.social

My pal Danielle Koenig shared that her father Walter Koenig passed away last night at age 90. A performer whose kindness and warmth shone through the screen. He will be well remembered.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

And that's how I ended up listening to Tomita's _Pictures at an Exhibition_ (we don't have _Snowflakes are Dancing_)

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Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

(1) So many little things that never went anywhere (as the review points out), but also (2) Not just the lisp, the entire "lifted kids" scene really felt like "lol being smart means being autistic, look at these weird kids who are barely human, they have no empathy" and you know what: gross.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

I *think* maybe it was supposed to be "the lifting process is deeply flawed, Josie may have been the luckiest of them"? That's the most *charitable* reading I can come up with for it.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

Folks we are *so* close to finishing the fourth and final* GachaPop! (* unless I decide to do a bonus Lite for fruit-rollups or smth, plus I would like to redo the shells for the orange coin mechanisms in PETG but that's mostly cosmetic)

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

This is the coin mechanism shell I want to reprint, either in the other orange PLA (as in the stripe/capsule return) or ideally in orange PETG (which will let it run smoother and hopefully also still match better).

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

Weather forecast for Halloween is looking optimal: no rain, not so warm the kids are passing out in their costumes. Maybe a little chilly, as it should be.

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Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

Plus a *ton* more capsules and candy, so if any of the toy machines somehow get emptied we will just have multiple candy machines.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

Interestingly, Google has started to not identify GOP fundraising texts as spam over the last couple days. Wonder if the texters got more savvy or Google is up there going "Whoops I was sure you wanted to see those 😇"

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

I just broke down 25 pounds of $2.75/lb bulk ground beef into one-pound freezer-ready bags. Prepper impulses satisfied. (It's mostly not for us, we don't eat that much beef, but I am the one with the warehouse membership. And the vacuum sealer.)

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

lrp: the real definition of "bluesky elder" is "I've told all my stories already, I can just repost the appropriate ones when they come back around on Trending"

Karen C reposted

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

Mooning over single-paragraph descriptions of Traveller in Games Magazine until finally encountering the real thing in college a few years later. Photocopying the charts out of the GM's Big Black Book in the basement of the library until I could afford my own box set, which I still have.

Brian Griffith@qlippot.bsky.social

Where did you start?

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Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

That's about 100 capsules which, in past years, would cover the whole crowd. But this is the first year we're doing a weekend so I don't know what traffic will be like. And yes, last year it was a Friday, but we did not do anything because as you may recall:

Karen C@silver.phoenyx.net

Just got one of those spammy SMS messages that was "Are you free tomorrow" and I have never before been tempted to actually answer that one.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

So we're expecting ~100 kids but for all I know some kid will post "you gotta see this" to the group chat and half the county will show up. We have 120 glow ducks for the Duck Dispenser, 120 bone dinos for the Halloween Machine, and so far 50 little flexi animals for the other Gumball Red.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

(this is the candy-only machine; I got a ton of small candy figuring we would put several in a capsule for the candy-only machine and one plus the toy in the toy machines and folks: 50mm capsules are smaller than they seem, half the candy won't fit at all and none is going in with toys SORRY KIDS)

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

In the same vein, I am begging TV stations (and newspapers, but they're less often guilty) to put their city and state on their web pages. It may come as a shock to you but sometimes your visitors are not local and don't just know "ah yes, good old Channel 7."

Reo Eveleth@reveleth.com

I simple request I have is for people putting events on Instagram to put the city that they're in in the description/on the flyer! Instagram's algorithm shows me events from all over the country and half the time I have to go digging to find out WHERE actually they are being held.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

Sometimes you can look at the URL and the call sign is there, but like 6abc dot com doesn't do that (though obviously they are pretty clear about where they are, and the small-market ones who aren't are more likely to have call-sign domains).

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

I am slowly building a little office here and I put that unit there specifically for that, but mostly she has used it to try to access the plant shelf until today.

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

It looks weird backlit but: the Duck Dispenser is done (or nearly so; it's actually printing an interior deflector that will wrap it up).

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

If MapQuest can get its Android Auto sound issues cleared up, it's a keeper. But it starts talking before it has the mic, which is mildly annoying, and every now and then it gets stuck in a loop, which is SUPER annoying. At least we have discovered we can simply turn the sound all the way down, and

Karen C
@silver.phoenyx.net

Android Auto will turn the volume back up when it gets a truly-new notification. But this means we can't listen to other audio while navigating.