So my wife and I signed up for a fantasy-LARP in about two months. We've thought up characters that could be fun and unfortunately I got the (possibly false) confidence that I want to take my hurdy gurdy with me. The one I have posted on the main page is too fancy for me to risk breaking it, though, so I'll take my Nerdy Gurdy to it. Even more unfortunately, I haven't played my Nerdy Gurdy pretty much ever since I got Count Gurdula, but this also means I haven't kept up with its maintenance and now it sounds just horrible and looks exactly how it is.
Let's look at the current state first (￣﹏￣；)
My therapist: Dusty Gurdy can't hurt you, it's not real
Soooo much dust and dog hair and Flusen collected on it, don't look!
You can see how fucked the cotton on my strings is. I'm actually pretty sure this is still cotton from before I switched to more beginner-friendly cotton. In the beginning I literally just used tampon-cotton because it's free* and if you don't suck at applying it, you won't hear much of a difference. Patty Gurdy herself uses tampon-cotton, too, since it's something she usually carries around anyway.
*free when you're someone who buys tampons anyway or live with someone who buys them; one tampon has enough cotton for months and possibly a year.
I forgot that food was still on our daily tasklist, so that happened after I assessed the state
Check out this amazing fish soup we made. It's all kinds of vegetables, pangasius (which I learned is some kind of catfish) and a shot of orange juice to give it some zesssst. I also made myself a bunch of caramellised onions; I vastly overdid it with the sugar. Yes, it tastes amazing. Yes, it probably legally classifies as candy with how much sugar I put in.
Also, check out Jacky. Don't check out the very unhappy fern. We're trying.
Alsoalso, don't tell Rainbolt about this pic, he'll doxx me in a minute
Okay, so the stuff I need to revivify her...
I was recommended Cellucotton in a gurdy maintenance class. It's a little bit more expensive (I think I paid 15€ for this pack), but literally do not worry about that. Buy one box and you probably won't run out of cotton for your entire life unless you manage to lose it or get it dirty. As you can see, the Cellucotton has super long strands that are packed really neatly. You want very long strands for the strings, since they need to properly wrap around it. It being a very soft cotton also helps the sound, but — again — don't worry if you only have tampons around. They still work, it's just a little bit more difficult to apply it on the string.
This is about the amount of cotton you wanna use. You really don't need a lot. Basically, if you think you've got enough, take half of that. Possibly, I still have too much cotton on there. But you can really see how nice the strands are. Ideally, you don't want to have it kinda-clumped like I have in the picture. It's hard to put the cotton on some contrast-y background and hold my phone to take a picture.
To make the cotton grip the wheel and produce a full tone, you need to put on some kind of rosin (it's a type of resin that comes from pines and other conifer trees?), either solid or liquid. My experience with liquid rosin has been very messy and sticky, so currently I stick (lol) to solid rosin. You basically hold the edge of the rosin puck to the wheel and then spin the wheel for a little bit (if there's still rosin on and you just want to refresh it a bit, one or two turns is enough).
You'd think I would produce images from after doing the maintenance work, right? But joke's on me, we finished our food so late that it's too late to play and this killed my mood to do the maintenance tasks. Because why do the maintenance if you can't test-play it right after? That's stoobid! So the "After"-images will have to wait until tomorrow at least.
11.04.26
You know when you let garlic sit for so long in your cupboard that it starts sprouting? Yeeeeah, happened with three bulbs the other day and since my wife already began potting new plants, I took some of the wormearth and coconutearth and some clayballs and potted the garlic bulbs. Additionally, I checked out how the seeds were doing that we received as guest-gifts on a recent wedding. Seems they're doing very alright, given how we have a north-facing balcony and therefore receive basically no sunlight hah
10.04.26 (this is a long one)
I recently bought a new keyboard because my old one (Razer Blackwidow Chroma V1) started having the switches on W, S and some other keys fail. I switched away from Razer, partly because I figured out the quality isn't as great as the price, partly because I wanted a keyboard where I can easily put in new switches when/if they fail and partly because I don't want to support Razer with their pretty sexist ad they doubled down on.
The only thing I do dislike is how weak the RGB lighting comes out in my Keychron K10. I found a reddit post of someone showing off how they sanded down some of the keycaps to give them this very bright-lit and jelly-like look. It took me about a week of sanding for around an hour at a time (pinching down the keycaps on the sandpaper started hurting my hand). I used 200 grit sandpaper, which took me maybe three or four minutes per keycap. The one or two other posts I found, recommended either first 100 grit and then 400 grit (to smoothen it up) or only 400 grit (but that takes about double the time). The 200 grit sanding is smooth enough, I feel, especially considering that I rarely touch the sides of a keycap. Mayyyyybe I'll smoothen it with finer sandpaper in the future, because it could enhance the shine even further, but probably I won't. I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome.
Aside from ideological/political/humanitarian (whatever you wanna call it) reasons (keep scrolling for that), here's a breakdown of the quality versus the price you get for Razer stuff.
First my own experience with the two Razer products I owned so far. The Razer BlackShark Headset (the now discontinued one that looks like a Vietnam-era helicopter pilot headset) and the Razer Blackwidow Chroma V1 (also discontinued): They are pretty alright hardware-wise, I think. I'm certainly not an audiophile nor a mechanicalkeyboardophile I think it would be pretty hypocritical of me to say they're actually bad when I've had the same headset for about fifteen years now (although I rarely use it as I most often play with loudspeakers) and the keyboard for almost ten (with heavy daily use). The mic quality also was never mentioned (neither negatively or positively) by the people I play with, so I assume it's at least okay to good. I will say that the cable jack got fucked up a few years ago, so I had to cut it and solder the wires to a new jack. But I don't remember anymore if that was from wear and tear or because I bumped into it and bent it. Oh and the faux-leather padding over the foam of the earpieces ripped open after a few years of use. And even back then there were no spare earpads for the headset, meaning I'd have to DIY it somehow or live with the ripped pads (which I currently do because I'm not confident enough in my ability to not fuck up that kind of repair) For the keyboard, it always worked (until it started not to lol) and the mega-thicc cable is mega-thicc-durable as well. My problems with the keyboard started appearing a few months or maybe a year ago (by that time, the switches on WASD were worn enough to be noticably less clicky than all other keys), when randomly one or two of the most-used keys would struggle to register an input. That would usually subside after a couple hard hits or if I removed the keycap and blew into the pressed switch (yes, yes, I know, just like with Nintendo cartridges, that's something you're not supposed to do and I wouldn't be suprised if that temporarily fixed the problem because the increased humidity allowed the switch to properly connect or something) and be fine again for a few weeks. But that problem just became more pronounced as time went on and was so bad a few weeks ago that I actually couldn't properly play games likes Helldivers 2 anymore because my character would just suddenly not walk anymore since W and or S just wouldn't register anymore for minutes. The software-side of things is less stellar, though. With the headset, I never really made sense and work of the Razer audio software. It kept switching the "virtual" software-device back to the physical headset, negating the settings I applied. Also, I never really got how/why the Razer Synapse software doesn't even recognise the headset, even though it should...I think? Razer Synapse also was quite the mess with my keyboard. It went from working alright to not working to requiring the installation of Razer Synapse 3 from 2 which then didn't work at all properly anymore and crashed quite regularly, leaving my lighting stuck in a static version of whatever lighting effect was currently set, and — when it did work — hogged more RAM and ressources than I was willing to give and in the past few years I just didn't start it up anymore because the, admittedly cool lighting effects, weren't worth the tradeoff.
The stuff the internet says about Razer's Preisleistungsverhältnis (price-performance-ratio)
Even if we assume the average user doesn't leave reviews but only the ones who are very happy or very sad, 80% 1-star reviews on Trustpilot is crazy bad!
I know mods on reddit are almost never affiliated with the company they mod the subreddit for, but a moderator saying "Sad, but true." to how the product quality has massive variations is pretty funny and sad to me.
Oh and here the stupid Razer ad that made me reconsider them as a hardware provider:
Because I know this video will one day not exist anymore, let me write down right now how it goes:
The caption reads: "Active Noise Cancellation: on | Drama: off"
A man is sitting on the couch, gaming on his console, while a woman (presumably his fiance?) sits next to him and complains to him about something. Not sure if it's about a thing he did or if she complains about someone else, the only legible parts are "I, literally, how do you even talk to this girl for a a whole year. I literally don't know why you're still trying to, like..." after which the audio is cut off / heavily muffled by him activating the Active Noise Cancelling on his Razer headset. He then resumes gaming as if nothing is happening, ignoring the woman. It then cuts to a scene where he's walking down a hallway, still wearing the headphones and noise cancel still engaged and she is still talking to him. Then another scene where he's gaming in a different room and she is still talking (or trying to) to him and he's still ignoring her via the noise cancelling headset. Then it ends.
Razer's description text says "Don’t let yapping get in the way of your winning 🗣 ️The Razer BlackShark V3 Pro’s Active Noise Cancellation on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation cuts through the chatter, so you only hear what matters."
08.04.26
Yeahhhh I contracted the sickness. I worked about four hours before clocking out and calling sick for tomorrow and overtomorrow. We'll go to the doc tomorrow and will most likely be written a sick-notice for the rest of the week. I'm very dramatic when sick, to the befuddled amusement of my wife.
Sick funfacts:
I can't blow my nose. I know in theory how it works, but trying to get the nose pressure going, makes my head hurt at best
When I sneeze, it's very loud and often sounds like a goofy cartoon character
I recently learned that when you hold your breath until it becomes uncomfortable, your brain thinks you're suffocating (I mean, you kinda are) and immediately unclogs your nose. Works only for a little while, though.
07.04.26
Ugh, I'm getting sick. We went on vacation to a good friend last week and I guess that's what being social gets you. The worst is that I'm now in this limbo where I don't feel sick enough to justify a doctor's visit and call in sick but I feel sick enough that working sucks, even if it's from home on a comfy chair and laptop. But at least the Easter Eggs we coloured look awesome. We didn't colour the eggs at our friend's house, I just wanted to show them off.
The visit and birthday was pretty amazing, though! I haven't seen her in 15 years or so, since she lives on the other side of the country, and there were a couple other friends from the mutual discord server. We slept in our camper-vanish-car and checked out a medieval hunting tower in the forest we were sleeping in. On the way, we also found a couple cool rocks.
With these two I tried to go for a lightning-look and one as golden as possible.
Yes, this is Josh Strife Hayes' WoW stream on the tablet
These are the first three I coloured. I began with the blue-red one that fits the stereotypical look of Easter Egg pretty well. Then I made the other two (first, applying the yellow base-layer, then switching to the other one to apply its base-layer).
These three were coloured by my wife and they're the silhouette of our dogs and their respective collar colour. Her first plan was to add the details in the face, but we agreed that the silhouettes look really good and, since we're risk-averse like that, we wouldn't want to possibly mess it up with errors in the details.
It's not just a phase, mom! At first I wanted to put many little X's all over the egg but when I put the third X down, I couldn't help but see eyes and a nose and had these cat-plushies in mind with their eyes x-ed out. And when I began drawing the hair, the only thing I could think of was the stereotypical Emo-hair and I love how it turned out.
He's even got two ears!
On Sundays the towerkeeper also shows tourists around the tower. It was not a Sunday.
This gate led to an abandoned structure near four artifical lakes in the forest. It was a bit overgrown with thorny shit and I was barefoot, so I didn't want to venture further inside. From what I could glimpse, it might've as well been an abandoned bunker with how much of the outside wall a meter thick lol
