I’ve seen a couple attempts at making modern entertainment out of Dungeons & Dragons, which have all failed for various reasons. The main question is: how do you build a relatable, entertaining story out of something that is built out of the individual imagination of each of its players? The whole point of the game is to build worlds in your mind, so most adaptations wind up looking like third-rate cosplay at the Ren Faire. So I was curious about seeing whether the new D&D movie get things right. Having been written and directed by a group of comedy veterans, I would say it mostly does. There are several setpieces that clearly cost millions of dollars, but there are several emotional beats that landed with the craft and feeling of an ABC Afterschool Special. Still, we all enjoyed it, and it was great to see a movie in a theater with my family.
This weekend was my turn for driving down to Lexington Park to visit with Jen’s Dad. We’re all spreading the load out among people so that everyone gets a break, which has been super helpful for everyone’s metal health. I’m pretty much done with the bathroom job so I packed the car with tools to get the Chrysler up and running again. When last I left it, we’d gotten it to turn over and run for a few moments but I hadn’t hooked up the boat tank yet, and then we had to turn out attention to cleaning up the house. I picked up some lunch for the two of us and visited with him for an hour and a half, and then headed out to the garage.
After moving some stuff around I tightened some bolts down on the engine, set up the boat tank, and cranked over the engine a couple of times. The starter sounded sick—much worse than I remember it from last year—so I adjusted some things and squirted more gas down the carb. With no success I looked over the whole thing again and happened to put my palm down on the positive battery cable, which was warm to the touch. It’s really not supposed to feel like that. Knowing there would be no starting that day, I jacked the front of the car up and took the wheels off to look at the drums and shoes, but found that no matter how many times I whacked them with a hammer, I could not remove either brake drum. Having been thwarted there, I got under the car and drained the oil into a catchpan, taking a sample from the middle of the pour to send off to Blackstone for analysis. I put in 2.5 qt. of new oil and made a note to buy more—the Chrysler 440 takes seven quarts—and buttoned up the whole thing for the evening.
New starters aren’t expensive, and I’ve replaced Scout starters multiple times, but this one is a bit more challenging: it’s on the driver’s side under the steering column, next to the manifold dump, and hard metal lines for the transmission cooler and rear brakes are directly underneath it. So I’m going to have to do some careful wiggling under there to replace it. Super.
On Sunday we took it easy. I walked Hazel and put some Scout parts up on Marketplace to try and get them sold this year (Craigslist is a ghost town), then did some grocery shopping. When I got back I had offers on three different items; if I sell one of the windshields this Thursday like I’m planning, I’ll have made back the money I spent on the red truck. The afternoon was spent with the girls doing some errands and then tinkering on the truck in the driveway, trying to soak up as much fresh air as I could before the sun went down.
I put a picture up on Instagram of the Traveall T-shirt I designed and printed through a vendor promo a few months ago, and it wound up being pretty popular. Through that post a guy asked about the ’64-’65 grille I originally bought for the truck that I can’t use, and we DM’d back and forth. Turns out he’s got a ’65 and needs a grille; I sold it to him for exactly what I paid, which is pretty awesome! I pulled it down from the garage attic, still in the box it came to me in, and sent it on its way Thursday.
Other than that, I haven’t gotten any bites from my post on the Binder Planet, so I’m going to experiment with Marketplace and see what kind of response I get for items like the Scout II windshield.
I was able to make a Tuesday early-morning run up to the recycling center to dump the first jug of used-to-be gas from the truck, which went smoothly. When I got back I drained the last of the fluid out for a total of about eight gallons, and some small flakes came out with the remainder, which is a pretty good sign—if it turned to soup or filled the pan with oatmeal, I’d be very worried. I’m going to buy some good gas and run it through the tank to see if any more yuck comes out, and if not, I’ll just leave the tank in place. (I really don’t want to have to drop it if at all possible). I do know that the outlet hose is clogged with a wasp nest so I have to pull the wheel off and figure out if I can get around/behind the tank to replace it.
I’ve got the bodywork on the passenger side endcap pretty much complete; I sprayed it with rattle-can IH red for the time being. It’s good enough for government pay, and I’m going to move on to other sections.
Theoretically I should have a wheel showing up to the house momentarily, and when that arrives I can bring it and our flat CR-V wheel to the NTB in town to have new rubber mounted. I’m on the fence as to what color to paint the wheels, but I think I’m leaning towards black. Depending on how good this one looks I might paint it before the tire goes on.
I got a box in the mail on Wednesday with the paint I ordered a month ago, which is good news. Now the big thing will be setting up for and actually shooting the paint. What I’m going to have to do is put up my 20-year-old car tent in the driveway, find a way to block out the sides, and put something down on the ground to avoid painting the driveway. Then the roof needs to be blocksanded, degreased, primed at least once, blocksanded again, and then shot with a coat of IH red. From there I can see how it lays down and if it needs a second coat, as well as whether it matches with the rattle-can red I’ve been using over the bondo patches.
On Thursday evening, after a long day behind the keyboard, I went out to the truck and put my experience chipping rubberized floorcoating out of a schoolbus to work.
While the coating came up, the paper-based adhesive was still stuck to the wood, so I went back to a trick I used to clean the floors up in our kitchen years ago. I have a hand planer I used to remove the tarpaper adhesive under old linoleum. It had tried to eat its own cord at the end of a job a couple of years ago, so I cut and spliced the cord and then put it to work slowly grinding out the paper. It’s still very sticky so it gummed up the unit and required a lot of cleaning, so I only cleared out about half of it before the setting sun made things too dark.
By now you’re wondering why I don’t just cut this wood out of the truck and replace it; at this point I’m considering it strongly. Part of this exercise was to see how difficult it would be to remove the existing wood, which meant I had to expose all the bolts. If I’m doing my math correctly there are about 60 chonky countersunk Phillips-head bolts holding the wood in place. I think I’m going to leave this as is for now until I get the truck mobile, and then I can pull the wood out, spend time scraping and coating the frame from inside—not underneath—and then replace the wood.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Back in the late 1990’s, when the web was alive and open and could be anything you wanted it to be, there were a handful of writers who started keeping journals online, and small communities formed around them, and their numbers grew. The best of these became daily stops during my morning coffee, and I found enough inspiration in their ability to code their own sites and write so well that I started this site—halfassed, really, hiding out as a secondary link on my primary site for a year until I got enough nerve to buy a boutique domain. Some of these folks hung it all out there, writing about every feeling and experience they had, and they gathered audiences around them to share their experiences. They also attracted haters who threw bricks and perfected the art of shitposting. Most of those pioneers are gone now, their domains shuttered, but a few old-school bloggers are still out there.
One of the originals, Dooce, died by her own hand yesterday after a long struggle with depression. She was a singular voice, who wrote with cutting humor and heartfelt tenderness about her kids, her dog, her husband, and life. In the early days I remember her comments section as a supportive place where friendships were made and she often responded to her readers. But she also took a lot of shit for her site. Whole websites were created just to attack every post. Her site had fallen off my regular reading list a decade ago or so when her site became mostly about sponsored content; the ad landscape was changing and she had a family to feed. She was still posting occasionally, and apparently her viewpoint over the last couple of years was transphobic and ugly, which was a shock to learn about.
Whatever the case, I consider her one of the primary influences for starting this site and my striving to be a better writer. I’m terribly sad for her and her family.
I already had Welcome to the Pleasuredome stuck in my head last week, when I read that Frankie Goes to Hollywood was reuniting for the first time in 36 years; this rehearsal for the Eurovision contest sounds amazing, frankly. That bass line is tasty when played live.
It’s pretty amazing how much of a cross-section of popular music one guy touched at a particular period in time, and how much I enjoyed all of that very different music: Trevor Horn produced this album, Who’s Afraid of? by the Art of Noise, and 90120 by Yes.
I got an invitation from Apple to join their new Savings account, tied to my Apple Card, and thought I’d give it a try, as it’s got a higher rate than pretty much any other account I have open besides my index funds. I had to update my phone and then head into the Wallet app, where I was surprised to find I’d already amassed a decent amount of money through the cash back program. I read the disclosures, approved the account, and now I’ve got a savings account earning 4.5%. I’ve been very happy with my Apple Card since I opened it, using it for gas stations and larger purchases I wanted buyer protection on, and it’s been super easy to manage and use. I’m going to keep funneling the cash back balance into the savings account and see how much it grows.
I’ve gone for hours sitting through meetings as Acting Co-Director for the last few months tethered to my computer, and I figured it was time to spend $15 to be able to move around every hour or so. I bought a pair of cheap earbuds from Amazon during a lightning deal. These earbuds put into stark contrast just how good my AirPods Pro are. Just the noise pass through function alone is worth the money. Using these earbuds as a microphone is annoying after years with a more superior product; it’s like having a conversation with your hands planted over your ears. The bass response is negligible. But for the money it’s a small price to pay for the freedom to get up and stretch.
We had a yard sale a week ago and one of the people who stopped by struck up a conversation about the Scout, which was parked in the driveway. One of the things he mentioned to me was that there was another Scout a half a mile away, parked in someone’s backyard. He gave me a rough idea of where it was and then went on his way. This afternoon Finn and I took advantage of some clear skies and took a bike ride (this is one of my goals for this year: getting her on a bike at least three times weekly) over into that neighborhood. Using his rough description I found the alley where it was probably located, and at the very end we found it:
What’s even more interesting about this Scout is that I’ve seen it before, but not around here. Back in 2019 an ad went up for the cab top on this truck, and when I saw it I considered it briefly, only because it looks like it was painted the same color as Peer Pressure. As I recall it was somewhere in Maryland then, but not in my town. Interesting. It’s got Maryland plates, so it’s legal, but I haven’t seen it on the road around here. I’ll keep my eye out.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.