damn he really is an all-time poster
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Three Goblin Art

oozey mess
trying on a metaphor
NASA
occasionally subtle

titsay
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
AnasAbdin

#extradirty
Cosmic Funnies
Keni
almost home
Acquired Stardust
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

Discoholic 🪩

pixel skylines
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Mike Driver
art blog(derogatory)
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@discoursedrome
damn he really is an all-time poster
In 38 years of life I have learned 1 thing;
If anyone is ever training you to replace them in a position and tells you 'its an easy job I don't do much' what this means is that you are about to spend six months to a year catching up on all the stuff they didn't do and sorting out the stuff they did poorly.
In related news I finally managed to finish un fucking my predecessor's lack of a filing system.
it's crazy to think that the babies they were trafficking on the wayfair website back in the pandemic are in kindergarten now
underexplored research area: multi-agent systems, but instead of doing different project roles they're a boy band
Star Wars fandom is really amazing, you have people arguing that the space fascists who - amongst many other things - destroy ecosystems, commit genocides, and enslave people, be it through colonisation or the prison system, for profit would never stoop so low as to use sexual violence as a tool because "that has no place in Star Wars :/"
none of you are serious people
tags from @antlered-vixen hit the nail on its head
it's kinda like when people in fandom - many of which white and/or American - will make jokes about their villainous faves being war criminals, murderers, sadists, etc. or react with amusement at people getting mad that a villain who, if real, would have an international warrant, has fans... but then blow up completely when any sort of the Most Unforgivable Crime (since, y'know, rape is a special kind of evil and worse than murder and torture, which carries some insanely bad implications that rape victims are off worse than if they had gotten killed, but that's another discussion) is more than just hinted at because it hits home too close and is inherently misogynistic
in neither case, real people get harmed because Bix Caleen and the Ghormans don't exist, but the (attempted) crime against the former is extremely visceral to people while the (planned and eventually executed) crime against the latter is so removed from people's reality and maybe something to be read about or seen on the news that they feel more than comfortable making jokes about it
It really speaks volumes about privilege and bias that these Americans, fat on the fruits of imperialism, are so upset that spinoffs of beloved children's superhero series The Justice Friends included an explicit scene of Gorilla-Tron molesting children, even though they never batted an eye when the old "clean" version of the character sent his fascist-coded stormtroopers to destroy the Pixie Planet with his Gorilla Ray. It's not clear exactly what they mean when they complain that "child molestation does not belong in the Justice Friends", but it seems like the only thing it could mean is that they consider it objectively worse than every other misdeed the series has alluded to, including the two times the universe was destroyed. And we can draw a clear link from this phenomenon to the way in which white Americans, unlike everyone else, are more comfortable with depictions of murder than depictions of rape, undoubtedly because of how unrealistic and far-removed the concept of "murder" is to an American.
For real? Look, this is the kind of topic where I'd genuinely be quite interested to see an in-depth cross-cultural analysis about how different national audiences engage with their domestic media. But you can't just think really hard and come up with it in your head, because that is where we get takes like "white people are incongruously upset with depictions of rape because unlike almost all other bad things, they can imagine it happening to them." You've got it, man, the hierarchy of taboo in media for white American audiences precisely corresponds with how worried they are about the depicted events happening to them! This theory is so perfect that we don't need to check it or even think a moment about whether it works.
In all seriousness, though, this kind of thing is why Andor was a terrible idea. This is, what, a gritty prestige drama about Star Wars, the laser sword adventure series for children? It's just a direct insertion into the same continuity, without even the minimal separation afforded by gritty comic reboots asking bold questions like "What if Commander Friendship peed on people?" I have heard people I trust swear up and down that this series is good, but I cannot help but feel that if that's the case, it's a bit wasted on Star Wars, a franchise that does not particularly benefit from having one little enclave which is also The Wire or whatever the hell.
In all seriousness, though, this kind of thing is why Andor was a terrible idea. This is, what, a gritty prestige drama about Star Wars, the laser sword adventure series for children?
I mean, entirely fair stance tbh. But the context of this post is (afaict) less about star wars in general than specifically comparing reactions to the prospect of imperial soldiers raping someone to the 3-episode plot line of escalating provocations and manufacturing consent for a genocide (culminating in a bunch of sympathetic characters getting massacred on screen) or the multiple torture-via-police-interrogation scenes from the first season.
I think it takes real backflips to interpret "that has no place in Star Wars :/" as something other than a statement about Star Wars in general. Of course, to say that is to imply that it's okay in some things, just not in Star Wars! It's certainly true that if someone draws that line there and not elsewhere, they're suggesting that onscreen rape is even less appropriate to Star Wars than those other things, but, well, this is where it's helpful to have a functional theory about the topic, yes? You'd have to be exceptionally oblivious to imagine this as a characteristic particular to white Americans, or to infer that it's because they think of sexual violence as something that happens to them and conventional violence as something that happens to others.
How oblivious? Well, you'd have to have a pretty poor understanding of the varying attitudes to depictions of sex and violence in general; you'd have to have missed how widely cross-cultural this norm is, or that it holds up regardless of whether the victim or perpetrator is foreign. You'd have to not notice that it applies cross-culturally to real wars, in which people who have no trouble defending their guys' killing of enemy civilians will nonetheless clutch their pearls at the suggestion that any of them might have committed a rape. If your theory about this begins with some sort of cultural psychoanalysis rather than with the fact that it's about sex, you are setting yourself up for failure!
Now the secondary issue is just that it's a bit ridiculous to say "there's no room for genocide in Star Wars" about the bad guys whose initial appearance involves blowing up a major populated world, yes? If they've already made that the Empire's central deal then it mostly becomes a question of how realistically and explicitly you want to depict crimes that were formerly abstract and cartoony, so while I certainly question their decisions, and would guess plenty of the people making these criticisms feel the same, I'm not surprised few people are expressing that as a red line.
Star Wars fandom is really amazing, you have people arguing that the space fascists who - amongst many other things - destroy ecosystems, commit genocides, and enslave people, be it through colonisation or the prison system, for profit would never stoop so low as to use sexual violence as a tool because "that has no place in Star Wars :/"
none of you are serious people
tags from @antlered-vixen hit the nail on its head
it's kinda like when people in fandom - many of which white and/or American - will make jokes about their villainous faves being war criminals, murderers, sadists, etc. or react with amusement at people getting mad that a villain who, if real, would have an international warrant, has fans... but then blow up completely when any sort of the Most Unforgivable Crime (since, y'know, rape is a special kind of evil and worse than murder and torture, which carries some insanely bad implications that rape victims are off worse than if they had gotten killed, but that's another discussion) is more than just hinted at because it hits home too close and is inherently misogynistic
in neither case, real people get harmed because Bix Caleen and the Ghormans don't exist, but the (attempted) crime against the former is extremely visceral to people while the (planned and eventually executed) crime against the latter is so removed from people's reality and maybe something to be read about or seen on the news that they feel more than comfortable making jokes about it
It really speaks volumes about privilege and bias that these Americans, fat on the fruits of imperialism, are so upset that spinoffs of beloved children's superhero series The Justice Friends included an explicit scene of Gorilla-Tron molesting children, even though they never batted an eye when the old "clean" version of the character sent his fascist-coded stormtroopers to destroy the Pixie Planet with his Gorilla Ray. It's not clear exactly what they mean when they complain that "child molestation does not belong in the Justice Friends", but it seems like the only thing it could mean is that they consider it objectively worse than every other misdeed the series has alluded to, including the two times the universe was destroyed. And we can draw a clear link from this phenomenon to the way in which white Americans, unlike everyone else, are more comfortable with depictions of murder than depictions of rape, undoubtedly because of how unrealistic and far-removed the concept of "murder" is to an American.
For real? Look, this is the kind of topic where I'd genuinely be quite interested to see an in-depth cross-cultural analysis about how different national audiences engage with their domestic media. But you can't just think really hard and come up with it in your head, because that is where we get takes like "white people are incongruously upset with depictions of rape because unlike almost all other bad things, they can imagine it happening to them." You've got it, man, the hierarchy of taboo in media for white American audiences precisely corresponds with how worried they are about the depicted events happening to them! This theory is so perfect that we don't need to check it or even think a moment about whether it works.
In all seriousness, though, this kind of thing is why Andor was a terrible idea. This is, what, a gritty prestige drama about Star Wars, the laser sword adventure series for children? It's just a direct insertion into the same continuity, without even the minimal separation afforded by gritty comic reboots asking bold questions like "What if Commander Friendship peed on people?" I have heard people I trust swear up and down that this series is good, but I cannot help but feel that if that's the case, it's a bit wasted on Star Wars, a franchise that does not particularly benefit from having one little enclave which is also The Wire or whatever the hell.
did you know? some primates have been observed to exhibit "blogging" behavior
i made a substack so i could read colin gorrie's post on iambic pentameter (which wasn't worth it btw) and now i'm getting email notifications from what i can only presume are substack's best and brightest
it feels uniquely hard to reason about the political extent and coherency of the british empire (and to a lesser extent the french) due to the whole naval thing. like normally when you think of empires it's a region on a map, right? You can see them budding off along major coastlines, but for the most part they have a "body". but the naval European empires were from a period where they were less focused on conquering their next-door neighbours than on spreading by spores, which makes it sort of fraught to trace their political continuity beyond the point where control began to break up.
It is funny how French is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world yet both the French and Quebecois language wonks have the paranoia of speaking a dying regional dialect deep in the hinterlands.
I feel like France must be this way because their authorities instinctively understand that the French language was the metaphysical formula by which Louis XIV conjured France from the primordial chaos (confusingly also called "France"). They're worried that if they stop honouring the ancient pacts and just let people talk however, the whole thing will fall apart like Cinderella's chariot turning back into a pumpkin.
I'm fairly sympathetic to this in the context of Quebec, though, even though their laws often go overboard and it ceases to be cool when they cause trouble for their own local minorities. They're not really worried about French abstractly but its use in Canada, and there mainly as a proxy for a historically-embattled regional culture. And actually, since languages are the geographic boundaries of Internet-oriented mass culture, that part of the country is the main bulwark against Americanization, so I think it's even useful to the rest of us to have it there.
The problem with all this is just that languages belong to the young, and the young are traditionally not fans of language authorities piloted by a mix of career politicians and 65-year-old prestige authors. At this point new restrictions just feel like political pandering with a light dose of protectionism for local companies, and if they actually hope to arrest the decline of French rather than just use it as a vehicle for stunts, they will need to get a bit cleverer about it.
I took your skull off display because my guests kept saying it looked noticeably gayer than the other skulls
how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)
We have similar problems.
Here's a UK version:
(it gets more complicated than this but this is the basics that most people need...also there's an age disparity in that some older people will only use imperial and some younger people have never used things like stones and pounds)
had a fucked up dream i had a book that turned out could never be read again the same as the first time because each reread the characters became incrementally more aware that the events of the book had happened before and they were “reliving” it and i reread enough times that they became self aware, figured out they were in a book, acknowledged me as the reader, and some lost their minds or had existential crises, became violent to other characters or themselves, some begged me to never stop reading or they ceased to exist and others begged me to end it all stop reading and keeping them trapped in the endless loop of torment, and the literal only way to get the book back to its first run was to hand it off to someone else to read for the first time and for some reason i physically couldn’t tell anyone about it so i’d have to just hope whoever i gave it to would only read it once and i could never open the book again to check if they were okay and back to normal because i was terrified of fucking them all up again :(
Haruka Kawakami
A cat trying its best despite its limitations ↔ A tired cat
かわかみはるか
出来ないなりに頑張る猫⇔疲れた猫
I am really just coping and seething about my lack of soldering ability here, but it's infuriating that even devices people call "easily repairable" require you to solder, something 99% of people don't know how to do and which requires not just specialized equipment but also a fair bit of practice. I have repaired a few oldschool devices from the era where you had to manually attach the bare wiring to a connector, and it was quite a bit easier to deal with than devices where replacing the battery requires soldering, which is to say all consumer electronics from the past 20 years.
> specialized equipment
sure, but i've spent more on fucking knitting needles than i have on my entire soldering station and it's not even close
> a fair bit of practice
a dyspraxic seven-year-old can do it. do you have better hand-eye coordination than a dyspraxic seven-year-old?
> replacing the battery requires soldering
i'm struggling to think of a single electronic device currently in my house where 1) replacing the battery requires soldering and 2) soldering is the hardest part of replacing the battery. it's all either laptops and larger items with battery connectors, or phones and wireless earbuds and bluetooth speakers and shit where the battery is really solidly In There and either requires gingerly prying out 18 other components to get at, or is just straight up potted in gunk and can't be removed without destroying the whole device.
the other problem with connectors in full generality is that their favorite thing to do is Wiggle Loose. i feel like people don't appreciate this enough. the more connectors are in your nice repairable device, the more times you ARE going to have to take the lid off to re-seat one of them. (then again, i guess most people's electronics are more sessile than the kind i primarily work on...)
I don't really have a reference point for what knitting equipment costs, but allowing that every hobby has a range of quality and prices, soldering seems like a case where it's dicey to have bad equipment when learning the ropes, given that the downsides includes destroying the thing you're trying to solder. It isn't a forgiving thing to do badly!When I originally researched it, the impression I got was that if you had zero experience and were practicing entirely at home, it was unwise to to try to learn with cheap tools, and the expensive ones might cost more than the things I want to solder. If that impression is wrong, it's a reflection of the inaccessibility of the hobby to newcomers!
That said, okay, hobbies are just kind of like that. Knitting is a good analogy in the sense that there's, like, a tacit social contract that it's is either a hobby or a job, and you will never find yourself in a situation where you need to knit unexpectedly -- contrast with sewing which everyone needs a little of from time to time, but it's low-stakes if you screw up and you can muddle through the urgent parts with a garbage sewing kit you bought in a convenience store. I'd be even unhappier if people changed how they designed appliances such that routine maintenance required me to knit!
a dyspraxic seven-year-old can do it. do you have better hand-eye coordination than a dyspraxic seven-year-old?
I mean I have no doubt that I can do it (though I will not presume to judge what percentile of seven-year-olds I beat), but I doubt I could do it well on a blind first try. Again in the relatively short bit of research I did, I found plenty of failure stories from adults, some of which were expensive! It sounded though like the complexity was less in putting things in the right place and more in the mechanics and chemistry of the process and the behaviour of the ingredients.
None of this is really that bad in an objective sense -- I've done lots of things more difficult and expensive -- but it's that tacit social contract thing. Society tricked me into thinking I would't need to solder unless I wanted to go into EE, then changed the rules! If I learn to solder under these conditions, I'm letting the terrorists win.
I do suspect we might just have different feelings about what counts as a bigger hassle, though. In my mind, there's a huge gulf between reversible mechanical operations and destructive or chemical ones -- as long as it's there's not much risk of screwing it up, it bothers me much less to spend half an hour disassembling something than it does to reapply adhesive, which means that replacing a laptop's actual battery feels mild, but replacing the CMOS battery feels like a big deal. Soldering is on a whole other level from all that, though I will concede that something like earbuds with tiny embedded batteries fully cocooned in glue are probably even worse. I have many devices where the battery requires soldering and that's the only part that isn't trivial, though, and I've rarely had issues with connectors (though some of the very tightly-fitting ones can be scary to change). These tend to be somewhat old devices (since they're now unusable due to battery death), but the devices even older than that are often better off, because they came from an era where "obviously customers need to be able to change the battery" was still the prevailing norm!
"seems like"
"impression I got"
"first try"
Bruv, why y'all out here wringing hands & writing essays about something that appears to be entirely hypothetical to you?
This soldering iron is $10 and is on Tom's Hardware's list of top soldering irons.
This beginner soldering project is $13.
I guarantee you that actually trying and practicing is going to be a million times more productive (and fun) than writing OpEds about the philosophical implications soldering could hypothetically have on Right to Repair.
Let us know how it goes <3
You need to think carefully about what kind of behaviour you are encouraging when you beat on people for polite verbal hedging. Since I can see you don't like it, though, let me be direct and impolite: all it takes to answer your questions is to read and understand what I wrote, and if you are reading enough to get offended but not enough to get the gist, then you could improve your experience by correcting in almost any direction.
You seem to be under the misconception that you're agreeing with gender-trash, but as a more attentive reading will reveal to you, they rejected the claim that soldering needed to be approached as a learning activity involving appreciable practice, whereas you're taking that for granted and simply insisting that people should pursue that opportunity eagerly, driven by the love of soldering rather than the immediate need to solder something. Imagine talking about plumbing this way!
It would of course be absurd if your recommendations moved the needle, since I formed the opinions I have now by reading more serious advice from more trustworthy people. All you're bringing to the table is a manifest indifference to the thing you're putatively giving advice about!
So let's talk about plumbing this way!
Generally, if you want to learn about plumbing you probably want to start with projects that don't cost too much if you fuck up. Say, practice by removing the p-trap under your sink and putting it back on rather than cutting into your 50 year old brazed copper plumbing. Now, unscrewing the flange things is something that I, who have been screwing and unscrewing things since I was two, think is easy. If this is the first time you've ever unscrewed anything, though, it helps to learn basics like "righty tighty, lefty loosey", practice rotating things, and so on. Two-year-old me put a lot of hours of practice into screwing and unscrewing things! I'm willing to bet that 7-year-old gender-trash put in a fair bit of practice into soldering too.
If the project that made you want to solder is, say, a burnt-out through-hole capacitor on an old radio then you can just dive in. You'd need to know things like "This end of the soldering iron gets hot", "Solder melts when you get it hot", "Wet solder can be wicked up by this braided bit of copper", and so on. If you do fuck up and get solder where you don't want it, then wick it up! It won't look pretty, but a beginner's work rarely does.
Depending on the project that motivates you to solder, you may need more than just jumping right in. If you've got some electronics with significant sentimental value which need soldering, then maybe you should practice on something else! If you need to work on surface mount parts, you probably want a microscope and tweezers. If you've never held a part, some solder, and a soldering iron at once, then practice with the iron off for a minute first!
Given that you haven't actually stated what things you want to solder in particular, I can't really give you more specific advice.
I thought the analogy was clear enough to stand on its own, but while you've correctly unfolded what I handed you, you're still holding it the wrong way round. Let's get that straightened out.
Some people learn plumbing because they want to be plumbers, and some people learn plumbing because they're passionate about it. This is likely to be a slow, exploratory learning process, and in that respect it's like anything else. Where plumbing differs from most things is that anyone may need to do a bit of it, even if they have no interest, simply because it's often called for in everyday life. (See also the comparison between sewing and knitting, above.)
Obviously I'm in this second group -- I don't want to learn to solder, I just want some things that require soldering to happen. So let's jump past "if you want to learn about plumbing" part and on to the rest, while still talking about plumbing. Certainly there are some plumbing jobs you can do yourself as a novice, and others for which you should call a plumber, but the kind of plumbing you need to do day-to-day is very heavily tilted toward the former! I'm hard-pressed to imagine a leak where anyone would say "the first thing you want to do is get a starter kit and gradually improve your plumbing skills with practice in a low-stakes learning environment." If plumbing changed in such a way that that was required for things that are plug-and-play DIY today, that would be very annoying! And of course it need hardly be said that a novice motivated by the desire to fix leaks is not going to have a strong sense of what they need and how careful they need to be in the first place. All this is meant to be implicit when I say "imagine talking about plumbing this way".
In any event, I'm wondering if you might have missed that this was about replacing soldered-in batteries in consumer electronic devices. Quite a lot of the thread was specifically about that, including the first reply! If you're saying you need even more specificity than that, you can take it as implied that these are lithium-ion batteries that already have connection wires fused to them, for which the soldering is just to attach those wires to the board. If even that isn't specific enough to give advice, it speaks poorly of the accessibility of the subject!
I am really just coping and seething about my lack of soldering ability here, but it's infuriating that even devices people call "easily repairable" require you to solder, something 99% of people don't know how to do and which requires not just specialized equipment but also a fair bit of practice. I have repaired a few oldschool devices from the era where you had to manually attach the bare wiring to a connector, and it was quite a bit easier to deal with than devices where replacing the battery requires soldering, which is to say all consumer electronics from the past 20 years.
> specialized equipment
sure, but i've spent more on fucking knitting needles than i have on my entire soldering station and it's not even close
> a fair bit of practice
a dyspraxic seven-year-old can do it. do you have better hand-eye coordination than a dyspraxic seven-year-old?
> replacing the battery requires soldering
i'm struggling to think of a single electronic device currently in my house where 1) replacing the battery requires soldering and 2) soldering is the hardest part of replacing the battery. it's all either laptops and larger items with battery connectors, or phones and wireless earbuds and bluetooth speakers and shit where the battery is really solidly In There and either requires gingerly prying out 18 other components to get at, or is just straight up potted in gunk and can't be removed without destroying the whole device.
the other problem with connectors in full generality is that their favorite thing to do is Wiggle Loose. i feel like people don't appreciate this enough. the more connectors are in your nice repairable device, the more times you ARE going to have to take the lid off to re-seat one of them. (then again, i guess most people's electronics are more sessile than the kind i primarily work on...)
I don't really have a reference point for what knitting equipment costs, but allowing that every hobby has a range of quality and prices, soldering seems like a case where it's dicey to have bad equipment when learning the ropes, given that the downsides includes destroying the thing you're trying to solder. It isn't a forgiving thing to do badly!When I originally researched it, the impression I got was that if you had zero experience and were practicing entirely at home, it was unwise to to try to learn with cheap tools, and the expensive ones might cost more than the things I want to solder. If that impression is wrong, it's a reflection of the inaccessibility of the hobby to newcomers!
That said, okay, hobbies are just kind of like that. Knitting is a good analogy in the sense that there's, like, a tacit social contract that it's is either a hobby or a job, and you will never find yourself in a situation where you need to knit unexpectedly -- contrast with sewing which everyone needs a little of from time to time, but it's low-stakes if you screw up and you can muddle through the urgent parts with a garbage sewing kit you bought in a convenience store. I'd be even unhappier if people changed how they designed appliances such that routine maintenance required me to knit!
a dyspraxic seven-year-old can do it. do you have better hand-eye coordination than a dyspraxic seven-year-old?
I mean I have no doubt that I can do it (though I will not presume to judge what percentile of seven-year-olds I beat), but I doubt I could do it well on a blind first try. Again in the relatively short bit of research I did, I found plenty of failure stories from adults, some of which were expensive! It sounded though like the complexity was less in putting things in the right place and more in the mechanics and chemistry of the process and the behaviour of the ingredients.
None of this is really that bad in an objective sense -- I've done lots of things more difficult and expensive -- but it's that tacit social contract thing. Society tricked me into thinking I would't need to solder unless I wanted to go into EE, then changed the rules! If I learn to solder under these conditions, I'm letting the terrorists win.
I do suspect we might just have different feelings about what counts as a bigger hassle, though. In my mind, there's a huge gulf between reversible mechanical operations and destructive or chemical ones -- as long as it's there's not much risk of screwing it up, it bothers me much less to spend half an hour disassembling something than it does to reapply adhesive, which means that replacing a laptop's actual battery feels mild, but replacing the CMOS battery feels like a big deal. Soldering is on a whole other level from all that, though I will concede that something like earbuds with tiny embedded batteries fully cocooned in glue are probably even worse. I have many devices where the battery requires soldering and that's the only part that isn't trivial, though, and I've rarely had issues with connectors (though some of the very tightly-fitting ones can be scary to change). These tend to be somewhat old devices (since they're now unusable due to battery death), but the devices even older than that are often better off, because they came from an era where "obviously customers need to be able to change the battery" was still the prevailing norm!
"seems like"
"impression I got"
"first try"
Bruv, why y'all out here wringing hands & writing essays about something that appears to be entirely hypothetical to you?
This soldering iron is $10 and is on Tom's Hardware's list of top soldering irons.
This beginner soldering project is $13.
I guarantee you that actually trying and practicing is going to be a million times more productive (and fun) than writing OpEds about the philosophical implications soldering could hypothetically have on Right to Repair.
Let us know how it goes <3
You need to think carefully about what kind of behaviour you are encouraging when you beat on people for polite verbal hedging. Since I can see you don't like it, though, let me be direct and impolite: all it takes to answer your questions is to read and understand what I wrote, and if you are reading enough to get offended but not enough to get the gist, then you could improve your experience by correcting in almost any direction.
You seem to be under the misconception that you're agreeing with gender-trash, but as a more attentive reading will reveal to you, they rejected the claim that soldering needed to be approached as a learning activity involving appreciable practice, whereas you're taking that for granted and simply insisting that people should pursue that opportunity eagerly, driven by the love of soldering rather than the immediate need to solder something. Imagine talking about plumbing this way!
It would of course be absurd if your recommendations moved the needle, since I formed the opinions I have now by reading more serious advice from more trustworthy people. All you're bringing to the table is a manifest indifference to the thing you're putatively giving advice about!
I am really just coping and seething about my lack of soldering ability here, but it's infuriating that even devices people call "easily repairable" require you to solder, something 99% of people don't know how to do and which requires not just specialized equipment but also a fair bit of practice. I have repaired a few oldschool devices from the era where you had to manually attach the bare wiring to a connector, and it was quite a bit easier to deal with than devices where replacing the battery requires soldering, which is to say all consumer electronics from the past 20 years.
> specialized equipment
sure, but i've spent more on fucking knitting needles than i have on my entire soldering station and it's not even close
> a fair bit of practice
a dyspraxic seven-year-old can do it. do you have better hand-eye coordination than a dyspraxic seven-year-old?
> replacing the battery requires soldering
i'm struggling to think of a single electronic device currently in my house where 1) replacing the battery requires soldering and 2) soldering is the hardest part of replacing the battery. it's all either laptops and larger items with battery connectors, or phones and wireless earbuds and bluetooth speakers and shit where the battery is really solidly In There and either requires gingerly prying out 18 other components to get at, or is just straight up potted in gunk and can't be removed without destroying the whole device.
the other problem with connectors in full generality is that their favorite thing to do is Wiggle Loose. i feel like people don't appreciate this enough. the more connectors are in your nice repairable device, the more times you ARE going to have to take the lid off to re-seat one of them. (then again, i guess most people's electronics are more sessile than the kind i primarily work on...)
I don't really have a reference point for what knitting equipment costs, but allowing that every hobby has a range of quality and prices, soldering seems like a case where it's dicey to have bad equipment when learning the ropes, given that the downsides includes destroying the thing you're trying to solder. It isn't a forgiving thing to do badly!When I originally researched it, the impression I got was that if you had zero experience and were practicing entirely at home, it was unwise to to try to learn with cheap tools, and the expensive ones might cost more than the things I want to solder. If that impression is wrong, it's a reflection of the inaccessibility of the hobby to newcomers!
That said, okay, hobbies are just kind of like that. Knitting is a good analogy in the sense that there's, like, a tacit social contract that it's is either a hobby or a job, and you will never find yourself in a situation where you need to knit unexpectedly -- contrast with sewing which everyone needs a little of from time to time, but it's low-stakes if you screw up and you can muddle through the urgent parts with a garbage sewing kit you bought in a convenience store. I'd be even unhappier if people changed how they designed appliances such that routine maintenance required me to knit!
a dyspraxic seven-year-old can do it. do you have better hand-eye coordination than a dyspraxic seven-year-old?
I mean I have no doubt that I can do it (though I will not presume to judge what percentile of seven-year-olds I beat), but I doubt I could do it well on a blind first try. Again in the relatively short bit of research I did, I found plenty of failure stories from adults, some of which were expensive! It sounded though like the complexity was less in putting things in the right place and more in the mechanics and chemistry of the process and the behaviour of the ingredients.
None of this is really that bad in an objective sense -- I've done lots of things more difficult and expensive -- but it's that tacit social contract thing. Society tricked me into thinking I would't need to solder unless I wanted to go into EE, then changed the rules! If I learn to solder under these conditions, I'm letting the terrorists win.
I do suspect we might just have different feelings about what counts as a bigger hassle, though. In my mind, there's a huge gulf between reversible mechanical operations and destructive or chemical ones -- as long as it's there's not much risk of screwing it up, it bothers me much less to spend half an hour disassembling something than it does to reapply adhesive, which means that replacing a laptop's actual battery feels mild, but replacing the CMOS battery feels like a big deal. Soldering is on a whole other level from all that, though I will concede that something like earbuds with tiny embedded batteries fully cocooned in glue are probably even worse. I have many devices where the battery requires soldering and that's the only part that isn't trivial, though, and I've rarely had issues with connectors (though some of the very tightly-fitting ones can be scary to change). These tend to be somewhat old devices (since they're now unusable due to battery death), but the devices even older than that are often better off, because they came from an era where "obviously customers need to be able to change the battery" was still the prevailing norm!