southsamurai

Man, whatever translation service you used needs to be spanked

Yeah, because that’s a useful community

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What’s thefuck?

Interestingly, mint is what I daily drive as my distro and the car for it is what I prefer in terms of driving daily (I love me a hatchback).

However, Debian is a distro I would drive more often if it were more practical, and that car is my favorite ever that I wish I could have on a practical level

Yeah, it’s mostly random, but the really dark ones are more likely with high stress of some kind. They’re not usually connected in a thematic way though. It’s more that stress will set off a general wave of imagery that’s matching in unpleasantness, without being the same in detail.

That one in particular was out of nowhere though. Well, no stress above the norm at least.

But I’ve always had very vivid dreams, nightmare or otherwise, even as a very little kid. One of the oldest dreams I remember was what could be called an apocalyptic scenario. Tornados, fires, storms all destroying places I knew. I wasn’t even in kindergarten for that one yet. Only reason I can place it in time is that it happened at the tail end of when I had measles and I told my mom about it. I was 4-ish

That one actually recurred a few times over the years.

I actually do have one that I partly edited and beat into a more coherent shape. The dream itself was nastier than the story, what with being the doctor and feeling the creeping dread of it all. It was also missing the conversation bits.

Anyway, I call it spreading the disease

“Doctor, report.”

“Captain, there’s nothing I can do. We’re all going to die, it’s just a matter of how fast the staph mutates.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes sir, I agree.”

I walked away from his cabin, still clad in my isolation suit. It would buy me enough time to possibly give mercy gas to the crew. Then it would be my job to hit the erase button.

That is the worst part of the job. Knowing that I might have to not only kill everyone aboard, but be the one to burn alive at the end, if the mercy meds didn’t work fast enough. Sure, on paper the blend of drugs pumped through the suit’s air would work in seconds, but there are always variances in exactly how many.

When we took to the stars, humanity was free. But so were all the myriad microorganisms that we live with, the ones inside and out. There’s no way to get rid of them all, and it wouldn’t be a good idea anyway; the balance of them is part of what keeps us functional. You don’t want to be in a tin can in the vacuum of space with your gut biome eradicated.

No, we had left our once salubrious blue-green orb with no idea what might happen regarding those microbes. When the first mutations happened and killed entire crews, it was a bit of a mystery. At first, it would cost more than a single crew, because communication ceasing after a report of an illness rapidly killing the crew would cause Control to send an investigative crew.

That crew would go aboard in full gear, only to discover that the mutations had already led to germs able to chew through them. It was almost always the ship’s doctor that would still be identifiable, their suit dissolved before the infection could get to them. When there was anything left at all, anyway.

But, then the investigating crew would have already been coated in the voracious mutations, their suits compromised the second they stepped aboard.

A few lasted long enough to reach a planet. That’s how Newterra was lost.

Which is why every ship’s doctor is now implanted with the button. A few attempts were made to use a command code to initiate, until a crewman decided to sabotage it in fear, demanding the doctor find a cure.

Now, the button is inside us. If we die, it triggers, and the ship’s engine will go boom. Makes crews very protective of their doctors, and lead to intensive psychological screening for every doctor willing to risk death between the stars after a couple snapped under the stress of carrying the button.

Normally, the doctor will have time to initiate the sequence code via a series of blinks. Sometimes, the eyes are destroyed too soon, and the button triggers after death. From first blink to boom, you have about thirty seconds to slap the suit’s mercy bolus before the anti-matter erases anything and everything.

The worst part is the dice roll of it. You never know when the mutations will occur, only that they will, if the mission is long enough. The shortest time it has been recorded as starting is ten days, the longest a year. Not great odds.

So we try hard to keep ahead of things. Daily tracking of shifts in the biome, via swabs and samples. Sometimes, you can find an outbreak of the Hungry as it’s starting and either delay the end, or very rarely, stop it until the staph mutates again. You find it soon enough, and maybe it hasn’t spread beyond the origin point. You can wipe the area, including any crew, and maybe get all of that wave. You get lucky like that, and you can initiate a round of antibiotics and a full sanitization of the ship.

You get lucky like that, and if you’re lucky enough to be close to a rely Fleet Control station, there’s a possibility of the chemical regime to fully kill your entire flora, and if you get that lucky, the difficulties involved are pleasant compared to the Hungry. But the chances of being close enough to a station for that are literally astronomical.

The Hungry is inevitable. In zero gravity, even with the best shielding possible, there are stray bits of radiation bouncing around. You get enough of them hitting, and the bacteria we carry mutate. They’re always mutating anyway, but it gets accelerated. It is staph that eventually becomes Hungry, eating anything and everything, shifting into thousands of variations that will attack anything except some metals. I’m fairly sure that it would eventually find a way to eat those. But it tends to go after organic compounds very early in the process, so nobody has lasted long enough to see it happen.

Oh, we tried to find ways to avoid it. But it only takes a single damn bacteria shifting for the process to start. Even nanobots failed; we couldn’t adjust them fast enough to keep up.

I got back to sick bay, looking around the isolation units to see everyone had died while I was talking to the captain. Only ensign Torres was recognizable. His face was quickly being eaten, the line of it moving visibly across him.

I walked to the command console and entered the codes to initiate the mercy gas for the crew, and began my inspection patrol with the backup injections for anyone the gas didn’t work fully on. Sometimes, you get weird drug resistances and crew will still be alive. There’s rumours of a few people that not only didn’t die, but the sedatives and euphorics weren’t entirely effective, so they died awake, if not exactly fully aware.

Fifteen minutes later, I had verified everyone was gone, no need for injections. I went into an isolation unit, sealed it, and unzipped long enough to have one of my carefully hidden cigars that the captain pretended not to know I had. Then I zipped up and started blinking.

Well, thing is that most of them are not only deeply personal, but unedited. I get them out in a rush while I’m still kinda reeling, then rarely go back to them. So they’re a mess, and all but a handful are on paper because that’s faster when a dream is already fading.

I dunno, I’ll take a look through and see what I have that’s somewhat sharable.

Fuck, I’ve written poems and short stories based on nightmares. None I’d ever let anyone else read because holy fuckballs do I have some fucked up nightmares, but still

'Salright, we know you did it in gimp

Those are the biggest stones on the planet (next to the ones dangling between my legs).

Or that’s a tiny knife. Like the one hanging between my legs.

Instructions unclear: dick is shredding my undies because the tip is now a chisel

Alas, that c/ is low traffic.

It’s way easier than people make it out to be, unless you’re chasing very specific things. Like, if you want to literally split a hair in two, expect to spend time refining your techniques.

Otherwise? You’re rubbing metal on a rock. You can sharpen a knife on a brick and get a damn sharp edge on it in five to ten minutes, no bullshit, no hyperbole.

There’s two things that matter: burrs and removing burrs.

What’s a burr?

When you rub a knife against a rock long enough, the very tippy edge is going to roll over a tiny bit. That’s a burr.

Once you get one all along the edge, flip that sucker and do it on the other side until a new burr forms. Boom! First thing done.

Now you have to remove that burr and finish up the edge. Use real gentle pressure and alternate sides on the same stone you just used. Lift the back of the knife a teeny bit higher than when you were grinding it before.

Do this maybe five times each side, then check the edge. Most types of steel, you should be able to make a clean slice in a piece of paper. If it can’t, give it a few more passes and try again.

If you raised a burr in the first place, you’ll get rid of it fairly quick, so if you’ve hit maybe twenty passes trying to remove it, chances are you didn’t raise a burr, you just thought you did. No biggie, they can be hard to see or feel sometimes. Particularly with really hard steels. Might have to go back and try again.

However, there’s a nice little trick to help. Get a sharpie and mark that edge. When you’re grinding, if you’ve got an angle close to what’s already there, you’ll remove the ink and know youre on track. If there’s a band of ink left at the edge, you’re too shallow. Ink left towards the back, too deep.

Truth is, for a useable edge, it doesn’t matter what the angle actually is, only that it’s fairly consistent along any straight sections. Yeah, the more acute the angle, the better it’s going to work for some tasks, but a morr obtuse one has benefits too. So don’t worry about nailing some arbitrary angle. That’s for later, once it becomes a hobby as much as a tool maintenance task.

Legit, while you can get fiddly with sharpening and fine tune a given knife to be better at specific tasks, that’s optional. You can take a crappy knife, run it over a crappy stone and cut things. That’s what matters; that it works. And the learning curve to get to where it works isn’t huge.

Hearts just broke

!like that knife!<

Preach!

Ngl, this is the best meme this c/ has ever had

Thanks :)

And the angle used, and the materials it’s used on (though that last part was contained in what you said tbh)

I’m gonna copy/paste a response I made to a comment as a response below so that (hopefully) it’ll channel the eternal debate over the benefits of a honing rod into one thread.

Not true, at least in part.

While it won’t sharpen, it does remove material, even the steel honing rods.

There’s been a ton of microphotography done over the last decade or so showing what happens at that level.

What a rod does varies based on the material. Metal rods basically friction off steel from the blade, whereas ceramics work exactly the same as a whetstone.

The problem with rods is the inconsistent angle, and the small area of contact. It makes them prone to irregular results.

So, you have to use a light touch.

But, since you’ll likely be working a microbevel rather than trying to totally grind out the same angle as your edge bevel, it works out fine even if you get over vigorous with the pressure. Hell, most folks are going to finish their more thorough sharpening with a microbevel anyway. It’s the easiest way to deburr the edge, and it gives a slightly more resilient edge with no loss of cutting ability.

There’s a site called knife steel nerd, operated by a guy that’s a metallurgist (who was part of coming up with magnacut, which is fairly widely considered one of the best steels for knives ever, if not always agreed as the best). There’s video footage on YouTube as well as other sites that cover the effects of various knife maintenance methods and materials.

On to not copy/paste stuff

Now, back on reddit, particularly on the r/sharpening and r/knives subs, this subject got done to death. There were some great guys that went the extra mile and did their own microscopy in photo and video form. It is a settled and well documented thing that honing rods do remove material, they don’t just bend the edge back into shape, and are a useful part of knife maintenance. So anyone wanting to fuss and argue the subject should either go there and look for links, or hit their favorite search engine because I’m not duplicating that work here.

They also aren’t a high skill tool. They also aren’t mandatory. What they do is extend the time between more extensive sharpening sessions on a whetstone (as an aside, it is whetstone, not wetstone, the word whet is synonym for hone or sharpen) where you’ll remove more material and reset the angle of your edge bevel.

There is both art and science to sharpening knives. The science part is well established at this point, and backed up (as already mentioned) by documentation in visual formats. The art part is where you get to have fun! That’s where you decide angles and adjust your method, then apply them to the stones you prefer.

Me? I’m an oil stone guy mostly, with ceramics for very fine grit work (around the 3k range, though there’s multiple systems for describing “grit”). But I do tend to stick with forming and removing a burr, which is fairly beginner friendly, but takes less time than other options. I’m always glad to describe the basic process, but it is already out there if anyone wants to go looking. Just don’t automatically swallow someone’s explanation based on them using good techniques. There’s plenty of folks (especially chefs for some reason) that can turn out a superb edge but spread total bullshit regarding how it happens.

Thing is, despite all of this being well established and documented, the info hasn’t made its way into everyone’s hands yet. Then you’ve got folks that simply reject the s

cience of it because they either don’t like thinking they’re wrong, or just don’t want to change their thinking since what they were doing already fit what the research shows.

And then you run into the assholes and idiots that just refuse to accept that the science even exists, which baffles me, but humans are fucking dumb sometimes.

All of which is to reach the summation that most of what you’ve been told about why knives get sharp when you rub them on things is wrong because nobody had bothered to properly study it until maybe twenty years ago, and by properly I mean documenting their work nd experimental processes. So, you can freely just use stones and rods however works for you, no worries. Just be aware that a lot of people scoffing at honing rods don’t actually know what they’re scoffing at or why.

Edit:

Shit, apparently there’s a lot of confusion about how edges “dull” as well. This comment was already long as fuck, so I’m not gonna go deep (that’s what he said).

However, knives don’t get dull solely by having the very apex of the edge bent. It can also be abraded away, chipped, and/or deformed in other ways. Again, there’s microscopy available out there of what happens as you use a blade on various materials. There’s a difference in what happens cutting cardboard vs on a wood cutting board vs a plastic cutting board, and even a good bit of variance depending on what you’re cutting on those boards.

Not true, at least in part.

While it won’t sharpen, it does remove material, even the steel honing rods.

There’s been a ton of microphotography done over the last decade or so showing what happens at that level.

What a rod does varies based on the material. Metal rods basically friction off steel from the blade, whereas ceramics work exactly the same as a whetstone.

The problem with rods is the inconsistent angle, and the small area of contact. It makes them prone to irregular results.

So, you have to use a light touch.

But, since you’ll likely be working a microbevel rather than trying to totally grind out the same angle as your edge bevel, it works out fine even if you get over vigorous with the pressure. Hell, most folks are going to finish their more thorough sharpening with a microbevel anyway. It’s the easiest way to deburr the edge, and it gives a slightly more resilient edge with no loss of cutting ability.

There’s a site called knife steel nerd, operated by a guy that’s a metallurgist (who was part of coming up with magnacut, which is fairly widely considered one of the best steels for knives ever, if not always agreed as the best). There’s video footage on YouTube as well as other sites that cover the effects of various knife maintenance methods and materials.