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It’s probably related to this possibly apocryphal story:

One shell, however, wasn’t quite empty.

Inside the casing was “a carefully rolled piece of paper” written in Czech, he noted. “This is all we can do for you now,” the message read.

Columbus was indeed a bastard by contemporary standards:

One man caught stealing corn had his nose and ears cut off, was placed in shackles and was then auctioned off as a slave. A woman who dared to suggest that Columbus was of lowly birth was… stripped naked and paraded around the colony on the back of a mule.

It got bad enough that he was sent back in chains (though he was released) and stripped of all his titles (permanently). There’s some thought that the report was a bit of a hit piece by his political enemies, but it seems like he, with his equally shitty brother, opened himself up by being such an asshole.

You don’t have to be an apologist for the Spanish regime or think they were enlightened somehow to understand that he was particularly shitty. As the historian in the article says, “The monarchs wanted someone who did not give them problems. Columbus did not solve problems, he created them.”

“Peaceful ancient Mediterranean state” is an oxymoron

The Minoans would like a word…

Though more recent scholarship seems to imply that the word would most likely be, “Agreed!”

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Anecdote time: My mom grew up in the Atlanta suburbs in the 50s and 60s, and while she converted to Mormonism (I got better!) for my dad, she was very much a white woman of her place and time. Growing up, she made it clear that she knew of exactly three “sons of perdition,” a biblical term the LDS used to describe “those who were permitted to be born to this world with physical bodies but then served Satan and turned utterly against God [and who] will not be redeemed from the second (spiritual) death and cannot dwell in a kingdom of glory.”

They were Adolph Hitler (fair enough), Napoleon Bonaparte (I’m guessing a personal bugaboo of whatever armchair historian and armchair-ier theologian introduced her to this concept, but okay he started a lot of very large wars), and William Tecumseh Sherman.

LOL, that’s rough. I should have clarified what I was thinking of the (Western) Roman Empire.

I believe that’s as high as it ever got, but it was definitely a thing.

Patrick Stewart was also deeply involved in the creative decisions on Picard seasons 1 and 2. He got to the point where he just wanted to do what he wanted to do, and since he is Jean-Luc Picard, what he wants is ipso facto the right choice:

“What I’d like to see at the end of the show,” I told them, “is a content Jean-Luc. I want to see Picard perfectly at ease with his situation. Not anxious, not in a frenzy, not depressed. And I think this means that there is a wife in the picture.” You see, the line between Jean-Luc and me has grown ever more blurred. If I have found true love, shouldn’t he?

Sometimes you do not want your actor actually in charge of their iconic character, and genuine embrace of it can manage to make it worse if they’re not writers. I will do my occasional hornet’s-nest kicking and say that Mark Hamill’s take on Luke Skywalker after filming The Last Jedi was similarly myopic, but in a direction that more fans at least think they wanted, and since we’ll never see his choices play out he still gets the benefit of the doubt.

That’s all correct, and the new movie also has the Colosseum flooded deeply enough that there are large sharks eating combatants in the naumachia. Then there’s the infamous cafe and newspaper scene, and of course, the one gladiator riding a rhinoceros with full tack as a war horse.

All of which could be somewhat forgiven if it was a decent movie, but it’s also predictable and overly derivative of the first one, utterly anticlimactic, and Paul Mescal joins Sam Worthington in being a “star” who has all the action-movie charisma of a floppy skin tag. I’ll withhold overall judgment until I see Hamnet.

And yet, somehow it’s a more sophisticated ahistorical argument than whatever the fuck they were getting at in the sequel.

What about the papers where he expounded upon how he wanted to return to a fully-functioning Republic, but not for the benefit of the senatorial class? Release the Maximus files!!!

In the meantime, OnShape is cross platform cause it’s all in browser and I don’t care about my designs being public. I actually post them all free anyway.

The biggest issue with their license is that they went so hard on protecting themselves hosting it, that they basically give everyone BUT the creator the right to monetize a public design. It’s an offensively sloppy ToU, or at least it was the last time I checked it.

Some of it will depend on what your goals and OS are. OnShape is pretty good, and being in-browser it’s inherently cross-platform. BUT… their free tier has the single worst licensing setup imaginable: your designs are public, you can’t make a single cent off them, BUT any paying customer (and arguably any other user at all) can. They also jump straight from free to enterprise pricing.

Fusion you know. Licensewise, the free version gives you a small grace zone to make a couple of bucks without issues, and you can at elast keep your designs to yourself.

SolidWorks has an extremely heavy and unfriendly web interface, but their in-browser parametric 3D CAD is better than it used to be, and you can get a maker plan for $25-$50 a year that gives you a little wiggle room to sell a few trinkets and not get blasted if someone or something rats you out to Dassault. If you’re on Windows, you’ll also be able to install proper SolidWorks (though files will be watermarked to limit them to a hobbyist/maker install.

Solid Edge is a bit clunkier than (real) SolidWorks or Fusion, is windows only, and there’s also a doughnut hole for limited commercial use, but it’s the full software and it’s free as in beer.

Since they cleared up the worst of the toponaming issue, FreeCAD is way better than it used to be. I still feel like the moment you have to do anything more than draw/extrude/fillet, then all the clunkiness comes back, though. It’s a brilliant project in its way, but it remains a mixed bag, shall we say.

I paid for a permanent license for my version of Alibre Design, and that’s what I generally use. It’s somewhere between SolidEdge and Solidworks in user-friendliness, and more than powerful enough for my keyboards and random widgets. I also do like the simplicity of owning my license and therefore fully controlling my designs, but it wasn’t cheap, probably two years’ worth of monthly payments on the Shapr3D usable tier or the fancy Fusion tier, so I will probably keep plugging along for a while yet. They have a more basic product (Atom) that’s missing some fairly useful features, but is still parametric and is rather cheap. It’s also all Windows only, though I keep hearing the next version will play nice with Wine/Proton. For now, my investment with Alibre is pretty much THE reason I occasionally boot back into Windows.

TinkerCAD (opwned by Autodesk like Fusion is) is great for certain things, and the “make shape, set solid or hole” workflow is much more intuitive for the abject beginner, but if you’re on Fusion you’re already past the need for it, i’d think.

There are other players (Rhino, Plasticity, DesignSpark, SolveSpace, among others), but Fusion, Shapr3D (for single parts only, no assemblies),OnShape, SolidEdge, FreeCAD, Alibre, and Solidworks pretty much cover mechanical CAD that’s (1) full-featured, (2) 3D, (3) got parametric history and (4) available with usable free or maker versions.

Nothing precise. I have tons of DIY nonsense in my garage, but when it came time to suspend storage from the ceiling, the consequences of it’s failing would mean significant damage to the ceiling, the contents, my car, and possibly the garage door. As long as you use sufficiently strong hardware and follow solid practices for how to mount things, it should be fine. Just not something I was wanting to do.

Overhead loads just sketch me out in general.

Same, especially as a fellow practitioner of the dark arts of “this unrelated device looks fit for purpose.” We had some large purpose-designed overhead trays prefessionally installed above our garage door, and while they’re each rated for a pretty hefty load, first choice for what to put up there was always items that are not very dense for their size. I will mess with a lot of stuff, but fucking with HVAC, weight-loads on ceilings, or in-wall plumbing and electrical is not for me.

Is it the same basic concept as its friend between the next set of rafters? If so, I might be more concerned about the piano hinge than the rest of it, as those are usually used to support lids versus gravity rather than loaded up carcases. I also might go for some metal strapping on your joist to reinforce the pocket holes. I’m not all that familiar with how awning gear boxes work, though. What holds the cable in place when the box is stowed?

All in all, I am not too terrified of this one, which may say more about me than about your handiwork (LOL), but some lag-screw hooks and some rope or chain (and a stick if they’re too high to reach) might be a good accessibility compromise to keep anybody from getting clocked if something does fail.