I recently bought a hand plane. I figured it was a good thing to have on hand for any future woodworking projects. I'd never used a plane before, so this was a first for me. I have an old piece of scrap wood, a 4x4, that I tried it out on.
It was... awkward.
For one thing, you've got to clamp that wood down tight, otherwise it'll absolutely shoot off like a bullet whenever the blade bites into it.
For another thing, you need a heavy table on which to work, otherwise the whole table will jump when the wood is clamped to it and the blade bites the wood.
The there's the pressure involved on the front end. How hard do you bear down with the left hand? Well, that's a trial-and-error thing, apparently. :/
I used it enough to where I sort of got in a rhythm. I didn't quite get the wood flat, but I was on my way there--somewhat--when I decided to call it a day. It's a workout, too, by the way. If you want to burn calories and sweat, do some planing for a while.
One thing I couldn't figure out is how to plane the area behind the blade. Am I supposed to start planing with the tool hanging off the end of the wood? Am I supposed to plane from the opposite direction? I'm planing with the grain here to avoid tearout, so going from the opposite side seems wrong. And starting with the plane mostly hanging off the wood seems wrong, too, due to the angle and the leverage and whatnot. So that's something I'll have to research, I guess.
Anyway, it was a neat experience. Maybe I'll get good with it with more practice.
Okay, so it's got some good stuff there. I like the look of the soldiers floating down to the surface. (Not sure whether those are Harkonnen soldiers or Sardaukar, but I think they're Sardaukar.) And the personal fighting shields are better than the blocky things in the Lynch movie.
But the trailer ends with the sandworm, and I'm a bit disappointed with it. I've always seen the sandworm with a three-jawed mouth apparatus, and this one doesn't seem to have that.
John Schoenherr provided the earliest artwork for the Dune series, including the illustrations in the initial pulp magazine serial and the cover of the first hardcover edition. Frank Herbert was very pleased with Schoenherr's art,[8] and remarked that he was "the only man who has ever visited Dune".[9] Schoenherr gave the sandworm three triangular lobes that form the lips of its mouth. This design was referenced for the sandworm puppets that appeared in the 1984 movie adaptation of Dune.[10]
Still, though, there's this thing called "fan expectations." The three-jaw design is decades old and ingrained in the consciousness of the fans. There's no good reason for Hollywood to ditch it.
Then there's the fight scenes. We only get a brief glimpse in the trailer, but the hand-to-hand stuff looks a bit too choreographed for my liking. Hopefully it'll play out as more realistic in the movie.
The trailer shows Jason Momoa more than it shows Rebecca Ferguson. That's an ill omen. Lady Jessica is a far more important character than Duncan Idaho. Hopefully the movie won't sideline her.
I really hope there's no Pink Floyd music in the movie. Nothing against the band, but I want a symphonic score. Symphonic music is timeless.
I didn't get to see enough of the ornithopters to form an opinion bout them. I didn't see much of the Fremen, either. Or Baron Harkonnen, or Feyd Rautha, or the Spacing Guild... I know a trailer is just a trailer, but this is like a Star Wars trailer not showing Darth Vader, the Death Star, any rebel fighters, or the Imperial fleet.
Was the spice mentioned at all? If so, I missed it.
So, yeah... I'm not terribly enthusiastic about the trailer.
However...
When the trailers for The Matrix hit television back in 1999, I thought the movie looked pretty dumb. I thought it was just a mindless action flick made for the purpose of playing around with CGI. When I saw the movie later, I was blown away. It's one of my favorite movies. And I was pissed off at the trailer for giving me the wrong impression. So I'm not willing to write off a movie based on the trailer, because I know first-hand how a trailer can fail.
The movie is part one of two, so it's also possible that the trailer only shows stuff from the first movie, not the second one. Still, though, that's no excuse for not mentioning the villains or the McGuffin (the spice).
Nevertheless, I'm still looking forward to seeing the movie. I won't fear the impressions given to me by the trailer. Fear is the joy-killer, the little-death that brings total disappointment. I will put the trailer out of my mind, and when it is forgotten, only the movie will remain.
Hurricane Sally blew through in a hurry, didn't it? The forecast had predicted several days of rain, but it looks like that's not going to happen. Once this storm came inland, it stepped on the gas pedal. It was in the Carolinas in no time flat.
Looks like Macon is getting dumped on at the moment. I suspect there will be some flash flooding there.
The areas downstream will probably flood, too, because water flows downhill, so the coastal plain gets both the rain from the storm and the rain runoff from upstream.
As for me, though, I'm fine. Just the usual heavy rain. No winds powerful enough to do any damage. The northern part of the state is pretty immune from hurricane damage due to being so far inland and at a higher elevation. By the time a storm gets here, it's already lost a lot of energy. So don't worry about me. Worst case scenario is a few low-lying areas experience flash-flooding, and I'm not in a low-lying area.
Best wishes, though, to everyone affected. Y'all stay as safe as you can, and watch out for each other.
Okay, so it's not actually a Jawa sandcrawler. But it looks like one.
My street is in the process of being resurfaced, and one of the construction vehicles is a tracked thing that looks like it belongs in the Tatooine desert. Four tracks, just like a sandcrawler. When it rumbles past, the room shakes.
I think they're just fixing the sunken-in parts of the road for now. From what I hear, the plan is that they'll repave the whole thing next week, presumably after the hurricane blows through.
Speaking of the weather, it's seventy-one degrees right now, and the projected high for the rest of the week is only seventy-five. It feels almost chilly.
In other news, I started a new story recently. I was stuck in neutral with book 5 of Wheel of Fire, and I needed something to jump-start my production. So I started a new story. We'll see what happens.
Thanks to the lockdowns and factories being shut down or on limited shifts, stuff has become scarce. I'm browsing for a tool box, and most of the items I've looked at on Amazon are only available from third-party sellers.
So I'm browsing Walmart's site now. It looks like they might have something that suits my needs, though I'd have to actually go in person to the local store to get it.
So, yeah... even the tool box supply has run low. Way to go, 2020. You win again.
I've been seeing a swarm of hummingbirds around the feeders lately. They're putting on fat for the long trip over the Gulf of Mexico, and that makes them frantic and competitive. But they've also all been female. I haven't seen any males in a few days.
So I guess the males are gone. It's typical for the males to leave first and the females to follow about a week later. Last year, the males left in early August, much sooner than usual, and the females stuck around an extra month. It'll be interesting to see how long the females stick around this year.
Blogger has decided to force us all to use its new interface. I don't like the new interface. I prefer the old one.
*sigh*
This isn't the first web site to do this, of course. It happens all the time. Using the internet means constantly having to throw out some of your knowledge and start from scratch.
Such is just "the times," I guess, the inevitable consequence of living in this century.
I usually don't write with music in the background. Too distracting. Sometimes, though, it works for me, so long as there aren't any lyrics tempting me to sing along. At the moment, I'm writing and listening to music from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Great stuff.
