Not completely SFW

Sending this to my drummer immediately.

fuck I will photoshop my picture in the pic over the mantle

That is glorious.

This is not nearly as glorious, but is still fantastic: 8 Prehistoric Saber-Toothed Animals

Yarr, i miss the Low Quality Inventors thread from tonesettings. Looks like that whole forum has finally gone tetsup.

It's brutal when you see the dude hit the ground, the spray from the impact, even if it's just water from the wet grass. Thankfully for his sake he died on the way down.

This is, I believe, a trap:

The best part of the plummeting fool is his last name is the same as someone I know and they are about equally as bright.

Yes the Inventors thread is sorely missed.

Cast iron snare drum:

Got this spam email earlier

Quality work, this:


Italics mine, save for the ship's name.

I'm not sure whether this counts as invention fail or merely engineering fail. Either way, jolly good show, that. Building a naval cannon which, upon being fired, blows up the head of the Navy takes some skill.

That prompted me to look up the HMS Warrior:





Though the first picture may be her sister ship, HMS Black Prince. These are the first iron-hulled battleships. They do still contain timber, but the hulls themselves are iron, 4.5 inches thick, backed by a foot-and-a-half of teak. I don't know if they can properly be called ironclads as they have metal hulls, not metal-plated wood. Though they are not the first metal ships, they are the first metal warships.

Surprisingly, to me, they could be sailed, like, with sails. Though of course they have steam engines. The Warrior, as evidenced by the lower picture, has been restored and is a museum ship today.

Yarr, it was definitely an awkward period of shipdesign there for a while where they had sails and steam props and wood and iron.

Partly it was aboot early steam being less reliable and not-very-efficient, so range was limited by what could fit in the hold, coal-wise.

But probably a bigger part was the fact that navy people didn't 100% trust the propeller/steam tech OR the heavier-than-water hull for kind of an extended period there.

That is just how seafolk are i think. See also: for many years after the magnetic compass was invented, sunstones were still a part of many ships navigation systems.

Now, I'm no expert- it's really only the past year or so I've taken an interest in matters nautical. But awkward sounds correct to me- I couldn't imagine that was very fast or maneuverable under sail. I mean: it's a goddamn battleship. In the modern sense. I don't know its displacement, but I suspect it's a pretty big number compared to other ships of the time.

It never did see combat, which sorta surprises me. And sorta doesn't- the British from the time it was built 'til the time it was decommissioned weren't fighting anyone at sea, and a battleship is useless for whaling on Zulus, say, and you can't sail one up the Khyber Pass. So not so good for what they were on about at the time.

It does seem like an interesting period though; the Warrior was decommissioned in 1883 after already having been taken out of front-line service. It wasn't even 25 years old. The technology had advanced so fast it was obsolete in a decade or so. It's interesting how recognizably modern things got to look after the age of sail. The first HMS Dreadnought, from 1875 (not the famous ship from the early 1900s):



There's still a mast and rigging, but if I didn't know better, I'd say that was an early 20th century ship. Perhaps it's because I never studied this stuff, but it's interesting to me how fast it changed. It makes sense- y'know, the whole Industrial Revolution thing- but ships weren't something I payed attention to.

That does have a ring to it very similar to if you like, tap a cast iron pan with a wooden spoon.

Seems like the shipbuilders were very wishy washy about "ohh, let's go to steam... but put up these massive masts and sails... just as a backup.." c'mon guys make a decision.

I bet that cast iron snare would sound incredibly tuned way up with the shit blasted out of it.

It's already tuned pretty high in the video. It's not a small snare either IIRC; 6.5x14 if my memory serves. I'm sure it weighs a ton, as it's 1/4" cast iron, and costs a small fortune. It is pretty damn cool. I like that it is an unusual material. I've heard a copper snare- a friend's cousin has/had one- and that was pretty neat too. Alas my tastes were not as developed back then so I can't comment other than it was a good sounding drum. Some dude makes a titanium snare, but the videos I could find of it were lacklustre. I do know and can confirm large brass snares are fantastic.

Of course, were I a drummer, I'd want a cast iron kick drum. A 26". Two of them, actually. To be That Asswhole.