My best guess is to use a spray lacquer for enamel, such as this:

https://a.co/d/ixJ7knW

I suspect the “brass” over zinc that is on that clip isn’t just brass - if it were brass plated zinc, I’d be totally comfortable using that spray lacquer over it. Instead, it’s probably some type of brass colored paint (or paint containing actual brass.

This means that you have mystery paint (and mystery “enamel”) that you are trying to coat. Because of that, no matter what top coat you choose, there is a chance it won’t work well and the solvents in the top coat could melt/harm the clip.

But… if I were in your situation, I would try the spray above and cross my fingers.

If you go that route:

Gently dab a bit of rubbing alcohol somewhere that you won’t be too sad if it hurts the finish. Give it a little rub. If it doesn’t mess with the finish, then you’re probably good to use rubbing alcohol to do final cleaning before top coating with lacquer.

Spray a tiny bit of the lacquer on a something (like the corner of a paper towel. immediately rub it on a spot on the clip to do the same type of test. Is the finish ok? Then you’re probably good to proceed.

Before spraying, clean the clip gently but thoroughly with dish soap and water. Rinse well. Dry well.

Give the thing a good rub with a soft cloth and rubbing alcohol to get any other remnants/grease off the clip before painting.

Give the clip a light coat of spray enamel. Follow directions for ambient temperature and recoat time. Give it another coat a bit heavier. Maybe even a third.

Let it dry and cure for a long time. The lacquer will seem completely dry and “done” after a day, but it won’t be fully cured. Giving it time to fully harden before messing with it too much.

Other notes: dust is your enemy. It’ll stick to your top coat while it’s drying. Try to minimize dust and similar nasties.

If you haven’t done used spray cans much, learn to use them first. Do a practice pass on something you don’t care about. It’s really easy to put on too much and have your clearcoat run. No fun.

This person is correct.

I’ve finished, painted, sealed, and repaired enough stuff to know that “maybe try clear nail polish” is a terrible idea for OP.

Nail polish is very hard to get to go on smoothly over a large area and OP is very likely to end up with an uneven or marred finish. If you just put down nail polish, you are not going to get a lasting finish on much of any material without cleaning and degreasing it first.

I would clean/degrease (I don’t know what to use as I can’t tell what the material is). I would lean toward using some type of spray top coat (again, I don’t know which product because I don’t know the material). You still need to know how to spray on finishes, but I find it much easier to do well than brush on finishes.

The Anarchist’s Cookbook is actually legal to possess (and buy and sell). It’s a common misconception that it is illegal. In the US, at least.

Wow. I just want to say thank you for such a thoughtful, informed, detailed response. You are an amazing person!

Oh hell yeah. I want to see a Dendy reboot.

I typed in the url and… yeah, that was A LOT of boobs and butts.

Came back here to see that I mistyped the url. Doubling the “O” results in many boobs and butts.

Are you logged in? It appears you can go to the privacy settings page and set some (not all) settings without being logged in.

Thanks. I just went and disabled it. I also found that they had “products and services notifications” turned on. I know I attempted to disable all advertising and monitoring stuff shortly after I signed up, but I can’t say for sure whether I had missed this section at that time or if they kindly turned it on for me between then and now.

I suspect that there is “palm check” turned on for your touchpad. This is designed to keep you from accidentally moving/clicking the touchpad by brushing it with your palm while you are typing.

Look for a “palm check”, “palm rejection”, or “disable touchpad when typing” setting in your touchpad utility. As far as I know, these are all roughly the same thing.

Also why the fuck would they charge for it?

Because they have long since moved away from selling worthwhile products to selling anything they can trick people into buying. Providing value is no longer a concern, only short-term profit.

On this train of thought…

OP, if you don’t make it clear that you want to date her, then make sure you accept the ambiguity of the situation and that she might have no idea that you want to date her (romantically). It can feel like your interest is obvious if you ask her to hang out one-on-one. But she may not immediately see that and could accept, assuming that you are strictly going as friends.

It’s totally ok to ask her to hang out, just don’t build up the situation to be more than it is. If she says yes, you’ll have to play it by ear. Maybe she’ll consider it a date. Maybe she’ll consider it a strictly-platonic hangout. Or maybe somewhere in between.

Edit: and if it goes well —even if it just ends up being a platonic hang out—I’d lean toward specifying “date” when you ask her to go out again.

If the others suggested aren’t quite right for you, you might try looking for an interval timer app. These are generally used for fitness, but it seems to me that type of setup might do exactly what you want if you just set up a “workout” that has a single 30 min interval and repeats.

Or use a scale.

As a rule, non-essential insurance (including pet insurance) is designed to be a losing bet as you are paying for the average cost of an insured animal’s care, plus the overhead of hundreds of people’s wages.

Plus all the other business overhead, plus tidy shareholder profits.

Here’s my recollection from my limited research on this a few years ago (in the US):

-High premiums

-Insurance company can cancel coverage or jack up premiums if your pet becomes expensive

-needing pre approval for coverage, so you may be dealing with an extra layer of beurocracy when you need to get your pet treated

-Notable risk of insurance company rejecting claims

-Maximumum coverage seemed rather low (ie they cap the amount insurance will pay per year or lifetime, so your coverage may dissolve if you end up having serious pet health issues.

-high copays, so you’re still paying a lot in the event of large vet expenses.

Basically, overall, it seemed like a scam in which, even for those that end up needing a large amount of vet care, you are likely to get less benefit from insurance than premiums.

All that said, I don’t think I did much research. I think I looked at a couple of pet insurance companies that seemed “legitimate”, looked at the details of their policies, did some math, and concluded “lol, fuck no!”

Someone bought a pallet of returned products and found this as one of the returned products. So what?

It is important to note that this pretty useless concoction of non-working parts – dressed up as one of the best graphics cards available to consumers in 2024 – wasn’t sold as a new model. It was received by an NWR customer in a pallet deal from Amazon Returns.

…

We can’t know for sure, but the product received by NWR, apparently from an Amazon pallet deal, may have been an Amazon return where a faulty Franken-graphics-card was returned and someone kept a good working one. The outward description of a cracked PCB and melted power connector might even suggest another level of deception used to return this switched product.

People use words in different ways. You will find varying definitions of propaganda. Some people will call any information produced by a government propaganda. Some people will only call that information propaganda if it appears to have a notable bias. Some will only call the info propaganda if it contains outright lies.

You seem to want to define propaganda as any information produced by a government designed to pursuance people of something. Most people are not going to be against that kind of information (or at least not strongly against it). I’m pretty sure most people that say they are against propaganda view propaganda as information that is misleading or an outright lie.

The problem here seems to be that you have taken the stance that propaganda simply means “persuasion”.

By my read, this is the core of the articles argument:

But if these billionaires’ largesse was designed to retain the conservative judge on the country’s highest court, the donations might fall outside of the definition of tax-free gifts, which according to the Supreme Court must stem from “detached and disinterested generosity.” If the benefits showered on Thomas were designed to elicit court actions or job decisions, they could be considered taxable income, whether or not there is definitive proof of quid pro quo on Thomas’s part.

Ambrosia probably provided me the most hours of gaming entertainment over the 90s. They published Mac software and, if I remember correctly, most of their games were shareware and the non-paid versions were pretty well featured.

I wonder how many hundreds of hours I played Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity Override. Those were some absolutely amazing games and they supported plugins (mods) and had a thriving mod community.

For the 90s mac users, you’ll probably recognize a lot of their games (listed on the Wikipedia page). Here are some from the 90s that stand out to me:

Maelstrom

Chiral

Apeiron

Swoop

Barrack

Escape Velocity

Avara

Bubble Trouble

Harry the Handsome Executive

Mars Rising

EV Override

Ares

Escape Velocity Nova

I usually have the same problem as you when I play rpgs (or rpg-like games), but BG3 has been different for me. Part of that is that I went into it wanting to just let the game play out. The other part is that the game does an excellent job of making results ambiguous (in a very good way, imo).

You can choose to save/kill/sneak through something and “complete” it, but it often is not obvious whether you made the optimal choice. Most approaches seem valid and you may not find out the real consequences until later in the game. Embrace it. Accept your consequences. And keep going. It really is an amazing experience.