Bit of a stretch for the community, but I figured if anyone can help me it’s probably the people of the archaeology community. Mods strike me down if I hath sinned.

Ok - story first, then I get to what I want to ask for help with.

So as you can see, I have an old cobblestone from a street I used to live above a while back. It was an old part of town with an asphalt road and apparently they had just paved over the original street, which apparently had a set of trolley tracks at one point.

They tore the asphalt up for some construction reason and found the original cobblestone street. The historical society apparently made them halt work and debated, but eventually decided they didn’t have storage space or something because after a couple of weeks of the old street sitting uncovered with a fence around it like an exhibit stuck out of time, the cobbles were in a heap in a dumpster, the ancient rusty tracks were tossed aside and a hole had been dug where they were.

I was upset, to say the least. So of course I picked one out (one I think was touching the rail, thus the rust) and have had it since.

So - this is the part where I ask for help. The grout is solid but every time I move it, a ton of rocks and whatnot fall off. This one was next to the tracks and has a bit of metal rusted to the side that fell off (you can see it in the photo) I’m thinking about using cyanoacrylate glue for that but I’d like to find a way to transport it without more of the old as frig grout disintegrating if I pack it in paper or something to transport it when I move.

I’ve heard hairspray is a thing? Would that be a mistake? Looking for anyone who actually knows preservation techniques, please! Lots of stuff falls off every time I move it.

Edit: I have to move it soon, moving across the country. Once I get there it’ll sit as it has but stuff is going to fall off if I just put it in a bin with paper.

Edit 2: Would Saran-wrapping it while I move, then unwrapping it once I can leave it alone be an option? Afraid it’d be worse than just packing it in moving paper

It’s less work than having to scrub them again after they go through the wash.

Just woke up and made my coffee, found that my migration is complete!

I built a nas when I was fresh out of college with 3 drives in raid5 but because btrfs was relatively new at the time, I decided to go with ext4 for the file system. Essentially it defines how the 1’s and 0’s are arranged on the disk and how reads/writes etc work. Btrfs boasted some neat new features, but I just wanted reliable storage so I went with the established tech. I also left the 4th bay open because drives were expensive as frig at the time.

Now that time has passed and btrfs is more widespread, I found myself missing some of the features like snapshots and copy-on-write, so I decided to both add a hd and convert at the same time.

Only thing is that there isn’t really a way to convert an ext4 drive to btrfs - you have to copy everything off and back on. Some of the files I’ve got I’ve had for more than a decade, so I was understandably terrified of the thought.

I ended up making my new drive in the final bay into a standalone volume which I manually copied everything to, then wrote a bash script to recursively check the hash of every file on both sides to make sure they’re the same. This took 4 days of straight copying and reading/verification.

And cuz I’m a paranoid fek, I repeated the process with an old external drive I bought so I’d have two copies, one on the raid volume and on the external. Less chance of something going wrong on both simultaneously.

Even with two verified copies I had to take a deep breath and think real hard about anything I maybe forgot before I deleted that >10yo volume full of photos, legal docs, etc. Terrifying.

But this morning the restore has finished! Now I just verify the restored files and I can nuke the temporary standalone and add it into the raid cluster, and I’ll have a shiny new ginormous storage volume with all the lovely btrfs features I’ve been reading about.

The nice thing about this project is that I realized that this single drive failure that my raid cluster isn’t really the same as a full separate backup on a separate media. So I’ve left the cheap external that spins down if not accessed and set up a job to spin it up once a night and back anything new or changed to it.

This morning I’m sitting here excited about my objectively dull accomplishment. I think if I explained this to anyone I know irl their eyes would glaze over in the first paragraph, but I’m living my best boring life and it’s fantastic.

The things with a grid of holes and a little spinning blade that removes pills from furniture and fabric. I keep buying $10 shitty Walmart ones and they die after a few months.

Any brands etc that aren’t enshittified yet?

Under US copyright law, only works created by humans can be copyrighted. Courts have (imho rightly) denied copyrights to AI-generated images.

My question is when do you think AI image tools cross from the realm of a “tool” (that, for example generates and fills in a background so an item can be removed from a photo) into the realm of “a human didn’t make this”?

What if an artist trains an AI so specialized it only makes their style of art? At what point do you think the images they create with it begin to count as their “work product”?

No fluffy shork photo I’m afraid but I wanted to share a nice story.

I’ve been dating an mtf girl for about 6 months now. She’s been on hrt for about 3yr but is still very socially anxious. We’ve been going out grocery shopping and whatnot to get her a bit more exposure to being in public presenting as fem - with me there to anchor and help in case she gets overwhelmed.

Recently, we went to Ikea together to look at kitchen shelves cuz my kitchen is a disaster. She was forgetting her anxiety a bit and we were having a nice light conversation winding our way to the exit and I jokingly asked “do you want a shark?” as we walked by the crate of them.

She asked me if I knew, I said I did. She turned the cutest freaking shade of red I’ve seen and said she didn’t think she could ever buy one without an anxiety attack and stumbled over her words a bit. Cute as fuck. 🫠

I knew what had to be done.

Next day I went back and went straight to the bin and bought literally just a shark. I’m super cis and masc but the self checkout cashier definitely clocked that I wasn’t buying no shark for no kid or nothing. Got a smirk on the way out. 🤣🤣

Decided that instead of just giving it to her I had to surprise her somehow.

She’s living in someone’s basement right now month to month and my roommate is leaving, so we’ve been considering moving in together - it would be nice to take turns cooking and be closer together but still have our own space to retreat to if we want. We’re both super introverted.

I decided to hide it in the closet of the vacant room and wait.

Two days later, she comes over and we’re watching random shows and cook a nice dinner, just hanging out doing our own thing after eating. I’m absorbed in assembling the shelves I bought instead of the ikea ones (sry ikea your shelves cost too much) and she’s on her phone on the sofa. She says she’s going to check where she might wanna put her furniture and I had to try super hard to be cool and be like “sure hon” without letting my giddiness creep in.

I stood up slowly and crept to the hall until I heard the gasp and went in and gave her a giant hug. Many good tears on both sides. She says she never imagined someone giving her a stuffed animal could make her cry, glad it did.

She and her new shork are moving in later this month and I’m super excited. 😊🦈💜