Aha! I knew it! I had this trepidation when I sold this one https://pixelfed.social/i/web/post/748289303255129698 especially because they also took this very similar one https://pixelfed.social/i/web/post/748289996039802817 …and I guess it’s probably for the best I abandon the foolish notions I had when I listed this https://imgur.com/a/mardor-z12y8cw and it was especially foolhardy to have ever considered parting with https://imgur.com/a/chassaigne-k0Fy4tt 🤔

But it’s also satisfying to set a new bevel, just not the same if it was already shaving fine (not to mention wasteful). And honing as a service seems less relaxing for myriad reasons. So compromises must be made. Thankfully(?) I’ve slowed a fair bit since the initial burst when I was getting into it, settling into a bit of an equilibrium with a handful in and out each year.

My honing enthusiasm provided too much rationalisation for razor acquisition and so I have …several. The winnowing process is ongoing and I’m proud to have sold 5 x 5/8 last week.

6/8 is harder because I like them more. Lately I’m wondering: Do I really need two 6/8 hollow-but-stiff round point French blades?

I’m partial to the Grelot. I do appreciate that it’s a bit more hollow and as a Canadian I enjoy the etch. Plus it’s my only nice Grelot and there’s some cachet there. And it’s in better shape. But there’s just something to the TI and it’s similarly my best TI and the pitting isn’t anywhere important so just sorta adds character. And it’s more towards a quarter hollow so …sort of a different thing altogether?

Inconclusive. More study required. Luckily they don’t take a lot of space.

Also: I’m always curious to see the grind toe-on every time I see a picture of a straight razor and that shot should somehow always be included in the metadata or something :)

Coooooool. Thanks for sharing.

This seems like a really nice size, good compromise between heft/lather handling and agility. Plus I like the jimping on it. Somehow I suspect you’ll hang on to this one.

And ya, wow, did you stumble onto a hidden cache of underappreciated and underpriced blades or did you set out to expand your collection like this?

I often see people wedging injector blades into things eg. Ender’s, Ronson, etc. but haven’t given it enough thought to guess if there’s a reasonable way to do that here.

You might also consider vintage razors, a lot of them are brass and they’ve stood the test of time to get this far.

Alternatively, if what you really want is machined stainless you can probably get it for that price from dscosmetic or yaqi on AliExpress. They have many models so it’d be worth searching out some reviews.

I’m unsurprised to see an overlap between meditation and straight razor appreciation. After all, using, honing and stropping my straights are some of my favourite meditations though I still try to keep a more formal practice.

There are also thick framebacks but they’re basically just like a light wedge so I think you’re right to prioritise the Japanese ones.

I like the look of tapered blades and was lucky enough to score one but it’s been at my brother’s place waiting for scales for a while now. One day.

Rattlers are neat but also basically feel like a light wedge however I have this one smaller one I quite like, took a nice edge, slight smile, etc. sometimes a razor just fits.

“Lancet” is what Mappin called these, but there have been a few imitators and while I’ve not tried one quite like that though I have this one with a hollowed out spine that maybe is at least in the same sort of category? Heh, actually that mailcall is pretty topical overall, even has a lather catcher.

Yes, but I have 100 FHS-10 blades and no other razor to use them in😅

Good call on the Audiostrop then, much more appealing than the Oneblade (which I never really felt drawn to in any way) and I liked the noisy feedback from it though I did move mine along as I could get a similar effect from the Wilkinson.

Edit: closing a stray image search tab I spotted this link to an especially nice lancet-ish razor.

For frameback be sure to try one of the thin Japanese ones, they’re almost like a stiff hollow and kind of sing. Hm, others… have you tried a lancet blade? Sheffield with a rattler grind? With a taper? Oh! What about the Wilkinson Pall Mall / Dunhill? It takes (quarter hollow) wedge blades but can use Gem too. Not only does it have a roller guard but you can adjust the exposure. Neat thing.

Speaking of Gem blades, you know you can pull the spine off a Gem and use it in that Autostrop right?

Does your 472 have the decorated spine like the worn one I picked up early in my exploration of straights and still keep with the edge it came with as one of my references? https://imgur.com/a/QJX47Yg

Thanks for sharing! I must admit, I was slow to come around to this way of thinking, one soap (Williams), one brush (house brand badger), one razor (Merkur 38c) for years but then I tried a straight razor and that all went out the window so on top of the comprehensive arsenal of straights I have a whole spectrum of soap, various DE new and old (even a few vintage blades), Gem razors, injectors (the twin blades from Japan are amazing), a lather catcher, Rolls, and a Wilkinson Dunhill where I hone the blades (pretty much the same as the Pall Mall). And today I tried this new giant tub of unscented soap I bought for some bizarre reason.

Very glad for the chill low key hobby, I think my favourite part is the utter lack of urgency, and as a bonus my kitchen knives have never been this well maintained. Plus theoretically I can recoup most of the (not life changing) money if I ever have need of it and the stuff is small, it’d all fit in an unremarkable box so I don’t really see any downside.

• Razor: Weck Sextoblade
• Blade: Kismet (2)
• Brush: Mühle 23mm STF
• Lather: Canada Shaving Soap
• Post: Thayers

My one-pass few-variables shaves continue. Kismet blades are nice, this went better but maybe it was the soap–my Canadian MdC tribute showed up quickly (snagged one of the last two they had at amazon) and wow, the tub was so full it didn’t quite close. Needed to add water as I unexpectedly loaded a sizable amount of soap, I think I expected it to load slower being so hard. Very slick, and very unscented unlike MWF which I find stronger than I expected (though unobjectionable).

I think I saw someone complaining that the B-20 has rounded corners and barely hits the posts on their injector so it might be perfect for a shavette.

Sorry, I just peeked at the config options and have never run any of this so no idea about the interaction with Lemmy or how to troubleshoot that. What I’d do though is spin up a toy instance on another subdomain/locally in a container and try to reproduce it there. Maybe with a copy of the data from production if that’s easy enough to pull off.

But ya only in retrospect - I wouldn’t have expected changing the banner or icon to be a risky operation.

Just poked around because I was curious, it does look like the config for pict-rs lets you specify a format to convert things to and a max size/quality: https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs/src/branch/main/pict-rs.toml#L237

I’d suggest WebP with a quality of 85 and max dimensions of 3840x3840 (because 4k is 3840x2160).

That takes djundjila’s photo for today (a 4236x2677 jpeg) from 1.9Mb down to 360Kb for a 3840x2427 WebP.

You might also consider AVIF as that’s widely supported as well and looking like it’ll probably become the new standard but for now is a bit CPU intensive until CPUs start adding SIMD for it. Too bad JPEGXL lost momentum, it was kinda better (and less CPU intensive). But if the server doesn’t mind chewing on it …that same SotD as a quality 66 AVIF is just 160Kb, eg. less than a tenth the size.

For more info about quality settings: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/avif-webp-quality-settings/

Thanks for your efforts and yay, that works here too! I can paste them even. Nice. Interestingly, I copied a JPG by right clicking in Firefox and it wound up as a PNG when I pasted that. But maybe that’s the browser? Still, it’d be neat if the site converts to something more efficient like WebP and maybe caps the res at 4k …though maybe storage is cheap enough at this point that we could each put a full res SotD from our phones for the next decade without really being a burden? …and now I wonder if the transcoding can be done client side via wasm or something. Yawn, I should sleep, rambling.

Oh! One thing though: earlier I tried pasting my SotD to another Lemmy instance to see if that works and it did fine. I didn’t post it and cancelled the preview. However the image stuck around. Wondered if and how those get mopped up, maybe a cron job? It seems to be there still some hours later, might check tomorrow just out of curiosity.

(heh I think you restarted while I was trying to post this so will also be interesting if the image persists, though presumably shouldn’t be orphaned now that it’s referenced in a comment?)

• Razor: Kai Excelia
• Blade: Kai Mild (4)
• Brush: Omega 10015 22mm boar
• Lather: Mitchell’s Wool Fat (tallow)
• Post: aloe

Been messing around with some honing experiments on troublesome razors and wanted to give my face a break so last shave I used my Fili as that’s usually a nice vacation. It was almost but I’m not sure if it was the state of my face, not having used that blade in a while or maybe I really do have a bit of a reaction to Darkfall so I figured let’s eliminate some variables and find out about the soap, I’d been meaning to get to know this new Kismet blade a bit better and compare to AC so I’m going to stick to unscentedish soaps and one pass shavette shaves with quality blades for a bit. That’s almost a theme thingy, One’n’done’tober 11vember …something. But I’m not quite that organised and will start messing with it soon enough by seeing how Darkfall goes once I do a few of these then maybe digging out some paste edges to compare to the shavettes.

I like Kai AC blades. This was nice, been a while. Feels a bit sharper than the Kismet yet less stressful as this setup seems less pointy (even though the corners are muted on the Kismet) plus the extra weight lends stability. I guess AC is the wedge shavette and Weck the hollow.

Oh, and this inspired me to order the Canada Shaving Soap I’d been vaguely interested in for a while (as it’s rumoured to be comparable to MdC). So far I’d resisted as why would I use that much unscented? But it does have a place and maybe it’s SV-ish too, was really enjoying SV lately so here’s hoping. Looks promising anyhow: https://www.badgerandblade.com/forum/threads/canada-shaving-soap-review.614669/

https://i.imgur.com/joMktr1.jpg

Which gap do you have for the WR4?

Side note: Uploading pictures is so much faster since the migration. It’s almost like having pictures didn’t have to be a PITA 🤔

Heh, welllll… I just tried to upload one. I get an HTTP 400 from the post to the /pictrs/image endpoint and the response body is Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image): operation timed out. I thought maybe because I was pasting a largish image so I tried a 350kb or so JPG and clicked the upload button …nope, same deal. Oh, and the UI tries to parse the body of the error response as JSON so it pops up a red box with SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data.

Thanks, this is way, WAY faster.