Peddling my shit

So for once I’m going to use my blog to sell you guys something.

I’m selling an electric guitar.

This guitar is a project for the Adelante social center in Sofia, Bulgaria. I organized a free attendance seminar on repairing and improving electric guitars.

Here you can see the bunch of people who worked on it. Each one of those people made a little part of the guitar. I’m the guy in the white t-shirt.

We shielded and grounded the guitar properly to eliminate all the parasite noise and added a Dohn security circuit, so you can’t get killed if the sound technician does a poor job grounding the amps. Also a treble bleed circuit that avoids the guitar’s tone going lower when you don’t play at full volume.

This is a treble bleed circuit, a 1pf capacitor in series with a resistance half the value of the volume potentiometer. The volume pot is 250k ohms, so the resistance is half that.

Soldered in parallel to the shunt arm of the volume pot and the output, it lets high frequencies pass slightly, when turn the volume down. That’s done because of how impedance. In a normal circuit, when you lower the volume the treble frequencies go away first, and you get a more growly guitar sound. This circuit keeps the tone constant even at low volume.

This picture and the next are from a similar project, for illustration. More here.

The bridge pickup has a 0.022uF capacitor and the neck one a 0.047uF one.

On top of that we drilled the pickguard and installed a new switch to it, to switch on the neck pickup independently.

That way you can get two sounds regular stratos don’t get: all three pickups at once (I personally don’t care for it) and neck and bridge pickups (really cool sound).

Oh and we decorated it.

We named her «Gergana Adelantova», and so it’s engraved in the back. I’ll have a pick next week.

We’ve had a lot of fun making it and now we want someone to play the hell out of it.

We are selling it for 200 euros plus shipping, meaning using an economic option of an international courier service. We’ll send it well packed in bubble wrap. The cost, minus the 70 I paid for the original guitar second hand, will go to the activities of the social center.

Ask any questions!

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The plane of the dead is hilarious out of pure silliness. It’s got all the B zombie movie tropes you can expect, and the package isn’t half bad. You just have to carefully avoid taking it seriously. Maybe exercising your suspension of disbelief would help with this movie. Lift some Uwe Boll movies or something, just to get ready to temporarily accept some serious bullshit.

Top secret, dangerous and unadvisable experiment on a commercial plane? check
The experiment is protected like shit and it breaks down at the first turbulence? Check
Everyone who knows what’s going on is an idiot? Check
People in row 12 get massacred, and a scene later the massacre of row 11 starts, because for some reason they didn’t fucking pay attention to the shit going down in row 12?? Check marafacka, check.
The army wants to shoot down the plane, but the plane is protected by some very thick plot armor? Check check check xDD
Man, it has it all, even idiots who get told to their faces: «Shit’s going down, I’ve seen horrible stuff, we are all going to die» who a bit later go «Oh, someone’s knocking at the door of the control cabin, and I’m the only pilot left here… better go see what’s up. Yep.

The «amazing» spiderman sucks half of the time. Ok, first a point in its favour: I thougth they were making the remake of the remake, less than a decade before the reboot. Turns out there were two spiderman comic storylines published by marvel, Spiderman and the «amazing» spiderman.

The «amazing» spiderman is different from the regular one in that the regular Peter Parker is a shy nerd, with superpowers, and the «amazing» peter parker is not shy nor a nerd, but mr. coolio who cools even cooler because he’s fucking spiderman and he knows it. This is an AMAZING premise for a movie, seriously, an unself-conscious superhero who just rocks being a superhero can be a pretty cool idea if it is pulled off correctly. Seriously, lots of potential there.

Then, why the fuch every 10 minutes of the movie do I have to watch some whiny bullshit about the internal moral dilemmas of spiderman about his hot girlfriend? And SO. MUCH. BULLSHIT!! «Oh babe, being around spiderman is dangerous, you could get hurt *sad music*» «Hey I’m a fucking grown woman, I decide to be with you and run the risk. Also I’m super intelligent and can help you against the baddies» «but… but… but… my masculine ego!!». Seriously, half the movie is cool battles and spiderman sassing it up, half the movie is «do you want some cheese with your WHINE?» spiderman. Seriously dude, wtf, she’s an adult, a woman who can think for herself and who takes her own destiny in her own hands. Your misguided «love» for her is just cockblocking her from reaching her full potential. Be a fucking man and treat her like an equal, you pissy little bitch. You can coddle people to death, yeah, but it will be a sad and useless death, unlike you treating them like peers. Jesus W. Christ that I have to explain this shit in the 21st century.

The divide is an interesting movie. Ok, it gets boring at times, and imcomprehensible at other times (seriously where the fuck do the NBC suit dudes figure in?) but it is also an interesting representation of people in extreme situations. Locked up, with limited supplies, slowly descending into a spiral who endpoint is losing the higher qualities that we like to think of as «human» (as opposed to «animal») and that we all like thinking that we have in droves. (Note: Don’t fool yourselves, we are essentially animals and those higher human qualities melt away in smoke at the second sign of trouble, except for exceptional cases like, say, Maximilian Kolbe. But let’s be honest here, neither me, nor you reading this, measure up to mr. Kolbe).

It is also a film that potraits quite well an extended game of Prisonners’ dilemma. Or a game of Red November, if you’ve ever played it. It’s pretty cool and you should play that game if you can. And honestly you should also learn about prisonners’ dilemma. 80% of existence inside human civilization is informed by prisonners’ dilemma.