My buddy Dave had a pinball room in his basement, five machines lined up, and he painted the walls flat black cause he thought it looked like a real arcade. Nobody ever played them. His wife finally dragged a floor lamp over from the living room one night and suddenly guys were staying for hours. She also swapped his one overhead bulb for a warmer one and he said it went from feeling like a storage unit to feeling like a bar. Cost him nothing but a lamp he already owned. Funny how light does more for a room than any of the machines in it.

Tbh the sludge disappearing is the whole game. Once you go burr you really can't go back.

That line about the "rhythmic knife work" teaching feel hits hard... seems like everything's going that way now. I noticed it with my grandpa's old hand tools sitting in the garage, nobody learns the slow way anymore when a machine can do it in half the time. We're trading away the muscle memory and patience that used to come with doing things by hand, and I think that's a loss you can't really measure.