Had a plank snap right at the tongue on a big glue-down job in a Charlotte office building last week

Remember when we had to make fake books from scratch?

We were doing a low budget period piece set in a 1920s library and needed hundreds of books. Buying real old ones was way too much money, like maybe $5,000. My friend who works at a print shop in Akron suggested we just get blank book blocks from a bindery, about 500 of them for under $300. We aged the covers with tea and shoe polish, and from three feet away they looked perfect on the shelves. Anyone else have a cheap prop trick that saved a shoot?

TIL a coffee chat with my old boss changed how I think about job hopping

I ran into my first manager from 5 years ago at a cafe last week. He told me he just hired someone who had 4 jobs in 6 years, which used to be a red flag for him. He said, 'I realized I was looking at it wrong. It's not a lack of loyalty, it's a clear skill in learning fast and adapting.' That hit different because it came from someone who used to think the opposite. Has anyone else had an old rule about resumes get flipped on them recently?

Saw a new apartment building going up in Boise and the site office was just a tablet on a tripod

I was walking my route over by the Bench neighborhood last week and they're putting up a big four story complex. What got me was the site office, or lack of one. It was a small trailer, but the door was open and inside, instead of a huge desk covered in rolled up plans, there was just a single rugged tablet mounted on a metal stand. A foreman was tapping on it, checking something, and then he held it up to show a guy in a hard hat what looked like a live 3D model of a plumbing stack. He zoomed in, spun it around, and they both nodded. No paper at all. It made me think about how much stuff we still move by hand at the post office, and how that one screen seemed to hold the whole job. Has anyone else run a full site off just a tablet like that? What software even lets you do that without a full trailer of computers?

Fake comics are showing up in our neighborhood trades

I saw something bad happen to a comic fan at the community center swap. A guy traded a Spider-Man book that looked real but was a cheap copy. My buddy lost his good X-Men issue because of this. Now I hear it's happening at other spots like the library comic club. Be really careful when you trade with people you don't know. Always look close at the pages and covers. Let's spread the word so no one else gets stuck with a fake.

Misaligned a critical joint yesterday and had to redo the whole section.

The extra effort paid off when the inspector gave it a thumbs-up today.