Good Morning Folks. My wreath was perfect… until it wasn’t. Around 3:30 yesterday afternoon I had to run into the office for a moment, and when I left the house the wreath looked beautiful. When I got back around 5:30 it looked like the image on the right side. Essentially there is a short period of time where the light streams through our glass storm door at exactly the right angle that it heats up the metal of our door handle. This is not something I had really thought about before now, but apparently it also heats up the door frame area enough for the PLA that I printed the wreath out of to warp beyond all recognition. At first I thought it was a mechanical failure in one of the joints that could be fixed, but upon further inspection it is like the thing just sort of stretched and warped uncontrollably. For now I have a deeply surrealist wreath, and I am kind of curious what it does over multiple days… but for future knowledge I guess I probably need to print the frame out of ABS which is way more heat resistant. It was a massive bummer, but at least it looked cool long enough to take a photo of it.
I had an extremely busy day, and when I finally got home legitimately I crashed pretty hard after eating the takeout that I picked up on my way home. I attempted to grind a bit in Path of Exile but by 8:30pm I was falling asleep in my chair, and decided to head to bed. I tossed and turned quite a bit, and had a rather fitful night where I was either too hot or too cold and could not really seem to regulate my temperatures. I did make it a bit further into my quest for level 100 and am roughly 1 pip away from dinging. In theory if I stay awake long enough tonight… I should be able to push through to level 100, or at least get considerably closer. I am still fighting whatever unnamed death flu nonsense that I picked up. My boss is a few days behind me and is also struggling, even though to the best of my knowledge we did not infect each other. The cough has been the worst part and I just go into these coughing fits where I struggle to recover gracefully. Today is supposed to be the holiday party in the office, but I dropped off the cookies I was bringing last night so that I did not have to be around people, and am otherwise skipping out today because I don’t feel comfortable hacking and coughing nonstop around others.
Tam introduced us to Where Winds Meet last weekend on the podcast and a few of us have tried it out. So far… I am not really vibing with it. He indicated that they had resolved the beard problems that I have with most eastern fantasy games… and I am not entirely certain about that. This was the best beard I could get, which is reasonable, but nowhere near as majestic as I would have liked. Mostly it feels very much like a Ghosts game, and I am not sure when the MMORPG elements come online. For the moment it feels like I am playing an entirely single player adventure game with mildly souls-like roots, and that is find and good…. but I am not entirely certain if I care enough about it to keep playing. If anything I think my time would be better served playing Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, or catching up in Final Fantasy XIV. I at a minimum wanted to fire it up and check it out, and it is a gorgeous game… just not sure if it is one that is going to flip the appropriate centers in my brain.
So the other night I got distracted when I was going out into the backyard and feeding tripod, and apparently never actually locked that door. So I slept the entire night with it unlocked, where anyone could have walked into my bedroom. That creeped me out to the point where I had to scrub through my backyard camera just to make sure no one did anything untoward. At which point I found out that I have a bunch of Raccoons who have apparently been climbing the pole up to the second floor deck off my wife’s office. I have no clue what they are doing. There is nowhere into the house up there, and no access to any crawl spaces or anything… but it seems like they are just having fun climbing around. They were specifically doing it when the wind-chimes were going crazy so I wonder if they were going up to investigate that. I figured if nothing else you could see cute Raccoons doing Raccoon things.
I am bummed about the wreath, but it is what it is. This is all learning experiences as I shuffle forward into my first attempts at 3D printing.
Good Morning Folks! Today is my first day without steroids so here is hoping that I do not begin to backslide on my recovery. I am still going into pretty prolific coughing fits, but only really during exposure to cold air or strenuous activity. I will admit that I went into this weekend planning on spending the entire weekend playing Guild Wars Reforged. That did not happen, but I did at least get to level 9 in Seared Ascalon. Still enjoying myself but sometimes the heart wants familiar patterns, and as such I spent most of the weekend playing Path of Exile or fiddling around with my 3D printed nonsense. The ranger/elementalist seems to be working swimmingly, other than the fact that I am not really doing anything with the elementalist portion of it. I have too many good Ranger abilities that I want to use, and not enough hotbar space to use them all.
In Path of Exile I am focused on trying to get yet another character to level 100 without taking any deaths. I am sitting at 86% to 100 and am alternating between 250ish depth delving and them relatively chill mapping. I’ve gone hardcore into creating Alva temples, because each of them if crafted properly is worth roughly a divine and they sell almost instantly. They also produce entire rooms full of rare monsters which are pretty solid experience gained per map. I am mixing this in with Ritual which also produces quite a lot of mobs on the map and as such more experience gained. Occasionally I swap back over to my Ice Trap Elementalist if I want to do a Hive Fortress, because that build is way better at clearing the entire screen than Righteous Fire is. I am hoping that over the next few days I hit level 100 so I can at least knock that off my bucket list for the season.
I’ve been doing 7 million shipments in Kingsmarch rather than sending a bunch of little shipments, and managed to get my very first ever Mirror Shard. These sell for around 35 divines each, so it was a quick infusion of capital. It feels better to do this and save up materials until I have 250k Blue Zanthemum and 1 million Dust rather than sending 10k/30k shipments out constantly. Now that I know how well this works… I will probably take this strat for future leagues, because a single shard makes up for all of the effort and I have heard there are often cases where you get multiples at once. Regardless you always get 5 or 6 Divine Orbs in a 7 million shipment so they still feel better off than a bunch of small shipments that may or may not have anything in them. I really need one of my shipments to get interdicted so I can fight the sea captain and knock it off my achievement list. I might have to start running mappers to see if one of those can get captured, because I really just need one of the kingsmarch bosses.
Over in Destiny Rising we managed to get another three stronghold week with the guild, but are reaching the point where we just need more active folks doing dailies because we keep running out of the juice required to keep our “bitcon miner” going. If you dabble in Destiny Rising and need/want a guild and are doing dailies, please hit me up so I can throw you an invite. I managed to get Jaren up high enough to start doing big kid activities and he actually becomes really useful when combined with one of the season artifact abilities that gives you a significant damage boost when you blind enemies. His movement ability that always seems to be up blinds everything around him, which means he can keep buffing damage output and shred through packs quickly. I look forward to seeing what he plays like when we do our grandmaster activities night, because I think he will inevitably be in the mix.
I finished gluing up and hanging my “Lego” Christmas Wreath and I am pretty dang happy with it. I tried solvent glues but did not find anything that would work well with PLA in spite of other discussion about it. The plastistruct stuff does have a solvent effect, but not enough of one to actually allow the plastic to bond. You could probably use it for smoothing out some minor layer lines, but nothing extreme enough to properly “plastic-weld” things together. So instead I relied on good old fashioned superglue and just letting it sit for awhile to make sure it was properly bonded. I cut out felt strips for the back of the wreath and placed those on the 3 highest points so that it would keep things from banging a lot when I hung it. So far I am pretty damned chuffed by it, and can absolutely see creating variations of this for other holidays.
I also finished up printing my second cabinet, but ran out of black filament and had to substitute in something else. I MIGHT reprint that single top of the unit in black because I ordered some refills that should be coming in today. I don’t mind the white but do think I would rather have them all be black structure with colored shelves. I can’t look at anything red and white without thinking of Oklahoma University, which is a thing I already see way too often anyways. I’ve got a really pretty turquoise filament that I ordered that should also be arriving today. For the black I am using spool-less refills for the first time since I now have a decent assortment of reusable spools, so hopefully that goes smoothly. It takes the cost per roll down to around $10 instead of $16, which for a bulk color like black seems like a good option. Right now as we speak my printer is idle for the first time since I got it, mostly because I am waiting on the black filament before I dive back into another series of prints.
I exported one of the timelapse videos that the P1S makes all the time while printing. I’ve already reached the point where I greatly prefer the Sunlu filament to the default Bambu Labs stuff that came with the unit. The Sunlu just ends up with a better finish and it is so much easier to remove supports from it. I printed this little guy in the green filament that came with the printer, and getting the supports off was a pain in the ass. I had to actually break out nippers to cut loose some of the elements that were holding onto the backside of his teeth because I was afraid they would do damage to the actual structure. I am slowly building up a toolkit of things to deal with bad prints, and I feel like I need to search for some sort of a hooked tool that I can print for pulling on supports. I used bambu scraper without a blade in it, to a decent amount of luck to help break free some of the big supports. I think one of my next missions is going to be to start actually organizing my damned tools so I can find things when I need them, because I have decades worth of tools scattered around the house in four different places which is not useful at all.
I had my first print go completely off the rails. I had been trying to print some spindles for a spinning wheel that Ace uses, because I am sending them a dino friend and figured I might as well try printing off a few bobbins while I was at it. I successfully printed off one for their current machine, but when I moved on to trying to print one off for a machine that is currently backordered… things went sideways. I think there were a few things that happened. Firstly I think the part was a bit too fine detail and it maybe had some overhangs that auto supports were not taking care of. Then there was a problem where one of the parts that was very fine… popped up off the bed and then the printer got confused trying to chase it around as it moved. I had tiny bits of white filament everywhere… above the plate, below the plate, on the gantry tracks, at the back of the unit, and most concerningly around the vertical screw drives. I happened to catch it when I looked at the preview and cancelled the print and then cleaned everything up. I might give this another go but I think I will need to increase the wall size or something to make sure it is printing out slightly thicker objects.
I started a new book this weekend as well, but I admit I have not made it super far into it. In 2023, I read the first two books in this series back to back and enjoyed myself. However coming back they feel immensely dense, at least compared to the relatively light reads that I have been doing lately. It is a very Norse mythology themed series and everything has a bunch of hard to pronounce names to remember… and quite frankly the two chapter long rapid fire catch up preamble was a bit much to get through on its own to remind you of what happened in the previous book. I am going to push through this, because I do not want to have a “did not finish” on my list for the year, but it is going to be a bit of a challenge. It is weird how tastes shift over time, because I was fully on board with these novels the first time, but now that I am going back for book three it is a slog.
I am hoping yall had a wonderful weekend that was filled with something interesting. Right now I have used almost all of the superglue that I went out to get over the weekend and am waiting on some bulk shipments to arrive so I can finish putting some of the other projects together. I got an order of magnets and metric machine screws which will further expand what I can do with this nonsense. I still need to get a good set of calipers and might make a trip the next town over to harbor freight to pick up a pair there. I am having a heck of a lot of fun with 3D Printing, and it is way the hell more engaging than I even thought it would be.
Good Morning Folks! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break if you celebrated it. I had a decent enough day but it pretty much wore me out completely. I am still fighting some illness and I have a doctors visit scheduled for in the morning where I am hoping going to get some help. I feel like I have something akin to “walking” pneumonia because I can function well enough… but just have zero stamina and devolve into coughing fits on the regular. We did not record AggroChat yesterday in part due to we were down a bunch of folks, but on my side… because I did not really feel like pushing it. Suffice to say that Friday when I set up my brand new 3D Printer… it took multiple passes before I had the stamina to get everything done. In truth I had done 90% of the things in a single pass, and had I ONLY dealt with the printer I would have probably been fine. However before hand I set up my last of my shelving units, and routine the power cord for the printer over the top of the door leading into the house from the garage. So by the time I actually got around to unpacking the unit I was already running low on juice.
I partook of one of the recent deals through Bambu Labs where I got their P1S printer, the AMS 1.0, and a couple of partial spools of filament for roughly $500. I realize that the P1S has recently been replaced by the P2S, and the AMS has also recently been replaced by a newer AMS 2.0 model. However I figured this was a good set up to get me started in my adventures in FDM printing. Truth be told I had been researching different printers for the better part of the last year, and this setup appeared to be the least painful and was as close as you could get to a truly out of the box turnkey experience. Truth be told other than a few hiccups where connectors popped off during assembly, and a single jam feeding filament with the AMS, it has been a pretty flawless experience. I would absolutely recommend this setup for anyone wanting to dabble in such nonsense.
As is fortold by the printer gods… the first print is required to be a Benchy. It also ships with the printer on the SD Card and was readily available. By around 2pm on Friday afternoon I had printed it out and for the most part everything seemed to be working just fine. This was with the default settings and long before I had dabbled in installing Bambu Studio or tweaking any of the parameters. My second print was a scraper, which honestly I am not sure if I am actually going to use because I am not too keen on metal blades on my textured printing plate. Instead after a bit of research I picked up some plastic razor blades which arrived yesterday and are seemingly going to work beautifully without leaving any scratches. I am well and truly knee deep in the eternal scope creep of hobbies, and I have a cooking torch on its way arriving today so I can burn away stringing when it happens.
The third print was a model designed by Miscast that is part of his permadeath vlog series. The models he has been releasing as part of this series are specifically designed to be a bit chunky so that you can print them without much issue on an FDM printer. For most miniature scale printing you really need resin printers, which is a thing that I am planning on getting into at some point but figured FDM was the better starting place. I attempted to use some of the auto settings in Bambu Studios, and was the first time That I actually laid parts out myself on the plate… and lets just say… it is also the model that made me realize I was going to need to start tweaking some of the settings. This is absolutely usable, especially when you consider that it is largely designed to be a base for kit-bashing… which is going to require a lot of post processing anyways.
So what did I do? Jump into my most ambitious print yet of course. This represents a plate of legally distinct Not-Space-Marine Not-Space-Wolf chapter base toppers. I cranked up the quality as best I could and let these stew for 14 hours, as effectively the last thing that I printed on Saturday. While they need some cleanup, and removing some support material that I had to add to deal with some of the floating aspects of a few of the designs, I think they are absolutely serviceable for the purpose of miniature bases. I printed off 25 of these in total, and for the most part I am pretty happy with them. Again I will absolutely spend a bit of time fiddling with them and smoothing out a few spots where there are textures that I did not want but they should paint up just fine when an official GW Space Marine is standing on top of them.
The first print of the day on Sunday was a set of filament clips, because I had ordered some specific colors of filament for the next big project. After doing a bunch of research I landed on this design which seems to work beautifully. Essentially I needed to eject the lime green and neon orange filament that the unit came with, so that I could load up new spool of SunLu Matte Green, and SunLu Matte Red high speed PLA. I put the other green and orange in baggies and put dessicant sachets in there as well, which is a thing that I am going to need to start saving from pill bottles. In theory you need to keep your Filament as dry as possible, and while we do not really struggle with high levels of humidity that often, apparently once it goes bad it stays bad and there is not much you can do to save it. There is a whole system that you can print out to put in the AMS 1.0 to solve this problem, which I will spend some time doing at some point.
The next project is something that I had seen somewhere along the way either on Instagram or Facebook or something of the sort. Essentially someone had the idea of making a “Lego” Christmas Wreath, and within a few minutes of searching I found several sources. I largely wanted the most simplistic design that only used the “leaves” and the 1 unit caps as berries. First off I have to say how much I love the fact that this printer has a camera. Sure I wish it transmitted at a reasonable framerate… but just having some ability to check in on your print is phenomenal, especially since I am usually upstairs in my office and the unit is humming away on a workbench out in the garage. My sibling Ace has been living vicariously through me and I have been flooding their messages with lots of progress shots as we went along.
The leaves came out beautifully and each one of them took about an hour and a half to print at the ttweaked settings that I had finally landed upon. I am not sure how much is the settings that I tweaked and how much is the fact that I swapped filament, but so far I really like the Sunlu stuff. I got it purposefully since I had heard lots of good things from folks about it specifically, and so far I agree with their assessment. It is cheap enough at $14 per 1kg spool, and in printing off six of these I barely made a dent in the spool as a whole. It took around and hour and a half for each leaf to print, and then some additional time to let the plate cool down to around 35c so I could remove it without fear of anything warping. Over the course of the day I printed all six leaves required to make the wreath and then set up a plate full of the 1x caps in Red filament to churn away while I slept.
When I got up and around this morning, I dry fit everything together and this is the result. I am not 100% sure if I like the arrangement of the caps yet, but I am pretty happy with the end product. There was some stringing down inside the red caps but it isn’t noticeable at all since they are going to get seated down on top of the leaves. I’ve heard that Plastruct works beatifully as a solvent glue to weld together PLA and I am contemplating a trip down to a local hobby shop to see if they have any over lunch. I would probably try it first with the Miscast limo to glue it up and make sure it did not destroy everything in the process, before touching this effectively final and perfect print. I could always use CA/Super glue, but I have always preferred “welding” plastic together when an option, and would love to find a viable solution for that with the ubiquitous nature of PLA.
Today however I need to sort out a better system for poop management. Essentially each time the unit clears the extruder head or switches filament color… it poops out a little bit of material down a chute in the machine that leads to it just sort of spilling out randomly onto my workbench. There are dozens of different systems that people have devised, but I am going with effectively a pretty straight forward bin that just sits up against the back of the machine to catch things as they drop out. I am holding onto this for the moment because if Plastruct works… I might try and create some sort of equivalent of “sprue glue” with it for smoothing out rough surfaces similar to how you can use it for gap filling styrene models. These remnants will also be great for testing with just to see how it works. However I did have the funny idea that if you had enough of these, they would probably make a great replacement for packing peanuts.
That was my weekend and my first steps into the 3D Printing world. Expect to see more of this nonsense in the coming weeks, and at some point I fully expect to get into resin printing as well.
Good Morning Folks and Happy Thanksgiving, or to my Canadian friends… Thanksgiving a month late. This is going to be a pretty text heavy post so as a result I am paying you off up front with a cat photo. There are a lot of things that I am thankful for this year, because it has been quite possibly the hardest year of my life. For those who do not follow this blog regularly, I lost my wife of just shy of 30 years in July when she passed away suddenly from what was effectively undiagnosed congestive heart failure. We had no clue anything was wrong until she suddenly effectively dropped dead one day after we both had a bout of Influenza B. What I am most thankful for is the support structure that I have had to make sure I am functional.
There are a lot of folks that I knew would have my back no matter what happened in my life because we are as they say “ride or die”. This includes my unofficial sibling Ace, the entire AggroChat crew, a bunch of folks from my work family, a handful of neighbors that we were really close to, and my family both my personal family and my wife’s family who keep checking in on me. What I did not expect was the plethora of other voices that have continued to show up in my life and make sure I am doing okay, and have been there to listen when I very much was not. Y’all have been amazing and I think you know who you are. I am not exceptionally good at accepting help in any form, because I am stubborn at doing things on my schedule and my way… but y’all have always been there in the background supporting me with a kind word when I needed it.
Another thing that I am deeply thankful for are my cats. Sure they love on me and snuggle me, and each of them does so in their own special way, but what they provide me that is more important than anything else is a routine. They expect to be fed at specific times, and expect me to go to bed at specific times. Gracie will scream at me until I pay attention and go to sleep when it is sleep time, and this is immensely beneficial. The indoor cats and the outdoor cats need me, and that more than anything is the thing that I feel like I am missing in my life… a sense of purpose. My purpose was taking care of my wife and doing whatever it was that she needed to make sure she could continue to be a rockstar teacher. I don’t have that anymore, and more than losing a partner, I lost my center of gravity and my purpose of being. The cats… while not exactly the same have allowed me to maintain some semblance of order in my life that got shook vigorously and carelessly dumped out onto the table. I am pretty sure a few pieces fell down the heating vent behind the couch.
What has been wild to me is how each of them has changed slightly, for better or worse. Mollie for example is way more demanding of my attention, and if I do not lay down fast enough she gets real mad at me because she demands to snuggle with me as soon as I hit the bed. Now this behavior is an adaptation of something that happened a lot where my wife would go to bed without me and read for awhile, while I was still winding down for the night and playing games. During this time Mollie got special time where it was just her, because the other two cats were almost always in my orbit. The death of my wife means that she had to get brave to continue getting that same special time, but she has done so and we snuggle more now than we have ever snuggled in the past. Similarly Gracie had behaviors that she had for me and my wife and they were totally different interactions… and now… I am sort of having to play both roles so she is always in my business. You see so much of her because she is always the cat that is within arms reach of me as I am doing anything in life. Josie sadly has gotten a bit more skittish, but she does not handle change very well so it is understandable.
Being the first Thanksgiving without my wife, I was way more concerned about her Mom than I was about me. I still have parents and we used to do the “divide and conquer” thing where I would go to my parents and she would go to her mom’s. There were many years where my wife was the only person there, and I wanted to make sure that she was not alone for Thanksgiving. So during the funeral process I made plans to eat Thanksgiving with her, and primed my folks that they would end up taking the backseat at least this year. We have a mutual friend that also said she was going to go with me to the meal, and thanks to timing it turns out my wife’s sister is also going to be available. She works odd hours and goes off to do these multi month long jobs where she cleans out nuclear power plants, so we never know exactly what her schedule is going to be like and if she is going to be available for holidays. We see her when we can see her basically, and I am also thankful that she has not made herself scarce in my life.
Early in our marriage we were having to attend five of six Thanksgiving proceedings. In my family there were always two happening which was my Mom’s side of the family and my Dad’s side of the family. Since my wife was from a split home there were two full families associated with her Dad and Step Mom, and with her Mom and Step Dad. Then we often had a separate meal with my wife’s eldest sister and her family, who often served as a bit of a surrogate mother because there was a twenty year difference between the two of them. So we would do this whirlwind trip through all of the houses, trying to carve the most opportune path and hit as many proceedings as we could so that no one felt snubbed, often ending up at her eldest sisters house that night, because we would get up at zero dark thirty to go shop the Black Friday sales, back when they were physical things and not just a month long sequence of lukewarm deals.
My wife would get so tired of eating the same meal over and over at every household, because while the individual components might vary… it was essentially a combination of turkey, ham, dressing, and the same basic sides over and over. Slowly over time the various houses disintegrated as they lost the connective glue that kept things together. When her step dad passed away, his kids stopped going to visit Mom-in-law in quite the same way… and started having their own family Thanksgiving meals. This led to some quiet gatherings, but my wife was always there. One year Mom-in-law asked my wife what she wanted to Thanksgiving meal, and not wanting her to have to cook a full meal with all of the trimmings, and also being tired of all of that… she said Spaghetti. Truth be told she makes really damned good Spaghetti, and then year by year that sort of became the tradition. The idea being it was something simple enough to make that it did not put her through an egregious amount of effort to make the meal, especially when it was often just the two of us and her eating said meal. The bonus would be that we also got sent home with a lot of excess Spaghetti, which reheats beautifully and keeps for a really long time in the fridge.
Traditions just sort of happen like that, and Thanksgiving Spaghetti was one of the good ones. Once upon a time I was starving and desperate for food… and ate a handful of honey roast peanuts at my Grandmother’s house… and those became something I got every single year because she thought I loved them. We do our best to do the little things for the ones we care about, and while honey roast peanuts are not a thing I actually enjoy… I did always appreciate the attempt at thoughtfulness. My Dad loves them so he always got them. I am thankful that we are keeping the tradition of this unorthodox meal alive even though my wife is no longer around. Thanksgiving without a big mess of spaghetti just would not be quite the same.
The only problem with a non-traditional meal is the fact that we ran out of traditional ones. As happens… the family bonds disintegrates over time as the glue that holds a household together passes away. We lost her sister and step father to cancer, and her dad started RVing full time which obliterated any semblance of a formal meal. Then both of my grandmothers passed away, each of them the anchor for that household, so eventually we were left in a scenario where we were out of homes to go to. My folks don’t really need to go to all of the effort of fixing the full meal, because my mom is no longer able to walk and my dad is overburdened with caring for her. So at some point we started partaking of Charlies Chicken, which makes ready to go meals that are pretty damned good. I went by and picked up a giant pan of chicken and dressing yesterday and then came home and split it out into another pan so I could take half of it to the little 85 year old neighbor guy that I check in on every Sunday. I wanted to make sure he also had a good Thanksgiving meal that he did not need to cook, and this also gives me plenty of leftovers in the fridge to eat on in the coming days.
I guess that is the challenge going forward, is that I am going to have to start building new traditions. There is so much of me that feels guilty that I am moving on with my life. I am trying to do things that bring me joy, and it feels somewhat wrong that I am doing so. The core of my being is still very much broken, and while I am shambling along and going through the motions… it feels like I still lack a unified sense of purpose in the way that I once did. I am going to have to find that purpose again, but that is a challenge for the future. I am just barely out of the crying every single day phase. I still have moments where I fall to pieces, and they almost always revolve around seeing something and desperately wanting to tell my wife about it, only to suddenly realize that I can’t. I am getting through it though and I am thankful to everyone who has helped me get to the point where it doesn’t hurt as bad as it did.
Anyways. I don’t normally do holiday posts but given that I have several hours to kill before I need to drive to my first destination, I thought I would sit down and bang one out because I am legitimately thankful for all of the help that I have been given this year. I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday, and if you don’t celebrate… then I hope you have a great tail end of the week and weekend. Does your family have any unorthodox family traditions? Drop me a line below because I would love to hear some of them.
