Adventures in Plastic Poop

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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 I realize that the P1S has recently been replaced by the P2S, and the AMS has also recently been replaced by a newer AMS 2.0 model.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.

Thanksgiving Spaghetti

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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.

Stubbornness Prevails

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Good Morning Folks. Once a week, Ace and I get together to do Grandmaster difficulty content in Destiny Rising. In general we have had much better luck when we queue together for content, because at a minimum we know that we can rely on each other. This week however is pure butts when it comes to options. For those who have not gotten to this point yet, you are limited in your character options when it comes to Grandmaster activities and everyone has to choose one of six characters that is also over 64k power rating. Really of the options there viable ones are Rossi, Ning Fei, Gwynn, and Jolder. Of those generally the strongest characters damage output wise are Ning Fei and Gwynn… but both of them are very much glass canons that have to get up close and personal with mobs in order to deal the maximum amount of damage.

We started the night with Blitz and I decided to roll with Gwynn and Ace with Ning Fei because they were our strongest options… and quite possibly it was the most frustrating experience we have had in ages. We got one of the new Blitz, and the worst one… where you have to fight the giant eyeball in the center and everything feels super tanky for some reason. After running out of resurrections and only having the boss down to 2/3rds of their health… everyone abandoned and we decided to try something we thought would be easier… and ran a strike. That turned out to also be frustrating and it took us three attempts… with the final being pure spite because we lost our third party member and duo’d down the boss. The biggest problem with the encounter is the fact that the adds are so damned deadly. We had to shift up our strategy from trying to burn down the boss to being on top of the adds as soon as they spawned. It was not the cleanest kill in the world, but we were proud of not giving up.

After that we did some way more relaxing Morgran’s Hunt runs since the event is going on right now. We got quite possibly our highest score yet with a triple Maru setup, and it was a lot of stupid fun. Essentially we got to the round where the game starts to cheat in both runs. I am not sure there is a solid way to get through round eight, because the mob health and mob damage output spikes massively… throwing a bunch of yellow bar mobs at you so that you can’t easily knock out the bonus, often leading to the map ending quickly. That is okay though because we got two four key runs, which are pretty solid. Unfortunately we both got our guaranteed exotics and they were useless ones… with Ace pulling the Old Prefect and me pulling another copy of Two Tailed Fox. Essentially if we get together and do another couple four runs we will wrap up the event with several days to spare.

I finished up my hundred maps running blue altars, and during that time I got one divine altar… unfortunately being one for the boss to drop six divines instead of one for the minions to drop divines. Other than that the only other exciting altar that I got was one for exalted orbs, where I pulled three whole orbs for the entire map. There is a reason why I find myself enjoying red altars more than blue ones, because blue is a pure gamble with most of your maps giving you nothing worth writing home about. Red altars on the other hand end up producing a bunch of Chaos Orbs, which always feels at least somewhat useful. Now I need to shift gears and run one of my atlas trees that can splash in the red altar nodes so I can start grinding out my hundred maps for that.

This has led me to go back to my Alva farming setup with Ritual as I continue my hunt for King of the Mists invitations. I am running the really expensive scarab that makes it so that the last Invasion of each map drops a fully itemized temple. In my experience you end up getting quite a few temples to drop with Locus of corruption, each of which sells for around 100 Chaos, so if you get 3 of these in 20 maps you can pay for the cost of all of the scarabs required for this run. It also is worth quite a bit of experience and should be a good way of pushing up my Ice Trapper in levels. However to make Red Altars viable I think I am going to drop my anti-bleed pantheon and swap over to the one that makes it so burning ground does not hurt me, since you encounter so many burning ground altars.

In other news, my second big splurge should be here shortly. I ordered a Bambu Labs P1S with AMS combo and in theory I should be playing with it within the next week or so. A lot of the work that I have been doing out in my garage has been preparing for the ability to pick up a 3D printer and dive into that world. I have a bunch of things that I want to make and will probably talk about them some on this blog in the coming months. I mostly went with the Bambu Labs option because it seemed the most turnkey and beginner friendly. At some point I would like to also add a Resin printer to my mix, but for the moment I am getting started with what seems to have the lower barrier of entry and FDM with PLA and ABS. ABS really appeals to me becasuse of the ability to use the same plastic cement and sprue-glue that I am used to from plastic miniature kits. I will probably print more stuff in PLA however just for the ease of setup. I stayed out of this world not due to lack of interest, but more that I was waiting for things to stabilize a bit before buying something. We will see how this goes.

In other other news… I am doing considerably better and thanks for the warm wishes from folks over the last few days.

Witchers, Heroes, and Zanthimum

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Good Morning Folks. I am slowly climbing out of the abyss that is whatever the hell crud I ended up getting. What is remaining is a cough and congestion. I started taking some over the counter fake dayquil to help with some of the symptoms and that has improved my general quality of life. I am hoping between today and tomorrow I will have kicked it enough to feel comfortable trying to be around folks for Thanksgiving. Which will probably just mean that I catch something else… but that is the life of someone without much of an immune system. I still have no clue what exactly I have had since it came on Thursday afternoon, and still has held on with a vengeance all weekend long and into this week. Since I tested negative for Covid and Flu, I am guessing just some sort of a random viral infection.

Since I was pretty out of it, and honestly continue to be… I spent a good chunk of yesterday watching some shows. I burned through all of Season 4 of the Witcher and it was “fine”. The storyline continues to be a complete and fucking mess, at least compared to either the books or the games… but the characters are mostly on point and I have to just treat this as its own thing. Liam Hemsworth honestly might be doing a better job of Geralt of Rivia than Henry Cavill did, which is probably a good thing considering I personally gave some major stinkeye at this actor swap given how invested Cavill was in the show. I think he was fundamentally pissed at how much they strayed from the material, and Hemsworth is doing an adequate job of being properly Geralt-ish. It feels like they are attempting to tell the storyline leading up to the second game, more or less, but a lot of the scenes differ wildly from either the book interpretation or the game interpretation, which are themselves two different things. Its fine… and was very watchable, but you have to put that lore accurate side of your brain asleep when dealing with this project.

I also started To Be Hero X, which is a Chinese Anime that I had heard really good things about. Essentially it is a world where everyone has something akin to the social credit score and if this gets high enough, you start to develop super powers. However those super powers are directly influenced by the way that people feel about you. If effectively social media feels that you are super handsome, you will legitimately keep getting more and more handsome. Its a weird concept but the art style is freaking amazing. It flows between at least three drastically different art styles as it tells various stories centered around effectively normal folks who were thrust into the life of a hero. I am not sure how far I am from the end of the series but there definitely have been set up a bunch of interesting background elements and I am curious how some of the plot threads are going to wrap up.

Over in Path of Exile I am still alternating between mapping on my Ice Trapper and then Delving on my RF Chieftain. I thought I would take a moment and talk through what I am running for Scarabs. The goal is just to add additional mobs to the map, which makes my Ice Trapper level faster and also provides for a bunch of potential drops. I am running Alch and go copies of Tropical Island which I am oversustaining, but recently swapped all of my favorite slots to Strand with the goal of eventually flipping between those two maps. Wide open layouts really favor the area of effect of the ice trap lifestyle. Then I add in Two Scarab of Monstrous Lineage, Two Scarab of Adversaries, and One Scarab of Hunted Traitors to add a bunch of extra mobs to the map, while running with my Niko/Betrayal/Beyond atlas. All the while I am running blue altars with support on the tree so I can knock out that 100 maps achievement, and then I will probably swap up what tree I am using and go with something that can do red altar support so I can knock out another one.

One thing that I have been doing that I think I am going to stop doing… is running the 10,000 Blue Zanthemum strategy. I’ve been sending it with 250k dust and occasionally this produces divine orbs, but it does not feel like it does so often enough to make it worth my time. I am probably instead just going to save up enough materials for one of the multi-million shipments and see if I can get mirror shards instead. I’ve not touched mappers, but I have heard they are producing a lot of good stuff this league, however the gold cost is just outrageous. I am not mining at all because mining generlaly produces gear, and at this stage in the game… especially with the addition of the tree tree… I have no interest in random gear. Basically my last few days have been super chill mapping while watching something on the television, and that is about as much activity as I can really take.

Tonight I plan on doing some Grandmaster activities with Ace in Destiny Rising so hopefully I will remember to take some screenshots of our shenaningans.