real life

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 I realize that the P1S has recently been replaced by the P2S, and the AMS has also recently been replaced by a newer AMS 2.0 model.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. The post Adventures in Plastic Poop appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

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. The post Thanksgiving Spaghetti appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Pile of Shame

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Good Morning Folks! I took the day off because I have several doctors appointments stacked up. A few weeks ago I dealt with a medical issue brought on by a change in medication, and that has triggered a bunch of referrals to specialists. The positive is all of the tests have turned up nothing special, and everything being normal… the negative is we still have no clear indication as to what caused me to react to the medication swap so drastically. I don’t want to go into too much detail but essentially I lost 22 lbs in 3 days… on something that was not designed to make you lose weight like that. Essentially threw my body into a state of shock and we are fishing for the reason behind it. We will see how things shake out over the next month or so of going to specialists. Here is hoping I don’t have something tragically wrong with me that can’t be fixed.
So here is where I share some of my shame with you. Over the pandemic the Garage became a dumping ground for everything from boxes that I had yet to break down and take to recycling, to dead electronics, to all of my wife’ stuff from her classroom. I don’t have a proper before and after, because things were far worse than the picture on the left when I started this mission over the last two months… but essentially I have been working on the garage and getting it into a workable state. Essentially when my wife switched schools during the pandemic, she dumped everything from her previous classroom in a pile of boxes on the left side of the garage. When I had to hurriedly move her out of her out of the classroom when she passed away, those boxes got crammed into the right side of the garage. So since September I have been plugging away at improving things… effectively moving everything to the south side and then putting up shelving on the north side, and then doing the opposite. I have a ton of boxes that will need to be gone through and dealt with, but at least most of it is now up on shelving units, and the work table that has not been clear in over a decade is now almost completely clear… allowing me to move forward with the purchase of a 3D Printer that I am going to set up out here. I still need to do a bunch out here, but I was pushing to get to clear enough for me to be able to move all of the furniture in from the backyard before the truly cold weather hit.
In other news I recorded one of my dumb little gameplay videos of my Icetrap build, and have since pushed it up another level. Right now this has become my mapper and I play it while gathering up the sulphite to go back into delve and grind out levels on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. For the moment I am running a bunch of scarabs that just add additional monsters to the map, while also running legion and expedition with the node that gives me a single large explosion. It has been years since I have run either of those mechanics so I am having fun. It also makes for some pretty chill experience loaded mapping. For the moment, the next few points I spend on the tree are going to be adding a couple more power charges to see how things scale from there. If by some miracle I can ever stack all 18 traps on the same target and have them overlap… POB claims it will deal 16 million dps. I do not however believe that is even in the realm of possibility.
I am now sitting at 20 of 40 challenges and have my first tiny totem pole joining the role of totem poles in my hideout. I’ve knocked out most of the simple items and what is left requires quite a bit of grinding. I need to open two more of the currency wombgifts and then I will knock out the achievement for those. After that I need to focus on getting things like the cross contamination achievements, and quite honestly… just grinding a bunch of content to finish out the gear grinding goals objective. My goal is to match the same size totem pole that I have had the last few leagues which I think is 34 of 40. So I have a long ways to go before I accomplish that.
I just dinged 98 on the RF Chieftain and now I plan on knocking out a few more difficult things that I had been putting off, because I did not want to risk backsliding on experience gain. So i will be knocking out Sirius for another map slot, and potentially doing some stuff like Uber Atziri which should be reasonable with the current state of my build. I might even try some of the other proper ubers to see how well I can tackle them. I might do some more T17s and a few T16.5s since it will be awhile before I really care about how far progressed in experience I am again. 98 is really where the experience curve grinds to a halt, and those last two levels are super painful. However I expect to push to 100 again, because it knocks off a component in the last achievement. Anyways! I need to gather trash and get it out to the curb and then start prepping to go to a doctor appointment. I hope yall are having a great week, and I will see you tomorrow for more nonsense. The post Pile of Shame appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Ineffective Cosplay

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Good morning folks. This is going to be one of those blog posts that does not get syndicated widely, because it is going to be a bummer. Last night I fell asleep on the couch around 7ish… went to bed around 8pm… and then slept until almost 7 am. This represents probably the longest I have slept in years. I feel like the wheels are falling off now. Technically I am still functional. I am getting up and showing, feeding myself, doing responsible work things, and making sure the house stays at moderate levels of cleanliness… but I feel like I am not really living. I am still chipping away at the giant mess in the garage, and am about halfway through. Essentially the north side is finished with cabinets set up and things moved into them… and I need to attack the south side and effectively do the same. I have a pile of shit in the garage that at some point I will call the folks to haul away. I can’t say with all certainty that nothing brings me joy… but more… I have forgotten what joy feels like. I feel like I have been cosplaying someone who has their shit together in the whole “fake it until you make it” genre… but I am just not sure if I will ever get there. This week is hard. It is fall break for all of the schools in Oklahoma, and I did not even know this until a coworker asked for it off to spend time with his family. This was always a big week for us and we almost always had some sort of project going on that we would complete. If nothing else it was a time when I took off from work and we spent quality time together. We would often go for trips elsewhere like down to Dallas, up to Kansas City, or over to St Louis to visit friends. I could do all of these things… but I just don’t really feel like doing so. Last Friday was really hard too, because there was a cookout essentially in honor of my wife… but not having her… made the social interaction almost unbearable. People talk about having emotional support animals… but my wife was my emotional support human and I miss her greatly. No matter how uncomfortable a situation got… I always had her, and I always knew that she understood that my skin was crawling and that I wanted to run into the night screaming at the top of my lungs. How do you condense 30 years of moments shared… into even beginning to rebuild that connection with anyone else? I feel like my life is over… and I am just this shambling husk that remains, because all of the good that was in me was sucked out the night I came out of the bathroom and found her making that awful gurgling noise on the couch. My life ended on July 2nd… and everything that I am doing now… is just a vague attempt at distracting me from that fact. Another thing that is really hard… is that in theory they should have installed the gravestone last week. There is a certain finality in that act. Like until that happened it almost wasn’t “really real”. I’ve not gone up to check, because its a two hour drive away, and I am not even sure if I should be doing that drive by myself. I had been waiting on a call from the funeral home to let me know that it was installed… but they have also been pretty much incompetent at every step of this process. They did not tell me when the death certificates were available, did not tell me when the final death certificates were available, and did not tell me when they had a mock-up of the tombstone ready for me to review. If I did not have a “fuck this is taking forever” moment at each step… I would not have gotten any of the information. So basically… I have Schrodinger’s tombstone right now… and the only way I am going to know for certain is if I make the drive. I’ve not gone to the grave site… since the day we buried her because… there has never felt like much of a point. She is not there anymore. My wife herself firmly believed that, and thought the whole visiting graves thing was a bit weird. I mean if she is anywhere… she would be here since she died in the driveway. Not that I understand the mechanics of hauntings mind you… but it would seem like the place someone dies would be more potent than the place where their remains end up. I know at some point I will need to go. I will need to at least for the sake of her family make the effort of decorating her grave, since they all seem to care deeply about that sort of thing. I am agnostic at best… and atheist at worst… and I have always struggled with the rituals of a predominantly evangelical society. I know I have people who are willing to be there for me… but what they can offer me… isn’t what I need. I need my wife back. I have friends who are pushing me to get back into therapy. Essentially how the free therapy works is that you get five sessions per instance. In theory I could just keep making up a reason for why I need therapy, because it is only ever dealt with at the inception of the therapy… and not during the sessions themselves. It did help… but only those first three of five sessions or so. I think I might just be going through a low spot with the changing of the seasons and the coming of the season of darkness. I’ve never had seasonal affective disorder… my wife had that… and I have always cursed the existence of the sun. However maybe I do need to get out more and at least pretend I am a daywalker. I am trying to get out and about more on the weekends, but mostly just because I have things I need to get done. I know today I am going to run to the recycling place because it was entirely too full on Sunday, and I never unloaded the boxes from my truck. Maybe I just needed to cry for awhile. I have been doing so while I write this post, and am honestly feeling a bit better as a result. Unfortunately crying is not one of those things that you can just sort of force to happen. Maybe I needed to get some of the sadness out of me. I will say that I would be completely lost if not for Gracie and how needy of attention she is. So many of the things I did… because I was trying to take care of my wife. Without her… it just doesn’t feel like there is a point to doing any of them. I have mostly been going through the motions because the routines are familiar… but there is no passion behind it anymore. I think I am going to cut this blog post off, because if you have read down to this point… you are a real one. I am not sure if I have been lying to you… when I say that I am fine… or if this week just got to be too much and I fell apart. I am broken, and I have to admit that I am broken. I just am not sure if I will ever be fixed. The post Ineffective Cosplay appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.