You can tell a lot about people by which deaths they celebrate, and which they lament.

“The average liberal thinks that if we’re nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can’t be reasoned with.” – John Hawkins

I think a celebration of life is in order, and what’s more lively than pretty girls wearing a smile and not much else?

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Q: What do you call a Biden voter crushed by student-loan debt?

A: Sucker.

Good thing, too, since if he had canceled their loans, they’d be suckers with a 1099-C on the way, promising a hefty tax bill. All those $150,000 Woke Studies degrees would become taxable income with the stroke of a pen.

(not so coincidentally, there’s a new bill in Congress to allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy…)

Unrelated

The Kindle version of Solo Leveling is out now.

Summoned To Another World To Defeat The Demon Lord, I Arrived 5,000 Years Too Early, So I’m Stuck In A Cave Eating Bugs

“Tomorrow, we have to decide which country we want to buy”

Went through the first pass on my taxes last night, and came out better than expected. That is, the two different employers, large severance check, and stock sales (options, ESPP, RSU) were effectively balanced by the extra amount I had withheld and the amount my new job over-withheld for Social Security, etc, leaving me with my usual close-to-breaking-even little refund checks. I’ll let it bake a week in case some late paperwork or surprise changes arrive, but it looks like the money I carefully saved for potential tax payments goes into my pocket instead. And there’s a semi-annual bonus on the way.

But I’ve already said that I’m not buying a new car this year, or a new computer, or a new camera, no matter how Sony tempts me. Oh, my. Wait, this one has gigabit ethernet?!?

We haven’t finalized the dates on the re-re-re-rescheduled Japan trip, but it’s currently “three weeks in November”, with enough time in Tokyo for me to spend way too much money. Probably not on camera gear, unless I find myself in a shop full of classic Minolta lenses…

Maybe this will be the trip where we take a few overnight trips off the beaten path. I’ve already penciled in a day trip to Kamakura and a whistle-stop tour of Nagoya (mostly for the Totoro House) on the way from Tokyo to Kyoto, but Nikko and Amanohashidate would benefit from full days, and a return visit to Ise would be cool, too. My sister’s not a big fan of cable-car rides, but she might go for an overnight stay at one of the many temples on Mt. Koya.

Solo Leveling Offline

File under peculiar the fact that the first half of the Solo Leveling light novel is out today in paperback only. No Kindle edition listed at all. I’d have to wait an entire day before I could start reading it. I think I’ll hold off for a week or so to see if the ebook turns up.

Which reminds me to check up on the online comic, which was supposed to start back up this year.

Marshmallow Oppai (マシュマロおっぱい), to be precise. I can’t imagine which recently-watched anime might have inspired this theme; target-rich environment, really. The only difficulty is that roughly 80% of the available pics are either Rem or Mashu Kyrielight (the latter being basically the trope namer, Marshmallow = mashu-maro).

Rigid tool holders…

Figures that right after I rant about poorly-designed 3D printable holders for 3D printing tools, someone shows how it’s done. Minimal volume of plastic, no supports necessary, fits on a lot more printers (175x125x58mm), with generic slots. It even has nicely-rounded edges. A few points off for abusing the words “generic” and “universal” while not including a wide slot or larger round hole, but other than that, it’s an excellent piece of work. Still not going to print it, though.

Unrelated Cura plugin

Material Settings, in the marketplace. This gives you a GUI method of making additional settings filament-specific (such as material_flow for a brand that runs thick/thin), rather than having to edit the XML by hand.

Yes, the only documentation for how to do this is in a comment on a bug that was closed with “won’t fix”. And the plugin exists because its author commented on the bug and agreed it would be nice to have.

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One for Rick C…

Overture PLA Plus/Pro is giving me a much less shiny top surface, at least in the dark blue (love the color, by the way).

Related, while using my heat gun to de-string a print, I noticed that it did a nice job of slightly dulling the extremely shiny finish that I get on the bottom from printing on glass+hairspray. I had it set to 350°F with the fan on high, and kept moving and rotating the parts to avoid melting anything thicker than strings.

Note that this is unrelated to the use of heat guns to restore smooth plastic finishes, which involves reducing the impact of UV and oxidation damage without sanding/polishing off the surface layer.

Oh, and What was I printing? A bag clip, of course. 😁

More specifically, this stl, scaled up from this clip by a designer at Prusa. I found the original wore out too quickly when used to secure twice-folded-over coffee bags, so I scaled it up (a bit more XY, a lot more Z) and printed at 0.3mm, with 5 walls so it printed solid without any infill pattern. The (quite mild) stringing came from testing Cura’s “smart hiding” of layer-start positions with a spool of filament that’s a bit thicker than the nominal 1.75mm.

(picture is unrelated)

Don’t Be A Tool

In the grand tradition of using your 3D printer to print 3D printer accessories, quite a few people have designed little stands to hold all their 3D printer tools and published them to the various “search” sites. With few exceptions, they suck.

Common problems include:

1. I need seven inches or more: requires at least 180mm in at least two dimensions. My printer’s build area is 255x155x170.

2. Carve away anything that doesn’t look like an elephant: designed as a solid block of plastic with small holes for tools.

3. If your love life requires close air support, something has gone very wrong: requires significant supports to print successfully.

4. Hours will seem like days: all of the above contribute to ridiculous print times.

5. Where does the third one go?: assumes specific workspace layout (wall-mount, pegboard, attaches to one model of printer, etc).

6. One ring to rule them all: very-specifically-sized slots for every tool you could possibly need, not just the ones you actually use regularly.

There’s a pretty reasonable one designed specifically for the Dremel 3D45. Except for the part where it mounts to the right side of the printer, which isn’t where I use any of the tools.

File this one at Cults3D under “baffling” (even though it would fit nicely on my printer), because it has prominent storage for seven spare nozzles. Why? Not even “why do you need seven nozzles”, but “why do you have them all out on your workbench gathering dust in unlabeled bins?”.

Right now, I don’t want to print any of them, and I don’t want to spend the time to design my own, so my tool holder will continue to be a $5 box from Michaels. Maybe I’ll make a little organizer insert for it sometime, but honestly, I pretty much just use the scraper, flush cutters, emery boards, and a small sharp knife, and those fit on the lid of the box, with room left over for the calipers.

66%の誘惑

(classical reference)

Next time, Nancy, maybe you shouldn’t buy your souvenir pens from China…

"That's the trouble with godhood: it robs you of your finer

judgement. A deity so rarely has to pay for his mistakes!”

"​...while heroes... heroes have an infinite capacity for

stupidity! Thus are legends born!”

How Disney destroyed Star Wars, catfight edition.

The images for the day are the intersection of the tags “virtual youtuber” (バーチャルYouTuber) and “ass goddess” (尻神様). This is a short NSFW set, just so I could get the joke in.

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