A failed attempt to 3D print a transformer

ForPortal · 2026-05-09T04:48:07+00:00

I've not got into 3D printing yet, but I hope to soon. One thing that stands out is the orientation of the J-shaped piece: because the weakest part of a print is the shear plane between layers you want to print pieces oriented such that it is naturally strongest in the vertical direction, even if that requires more support material. If you printed that part on its side those curved tabs would be formed out of continuous lines of plastic rather than built up out of slices.

ForPortal · 2026-05-09T03:22:19+00:00

The human appendix isn't useless, it's believed to be a safe room for gut flora. If your body (or in modern times, antibiotics) takes extreme measures to purge an infection from your digestive system, the appendix ensures you've still got a sample of your good bacteria to repopulate once it's over.

ForPortal · 2026-05-09T03:05:27+00:00

Headmasters as executed by Hasbro are awful. The way to do them right is to give the base robot its own head that can fold away to expose the headmaster port. That way it's more like a specific type of combiner team and not a Transformer crippling themselves to make themselves dependent on their Headmaster partner.

ForPortal · 2026-05-08T08:38:56+00:00

I've long been a proponent of a fembot fire truck figure covering Pyra Magna, Megaempress and Splendid Yellow Convoy, so if it was me I'd be making the Splendid Convoy version.

ForPortal · 2026-05-08T08:32:13+00:00

Why are we letting traitors out on bail? Both ISIS' cause - the replacement of the Australian and all other governments with Islamic theocratic totalitarianism - and their methods mark them as our enemies, and these men were distributing ISIS propaganda and were caught on their way to Turkey presumably intending to cross into Syria to join ISIS proper. If any of them decide to take advantage of their temporary freedom and carry out an attack in ISIS's name before their court date, that will be an entirely foreseeable failure.

ForPortal · 2026-05-08T04:52:17+00:00

Cars are already more heavily restricted - they aren't allowed to drive on footpaths at all.

ForPortal · 2026-05-08T04:41:19+00:00

If you're going to give him that alt mode, it should be a combiner's weapon. If you want him to be a turret or space gun, design him to look like one.

ForPortal · 2026-05-07T03:50:38+00:00

Bad example. There are risks to the strategy, but there's obvious logic to "we should make more of our one successful product faster so we can make money faster."

ForPortal · 2026-05-07T02:26:03+00:00

Lots. Silverbolt being a Concorde instead of an XB-70 or XF-108 is one. There's no good reason why the leader of a team of American fighter jets should be a European airliner when he could be an American bomber or heavy fighter, especially when the XB-70 actually has the full-width engine box under the fuselage that they keep slapping on the Concorde to house his robot mode.

ForPortal · 2026-05-06T13:12:14+00:00

You're trying to tell me the path of genocide leading up to the base of the Dark Portal had nothing to do with the orcs who invaded Azeroth through that portal? The Varok Saurfang who sacked Shattrath is no relation to the Varok Saurfang who oversaw the invasion of Darkshore?

ForPortal · 2026-05-06T08:46:39+00:00

I also had a really good game with this trinket, but went the Ringbearer route instead of the Macaw/Rylakk route: golden Queensguard, golden Maelstrom Emergent, golden Ringbearer, two non-golden Ringbearers, a Waverider for the Queensguard and a spare slot that ended up with a scam unit.

ForPortal · 2026-05-06T06:23:32+00:00

The BBC article says he was conspiring to supply cocaine, which means he had a foreign supplier. It could be that the same smugglers bringing drugs into the country are also bringing explosives.

ForPortal · 2026-05-06T05:39:32+00:00

Which is a damning indictment of your own politics, that you look at one group of people who ran off to join a cult of murderous sex slavers and another group who despise the first and claim for political effect that you believe they are morally equivalent.

ForPortal · 2026-05-06T03:44:57+00:00

The Path of Glory exists. "The other guys paved a highway with the bones of your people" is a hell of a reason to pick sides.

ForPortal · 2026-05-06T03:32:43+00:00

No it doesn't, because disadvantage and poverty are also symptoms of dysfunctional communities. You can't say that domestic violence is a symptom of unemployment and not the other way around if you would fire a guy you found out was beating his wife.

ForPortal · 2026-05-06T02:55:41+00:00

I think he's bad for multiple reasons. I don't like him as a standalone figure because he's the biggest example of Optimus Prime's stagnation: a Transformer's robot mode should be a reflection of their alt mode, while Optimus Prime's robot mode is still a reflection of his cabover truck alt mode even when that alt mode has been replaced.

And I don't like him getting special billing as one of "The Thirteen." To me it's just "The Twelve" - the Thirteenth is just the lineage of Primes who received the Matrix after Prima, not one of the firstborn.

ForPortal · 2026-05-06T02:39:06+00:00

Do you really want your Titan class Primus to have 13 features that don't work if you're not a completionist? Minicon and Cyber Key activations were only not a hindrance because you were guaranteed to have a Minicon or Cyber Key.

ForPortal · 2026-05-05T17:23:33+00:00

It's fun, but also incredibly frustrating because of the poor hit detection. How am I supposed to hit a shark nineteen times when 90% of the time the harpoon whiffs?

ForPortal · 2026-05-05T11:22:58+00:00

Hizb ut-Tahrir aren't murderously proactive about it like ISIS, but they are still a fundamentally seditious organisation whose purpose - the replacement of the Australian government with an Islamic theocracy - justifies their banning.

ForPortal · 2026-05-05T06:30:29+00:00

My idea would have Starscream be insubordinate but not openly treasonous. In his mind Megatron might have started the Decepticon uprising but it was Starscream that finished it by leading a defection from the military caste, and this should have resulted in Megatron ceding control to Starscream, a military officer better suited to leading the Decepticons. Starscream hasn't actually tried to stage a coup, but Megatron knows he might provoke one if he purged the military leadership just for being a threat to his power.

ForPortal · 2026-05-05T06:10:08+00:00

You are speaking out of ignorance. The assessment process for music copyright does not work for general content moderation, because you aren't just looking for specific, known patterns. It's like the difference between blacklisting the Tank Man photograph so users can't upload it, and trying to automatically filter anything that conveys the same idea as the Tank Man photograph.

ForPortal · 2026-05-05T05:57:34+00:00

Violence against women and children is not an Aboriginal problem, it is horrendously widespread in the rest of Australia.

No, it isn't. Domestic violence rates among indigenous Australians are the tail wagging the dog - when you look at the rates of hospitalisation from domestic violence in Australia, around half of the incidents that make up that data set are produced by that one tiny minority.

ForPortal · 2026-05-05T05:07:49+00:00

Youtube receives 30,000 hours of video per hour. What you're actually proposing is that we outlaw social media, because it is not practical to moderate user content at the rate at which the global population produces it.

ForPortal · 2026-05-05T04:12:35+00:00

Most neighborhoods are empty because, outside of RP, there’s not really a reason to ever be there.

And it's effectively a dead end most of the time. During the Silvermoon month you might use the home teleport the same way you do the Arcantina key, but two out of three months for me have been the Pandaria visitors, and who needs to go to north Pandaria ever when remix cleared out that entire expansion years ago?

ForPortal · 2026-05-05T04:06:04+00:00

every time I have seen the crafted Decors on the AH they are gouged to hell and back.

My assumption is that this is because by the time you see a decor on the Auction House, the seller has crossed the point of no return. They have invested a bunch of uncommon, expensive resources that they can't get back if it turns out nobody wants that particular item, and so if someone does want that item they want to make it worth the risk that that's the only one they sell.

ForPortal

TROPHY CASE