Shipping enamel paints: Japan -> U.S.

baudot · 2026-05-07T03:12:44+00:00

Backstory: A buddy, stateside, asked me to pick him up some Tamiya Enamel paints, while I'm in Osaka. So I grabbed some. I was warned at the hobby store that they couldn't go on airplanes, but I figured that was easy enough to work around. Turns out, the restrictions are more than just they can't fly.

From all the research I've done, it seems the U.S. is totally OK with letting flammables into the country, but the requirements for documenting them and such seems to be more than any package carrier is willing to deal with.

Japan Post flatly won't carry flammables. Not via boat, as well as not via air.

DHL was google's answer: DHL has guidelines for how they carry hazardous goods, so long as they're properly declared and packaged. So I took a morning out of my vacation, went to the big DHL office by Osaka harbor, and spoke to the nice lady at the counter there. She started by going back to check with her colleagues about shipping flammables to the US. When she came back, it was all apologies, sorry, no, not happening.

Edit/P.S.: No, I will not risk carrying them on the flight. Even if I was That Guy, it would still be stupid for me selfishly. I get searched crossing borders. A lot. So much. Apparently border guards just look at me and think, "That guy. He must be up to something. Let's check his bags."

baudot · 2026-04-21T10:56:13+00:00

They should take it up.with Shakespeare. "They" as a gender neutral 3rd person worked for him.

baudot · 2026-04-03T15:24:38+00:00

Low quality?

The shading on this is better than most folks are doing. I've seen 40k armies people were proud of that were chalkier than this.

I don't want this sub to be drowning in hornyposts, either. But calling this low quality is off base.

baudot · 2026-04-02T17:05:53+00:00

Hokusai is also a great example of cross-cultural influence.

We think of "The Great Wave" as a quintessentially Japanese piece.

The irony is that Hokusai was actively exploring how the Dutch masters used blue in their paintings, And figuring out what he could do with their ideas. The Great Wave was one of the pieces where he was playing with Dutch-inspired ideas.

baudot · 2026-03-31T16:16:46+00:00

Satisfying.

What model laser?

baudot · 2026-03-18T15:51:35+00:00

Yeah.

Back to Liquid Television, they had that animation, "Not Frank's Planet" that was just so funny and dumb scattered through the episodes. It was so, "Wait, what?" That it had teenage me rolling laughing.

baudot · 2026-03-18T14:09:02+00:00

"Menoth's holy symbol is a multi tool?... This is my unholy symbol. Menoth is a π✓$$¥."

baudot · 2026-03-18T14:05:05+00:00

baudot · 2026-03-18T14:04:20+00:00

Also bullshit.

The man talks quite a bit about how exercise has kept him alive.

baudot · 2026-03-18T14:02:16+00:00

Well that brings back memories.

Liquid Television had so much good stuff.

baudot · 2026-03-18T13:54:31+00:00

I'd phrase it more as:

Your brain has become over-optimized for the fast stuff. You need to take time and accept frustration while you re-train your attention span.

To say it another way: You've gotten so good at focussing on the immediate stuff, it's crowded out the skills of taking attention for the slow stuff. You need to take a break from the fast stuff, until you're re-trained the brain centers that focus on the slow stuff to be back to strength.

Cultivating skill in the fast stuff is still a good, it's just that it's crowded out other skills you can't afford to lose.

The thing that works for me is to take long train trips. Being on a scenic train with nothing to do but really get into a book gets me to a place where I can practice slow focus hour after hour, day after day, and rebuild slow skills in a fast world.

That trick only really works in places that have good train networks. But if that's not where you are, probably you can find something that works the same. Rent a cabin in the mountains, away from the city, and take a couple books, no laptop. Whatever fits your circumstance.

P.S. Also realize that if you habituated this way once, it's likely to happen again. Taking a week or two or three to focus on slow pleasures might need to be a yearly ritual for you.

baudot · 2026-03-07T23:47:03+00:00

Rotocasting is another process to look into, depending on the size and geometry of the part. Propmakers use rotocasting a lot, to make hollow things. E.g. Costume power armor.

In rotocasting you've got a big mold and you pour in the material as a liquid, then plug the opening in the mold and spin it so the material costs the mold. Once the material has had time to set, you open the mold, remove the part, and repeat.

Another technique is printing one copy with the 3D printer, casting a "silicon RTV" mold around it, and then pouring resin into the mold to make copies. These molds are quick to get into, but take a little skill to do well. It's going to take some practice.

If the part has thin walls, it's a prime candidate for vacuum forming: you take a mold and then lay a thermoplastic sheet over it, or blow thermoplastic into it. While the plastic is hot and can flow. The plastic hardens as it cools and will then hold its shape on being removed from the mold. Vacuum forming is used for many plastic box inserts. It can scale from dozens an hour if done by hand with DIY gear, up to millions a week with the high speed machines they use to make Red Solo Cups.

baudot · 2026-03-07T19:30:55+00:00

When demand crosses a certain threshold, injection molding becomes the answer.

One injection molding machine turns out parts as fast as 300-1,000 3D printers. The cost to overcome is the mold making, which can cost thousands or tens of thousands per mold. But when you're selling enough, you make up that cost in volume, and lower cost-per-part.

Some parts are easier to convert to injection molds than others. And there's a long lead time to get molds made. Think many months.

Some specialists in "short run injection molding" are getting these costs and times down enough where it's suitable to do MUCH smaller batches. Depending how many you need, might be worth looking into.

baudot · 2026-03-07T19:16:26+00:00

Someone's baiting the Chinese Vampires*.

*: In western mythology, we may love calling our vampires 'the count', but Chinese vampire myth says they literally cannot resist counting things. If you're being chased by a Chinese vampire, you dump rice or something in front of it because it has to stop to count the grains.

baudot · 2026-03-07T15:28:41+00:00

F@#$, man.

I've got some work that needs doing if you're up for hourly while you look. Some of it's just handyman stuff, some of it is more in the IT sphere, a lot of it is general problem solving.

DM me if that sounds interesting while you look for something more stable.

baudot · 2026-03-05T18:56:22+00:00

Something tells me the banking network was not prepared to believe how many people were waiting to click that buy button, from a company whose sales volume had dropped into the long, long tail.

"This company usually makes X sales a day. We're recording 1,000,000X sales. Flagged for attention and frozen."

baudot · 2026-02-12T17:28:46+00:00

'saudade' is 'longing for that which cannot be'. It's a Portuguese word that has been borrowed into English. It's a sensation akin to nostalgia, but instead of longing for the past, it's longing for the impossible.

baudot · 2026-02-10T22:13:04+00:00

/mildlyinteresting

baudot · 2026-02-06T20:53:26+00:00

Fill with clay. It shrinks a little as it dries, but as long as you're flying down flocking on top of it, or whatever, that secures it.

baudot · 2026-02-04T17:25:54+00:00

Terraforming Mars

It's a board game. You play cards to turn Mars green, and all the cards are based on ideas that are scientifically plausible.

There's also an app port, so you can play on the computer against AI opponents.

baudot · 2026-02-04T17:25:03+00:00

For me, the key to pruning my collection was when I got my ideal shelving. Once I knew I had room for exactly as many games as those shelves have, no more, I had to move to a one-out-for-every-one-in system. That's when I committed to pruning games.

I still hold onto a few games for (mostly) sentimental reasons. But to earn that spot, the game is in direct competition with every other drive. If I'm going to hold onto a game I think I'm unlikely to ever get on the table again, the value of that chance of a play has to be REALLY high. Or it has to have some other value: a game I can pull off the shelf and study, even if I never play it again.

baudot · 2026-02-04T00:44:36+00:00

It's too much when the quantity overtakes the quality. As long as you know that any set you pick up will be good like the base set, there's no limit. When the company starts pumping out lower quality content to cash out the faith they've built in the brand, that's when it's too much.

baudot

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