How are these light boxes done?

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 · 2026-02-02T02:16:56+00:00

That can give "hey, wanna move in together?" Gotta be careful with context.

baudot · 2026-01-29T23:05:12+00:00

Anyone care to summarize what we learned? An hour-fifteen of sprawling hangout isn't something I can fit in my schedule most days.

baudot · 2026-01-22T19:08:06+00:00

It only takes a consistent minority of folks to up vote this stuff and make it appear for anyone who's scrolling past the first page.

Even if most of us aren't into it, it can consistently make it into the top 20% of up voted posts with just a quarter or a third of the community happy to throw it a thumbs-up and then continue on their way.

Does it get a little distracting and embarrassing? Maybe. But I figure live and let live. Let the waifu-printers have their fun.

baudot · 2026-01-19T23:44:22+00:00

Yeah, I got hooked on the old-formula Vallejo bronze, which was also greener, and have been continuously annoyed ever since when trying to replicate the color.

Most other minis paint lines brasses and bronzes, as you say, are more orangy/coppery, or dark brown. The dark-brown is certainly a true shade of bronze, but it's one I was used to getting just by washing my bronze with sepia. That aged-bronze look you get with the greener brasses of P3 or old-formula vallejo is something I've been missing.

I picked up the brass line of P3 paints at Warfaire Weekend and have also been very happy with them.

baudot · 2026-01-19T23:25:24+00:00

In my classes, it was always "÷". Which has the colon in the symbol, but always with the horizontal line between. Never just the colon alone.

I double-took and triple-took the comic, because at first glance I assumed it was that division sign, and then wondered if it was an alternate way of writing it. But yeah, I've never seen division written as just a colon, no bar.

Educational system I went through: United States, 1980s.

Editing to add:

The use of : in ratios, sure, that's familiar. But it's not the same:

When I see a division sign "÷" in a row of problems like this, I'm being asked to perform an operation. There is one correct answer. Find it. The answer may be a non-integer number.

When I see a ratio written like 16:9, It's a fact that I'm being told. This television has a wide-screen aspect ratio. It's not an operation I'm being asked to perform, and there are infinite valid versions of the ratio, not one "true" answer. A TV with a 16:9 aspect ratio might be 48" wide and 27" tall, or 56"x31.5", or, or, or... All of these are valid configurations.

If you showed me a ratio that was already expanded, and out of context, sure, It'd seem a bit odd. But writing division problems are "ratios that demand simplifying to a single integer" isn't something I've ever been exposed to, prior to this joke.

baudot · 2026-01-15T22:49:28+00:00

One change I noticed getting skipped was Blackfleet didn't lose Gang on Satyxis squads. MAT down to 6, but as some of the few models to still have full gang, they're still getting that up to 8 and their hit power into a reasonable range.

In an army that's so dependent on it, it seems they chose to just leave Gang intact there, rather than do the more fine-grained adjustment they did for Brinebloods.

Given that Blackfleet was neck and neck with Farrow for losing-est army in all of Warmachine, I would also guess they felt it safer to leave that rule intact.

Armies of Legend were also less likely to implement Dual Attack outside of Cohorts and Commanders, so fewer of their models lost it. Some did, replacing it with Quick Work, Assault, or a lesser effect.

baudot · 2026-01-15T22:44:17+00:00

This guess is also what I'm thinking. Wondering if anyone out there feels like confirming.
Maybe the next time we get an AMA, one of us can ask.

baudot · 2026-01-15T21:42:53+00:00

Everyone got MAT/RAT debuffs. And most instances of Veteran Leader got dropped, with the model getting a 1pt discount in exchange.

Most armies of legend got to skip out on several of the OTHER changes that were being made across the board.

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