I’d tell a reduction reaction joke, but I want to stay positive.

You can call me et al

She has to defend her Masters thesis? Over here in the UK, you only have to formally defend Doctorate level theses.

Kenya’s system must be a bit more rigorous than ours.

I wonder if I’ve got the same kind of thing. I love onions but absolutely hate leeks. They taste like the smell of stale urine.

I’ve never understood it - I know they don’t taste like this to other people. I like the other edible alliums, but leeks taste uniquely awful.

I keep trying them every few years hoping that my tastes have changed, but they haven’t until this point.

In the linked article, MyMiniFactory say that they’ll ultimately be removing AI content from Thingiverse.

I’m in a tricky position here.

I use MyMiniFactory, have backed several frontiers things and am a member of a few tribes.

I also use Thingiverse a lot.

And while I certainly don’t want to pay for AI content, I don’t mind that much if it’s free. There have been times that I’ve looked for something for DnD and the only option was AI generated. And honestly, I’d much rather have that than no model at all.

Taxonomically speaking, birds are dinosaurs.

There isn’t a place to put a line between them - all the things that make birds “birds” also apply to dinosaurs.

A super fun fact is that of the two main types of dinosaur, Saurischia (“lizard-hipped”) and Ornithischia (“bird-hipped”), birds actually evolved from the lizard-hipped group.

I can’t see the video without an account, but the house in the thumbnail looks really good.

For DnD, my orcs all lived in a Tabletop Scenics Orc Barracks, but now I’m very tempted to try something like this for next time.

Psssh.

It’s clearly a mogwai and nest of wild otamatones

He was. He just didn’t get the mechanism behind it right.

A crude way of explaining Lamarckian evolution would be to look at giraffes. Lamarckism suggests that because an animal that spends much of its life stretching its neck to reach food, it ends up with a slightly longer neck. This trait is then passed down to children, who might spend much of their lives stretching their necks, making them slightly longer. And so on.

He correctly identified that speciation occurs over many many generations, as a result of tiny incremental changes.

What Darwin did was to recognise the actual mechanism behind speciation - Natural Selection. Darwin was aware of and built on Lamarck’s work.

Weirdly, within the last thirty years, we’ve realised that the truth is not so clear cut. Epigenetic changes do occur as a result of the environment and are hereditary. While genes are still the main drivers of evolution, these epigenetic changes affect gene expression.

Ellen - before she was a talk-show host, Ellen DeGeneres played the main character in an Emmy award-winning sitcom. The show had LGBT characters, with Ellen herself (both the character and actress) coming out later in the show’s run.

I’m surprised I’ve not seen Will & Grace mentioned (I’m sure it must be here, but I didn’t notice it). That show famously featured many LGBT characters, including a lesbian couple who were Will and Grace’s main rivals.

Less specifically for lesbian characters, but featuring a gay couple as main characters, you’ve also got The New Normal, a fantastic show about a gay couple that was cancelled after one season, and, of course Modern Family.

I wouldn’t say that this programme was good, but Brookside famously featured the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss on British TV (the watershed is the point, 9pm, where it’s assumed that children will no longer be watching TV). This was in 1994, when we still had backwards Conservative Party laws about it being illegal to “promote public discussion” of homosexuality. For context, it’s worth noting that even two years later, when Carol and Susan got married in Friends they didn’t kiss.

The shocking truth is that the US is just one of many, many, many democracies. There’s nothing uniquely American about democracy.

The American system was based on the French implementation, which in turn was based on the British implementation.

What is unique about American democracy is the scale. The biggest issue that America has is that the current incarnation is not fit for purpose - it’s a system that when used like it is, creates massive vote inequality, gives some “elected officials” what amounts to jobs for life and spreads blame so thin that (heaven forbid!) should someone try to create a dictatorship, it would be very hard to stop it.

I use ESUN PLA+ for printing minis and would recommend it to anyone.

For reference, the only filament I’ve used that came out nicer was SUNLU high-speed PLA, but would NOT recommend for minis (it can’t cope with the constant retractions).

Oh, and also prime your models before painting them. I just use ordinary spray primer that you can get for dirt cheap - Tetrosyl Trade Spray / Hycote / Motip are all good brands. Just make sure you don’t get gloss finish and you’ll be fine!

Have you tried DAS clay? If you’re British, you can buy it pretty cheap from The Works, Hobbycraft or The Range.

It seems like it’d be exactly the right consistency to fill out these molds - a smidge firmer than playdoh, but much softer than plasticine.

Edit: just remembered, you can even get stone effect DAS clay for the same price, so no painting needed!

I didn’t know imagetostl took glbs! I honestly wouldn’t even have expected it!

I’ll definitely be using that then. Blender is great, but I’m tied to one machine - I’d much rather use online tools when I can.

Thanks for that :)

If you have at least one of each piece remaining, then yep - it’s easy!

The technology you’re after is called photogrammetry, and there are two inexpensive ways that I use often (there are more, but these are the two I rely on)

1. KIRI Engine - I have a subscription, but I think there is a free tier. You take about twenty photos of the object from different angles, upload for processing, and you get a 3D model back that you can print.

2. TRELLIS - take a single photograph and upload to here:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/JeffreyXiang/TRELLIS

You will receive a 3D model back that you can import into Blender, run a mesh operation to merge by distance (to create a watertight model), export as STL and then print.

KIRI Engine requires more work upfront, with all the photos, but is the best at recreating existing things accurately.

TRELLIS requires more work at the end, because it doesn’t automatically create printable models, and it isn’t a finished product yet, but it is the closest thing to actual witchcraft I’ve experienced.

It’s a neat idea, similar to how displacement maps affect the output without affecting the geometry of a 3D render.

Also, I like this image, as it makes me feel less bad about my own grizzly-looking heat block.

Ah, ok - that’s fair.

I thought you were implying that we had some kind of firewall like China or something!

I agree, US sites geolocking their content is sometimes a pain, but I get your meaning. We do tend to be more comfortable with our governments trying to protect us than the Americans seem to.

I’m really curious about what you think you’re not being allowed to visit on the internet.

I can’t think of a single thing that’s ‘blocked’.

Unless you’re under 13, of course, in which case I concede there are a lot of restrictions - but that’s a good thing.

Overhangs were the biggest issue I found. So much so that I moved back to a 0.4 after a month of faff trying to find settings that would compensate.

I use my printer mainly for minis, and figures that would print supportless on the 0.4 nozzle needed huge amounts of supports at 0.2 in order to print without missing chins etc.

That said, the level of detail that I could achieve was better, particularly on the hair, but not enough to compensate for all of the extra faff and wasted plastic.