busybee fluffy rambles

Hey folks! That time of year is coming up… it’s my birthday in June! And what’s more, I have a new house to celebrate it at!

My plan this year is to have an outdoor cookout in my lovely new yard in White Center (a small town nestled in between Seattle and Burien) the afternoon/evening of June 13, 2021. I’m trying to get a headcount to see who’s going to be able to attend. Please register your interest by emailing me or posting a comment or RSVP webmention or whatever, and I’ll try to get a more formal invite when details start to coalesce better (ideally in a better format than a public blog post, obvs).

The format will probably be potluck-esque; I’ll definitely be providing a bunch of meat and veggies for grilling and some sides and drinks but it’d be great if other folks could bring stuff to grill and serve too! Also, due to COVID still being a thing I’d ask that people still maintain social distance and masking, and for non-vaccinated folks to limit their time indoors.

Regarding transport to my place, there’s a decent (but not unlimited) amount of street and on-property parking, and there are technically buses nearby but they aren’t the most convenient thing for folks coming from anywhere other than West Seattle or Burien or whatever.

But anyway it’d be lovely if folks could come! I’ve missed seeing everyone, and what better way to try to fix that?

So far I haven’t gotten a fully-successful resin print, but I’m inching closer and closer.

The current issue I keep running into is that it’s very difficult to separate a print from the bed, and I think I need to give up on having a good clean bed-adhered surface. It’s better to give all prints lift and support, probably, even if that means having more tiny surface defects on the side facing the build plate (which is better than having an entire shattered print when I inevitably resort to a hammer to separate it).

I also ran into a problem where somehow a bit of resin got underneath my FEP film (hopefully due to my own carelessness and not due to a leak I haven’t found on my vat!) and some resin got caked to the LCD. Fortunately, Phrozen’s suggestion of soaking it in 91% IPA and then using the plastic scraper to get it off worked just fine.

Anyway. For now I’m still stuck trying to sun-cure my prints, but hopefully I can figure out a decent cheap curing station setup. I’m thinking of building a curing box using UV LED strips but it’s so hard to find reliable parts for that sort of thing. I also ordered a cheap curing station off Amazon but I’m not expecting great results from it.

In the meantime, my FDM printer is working again, and now that I have a decent supply of isopropyl alcohol I can actually get prints to stick to the build plate!

• My resin printer arrived today. It was a bit obnoxious to get a working print and holy heck it’s a messy process even when it does work, but this’ll be fun to mess with. (Yes, I now have three 3D printers. Only the resin one is actually operable right now, but the Artillery Genius has some repair parts on th eway, at least.)
• I accepted an offer on my condo. It’s a lot less than I was hoping for but it’s still plenty of money. When that sells I can start working on building out the studio, which is the linchpin for getting a bunch of my other house ambitions underway.
• I’m having one heck of a fibro flare and this makes it very hard for me to actually focus on work. But also there’s a stress factor involved. Hopefully that all sorts itself out soon.
• Because of the aforementioned flare I’m also not making much progress on getting my living room or kitchen in any sort of order. But I’m still slowly chipping away at that glacier.
• Cannabis isn’t really helping with the fibro right now, either.

Aside from a few hours of severe soreness last night and this morning, I haven’t had any major issues with the vaccination. Yay!

Also with my hecked-up shoulder/neck, the set of stretches I’ve been trying has been doing a good job of clearing up that pain too. If only I’d found those stretches last year instead of going through a month and a half of agony and condescention from healthcare professionals!

Also today I finally found my Wacom tablet and started poking at comics again. I also made a bunch of progress on my living room situation, and got Stepmania moved to my gaming PC (and also have my z-i-v mirroring thing running directly there, although wow Python is kind of a pain to deal with on Windows these days). I still haven’t actually hooked up my dance pad, though, but hopefully soon I’ll have the clutter mitigated to the point that I can do that.

Incidentally, I’m pretty underwhelmed by the TV stand I got. I’m not too surprised by the fairly low quality of the materials (especially given the price) but what I cannot get behind is its complete lack of internal cable management. Each of the 6 bays has a too-small hole out the back, and there’s no way to run cables internally, nor is there anywhere to reasonably stash a power strip. Ugh. I think I need to take up a furniture-making hobby so that I can eventually get to the point of making a TV cabinet that works the way I want it to. Because that’s what I need, more hobbies!

So I mean I ordered a circular saw, some saw horses, and a bunch of clamps, and most of it’s arrived already. And I’ve been watching at lot of 3x3Custom Tamar and Frank Howarth for inspiration. What I want to build actually seems pretty doable! (For that matter, Tamar did something very similar to what I want to make.)