All of the days blur together, and all of these posts do as well. Let’s get to it again.

3D Printing

My daughter is heading to Anime Boston in a little over a week, and as usual she has been frantically working on her cosplay. This year, one of her pieces is based on a FFXIV character named Alphinaud.

This means absolutely nothing to me, but this character is sporting a whole lot of accessories of the kind that probably make cosplayers either giddy to replicate or curse their own decisions. However, seeing as how I have a 3D printer, I’ve been enlisted to create most of the decorative pieces you can see in the image above.

I’m at the Boss Level right now: the collar piece. Because my printer isn’t massive, I can only print one half of the collar at a time, and even then I had to do some CAD-gymnastics to get it to fit on the print bed. I’m looking at a 10 hour print per-half, so I’m hoping that my success in printing the other bajillion pieces continues to hold out for these two last pieces.

Thing is, resin printing smells awful. I have my printer in a growing enclosure (meant for plants and “plants”) and it’s right by a basement window, but when I open the flap to do work, the smell escapes into the basement. Last night was humid so my wife turned on the HVAC system and then complained that the house was starting to smell like resin. In truth, the printer enclosure is right around the corner from the HVAC unit, and the air draw obviously pulled in that fresh resin scent. So thankfully it’s just two more parts left to go, but they’re quite the doozies.

Refactoring

Per my last post, I’m still plinking away at a nonsense project. I think I like writing template projects because it lets me feel like I’m making progress towards something while also having absolutely no set goal. It can be done when I want it to be done, so long as it has features I think I might want later. This project, built using React and Appwrite, has been working OK. Most of the issues I run into are of my own design, in part because the project runs both a React front-end and a Deno-based back-end API server that allows me to interface with Appwrite’s more sensitive operations such as user management.

As of right now, I’m closing up the user management UI, and spent a good chunk of yesterday refactoring my API endpoints as they had been created without much regard for sustainability and discoverability. Many were renamed, and a few had their innards ported to more centralized, reusable functions. I also rebuilt the user profile picture system. I haven’t spent any time on design, so it all looks like a literal third-grader made it (because I’m unsarcastically certain that third-graders can do what I do, even without A.I.).

Andor

I was surprised to learn that there was more Andor this week. I thought the ending last week was some kind of suitable segue into Rogue One, but it’s been a hot minute since I’ve seen Rogue One so I’m not 100% sure where everyone was in the movie at the start.

I’ll try not to be hyperbolic here, but I would like Star Wars if it were more like Andor and less like…[gestures at everything else Star Wars]. This was a smart, gripping, yes, sometimes slow narrative focused on an ancillary character featured in an ancillary movie that fell into the Disney trap of existing solely to explain content that had lived unexplained and unanalyzed for decades. Did we need to know about what we learned through Andor? No. Is Star Wars 1000% better because of Andor? Unquestionably. Will Disney learn from this and provide more non-Force-centric Star Wars stories that take the high-road by recognizing that George Lucas’ child-focused magnum opus can be intelligent? Have you seen how many Marvel moves are on the docket? I doubt Disney learns anything it didn’t already assume it knew beforehand.

Star Citizen 4.1.1 etc.

Star Citizen patch 4.1.1 has been released just hours ahead of this year’s Invictus Fleet Week, which is one of CIG’s annual tentpole pledge drives. This is a special year in many ways. It’s the first large show in The Year of the Patch, and it’s bringing several new and surprise ships to the game, one of which is the Idris, the largest flyable ship in the game and which some people had pledged for over a decade ago. Blame Squadron 42 for it’s lateness, as CIG does. Idris owners are going to be insufferable in chat, and I suspect there will be a lot of them, humblebragging by asking if anyone wants to help crew their Idris. Bleeech.

I’ve been down on the game since last year’s CitizenCon, and I think rightfully so as CIG has burned over a decade of time, money, and good-will at the end of Chris Roberts’ narrow-minded whip. They have promised that this year, out of necessity as they point their bows towards a 1.0, they would focus more on fixing things and less on the “move fast a break everything” strategy that had brought them to this point. +1 for some much needed self-awareness, but -2 for for taking so damn long to get to this point.

As such, I have chosen to give them the benefit of the doubt without tacking on a “despite my better judgement”, and that made me start thinking about the difference between “hope” and “blind loyalty”. I don’t think I’ve ever had blind loyalty to this project because how could I? I was standing in knee-deep garbage on a daily basis; I couldn’t honestly say that I could smell roses. But I always hoped things would get better because as a developer of a different stripe, I know that bad code keeps good coders up at night, and despite what armchair pundits will say, anyone who has the skills to make a game is a good coder. The alternative is to just shut the project down, and I don’t care for anyone who casually suggests such a thing. If the project fails, it fails. I have long since made my peace with that but I wouldn’t take it out in the woods and put a bullet in its head prematurely. I do want to live in a world where Star Citizen is playable for the masses, and I’m willing to let that timeline run it’s natural course.