As was the case for many folks across the North Western hemisphere last week we got slammed with some alarming temperatures. Normally my basement office stays cool but things were so bad last week that I had to get a fan up and running. This week doesn’t seem to be moving completely away from the scorching temps, but at least we’ll be in the mid 80’s at it’s worst. If you’re affected by these face-melting temps, stay safe, stay cool however you can, and stay hydrated.

3D Printer

As you may well know by now — I assume you arrived here through the socials, where I’ve been posting pictures and such — I have…upgraded? side-graded? down-graded? my Elegoo resin 3D printer. Although I had finally dialed in the voodoo needed to get good prints from the device, there were a lot of ancillary issues I didn’t want to admit to, such as the fact that dealing with resin is a pain in the ass in every conceivable way, from the use to the storage to the disposal. The biggest issue, though, is that it smells. My wife has an insanely acute sense of smell, and even two floors up she could catch a nostril-full of that smell any time I was printing, and it would give her a headache.

Since we know several people who have a specific filament printer, and because it was on sale, I had to do practically no convincing to reach consensus that the Elegoo should be replaced by a Bambu Labs A1 Combo with AMS Lite (BLA1CAMSL for those pressed for time). My friend @CakedCrusader uses his A1 to print RC car parts and accessories, and another friend who runs a local pinball league has printed all kinds of cool signs for their venue, and even prints replacement parts for his machines with his A1.

Yesterday (Sunday) I broke down the Elegoo and it’s grow-tent enclosure, returned the folding table it was resting upon to our folding table stock, and pushed all of the accumulated junk to the side (boxes of resin, paints, an even older resin printer I had borrowed, and so on) so I could build a new desk for the A1. The folding table wasn’t all that sturdy, and because filament printers shake violently, I wasn’t happy using the previous setup for this new device. We had finally made it out to IKEA in Stoughton, MA (a good hour and change from my house) and picked up parts for a very sturdy desk with bonus storage drawers. This I built last night, and my aging body is paying for it this morning, but at least it’s done and the printer has a new home.

Right now I’m printing the “must have” parts that always seem to be required for 3D printing. First up: the “poop bucket” which if you know, you know, but if you don’t…it’s not as scatological as it sounds.

Cape Cod

Almost immediately after my printer was acquired, my wife and I went down to West Yarmouth, MA for the weekend. We have a condo that we can reserve for points, and we hadn’t been using it much over the past few years which resulted in much of our annual point allotments to expire. As this destination was “in network” it cost us absolutely nothing, which allowed us to spend money on dinner and drinks and other things we might want to do.

Thing is, Cape Cod isn’t that exciting. The road on which our resort was situated, Rt. 28, is littered with shuttered businesses and those that are still operational are remnants from some bygone “glory days” where the Cape was one of the destinations in New England. The highlights of our trip were the pirate museum, which was excellent, and the live entertainment at our resort. Each night there was a musician playing by the outside bar-slash-pool who was one of the best entertainers I had ever heard in such a venue, and a local band who played in the resort restaurant on Saturday evening and who ran through a retinue of songs I never expected a regional cover-band to play — like Santeria by Sublime. I guess 90’s music is old enough now to be considered fodder for bands playing Chinese restaurant dive bars and run-down vacation town resorts. That doesn’t make me feel good at all.

Dune: Awakening

I now need to pick up Dune: Awakening where I left off, which is somewhere I cannot recall. I’m moving slowly through the game, relative to Crusader to be certain, but find myself hanging around now in Hagga Rift and the Eastern Shield Wall areas. The good news about both of these areas is that there are no sandworms! The bad news is that Hagga Rift is maddening to navigate, and ESW is heat level 3 which means I can’t seem to maintain enough water at any given time to really explore the zone. I have a second base set up in ESW and am surrounded by bandit NPCs so I have a source of blood and a place to convert it to drinkable water, but the survival aspects are no joke in this game.

I finally have a crawler which includes a lot more cargo space, but no accessories otherwise. I need to get the top-mounted harvesting cannon built so I can just roll-and-go when I go out for resources, but first I think I need to ensure that I can get the buggy from EVG to ESW without A) getting eaten by a worm, or B) falling into quicksand.

Star Citizen

Since I’ve been marooned on Arrakis for the past two weeks I haven’t even really thought about Star Citizen except when I get a Discord notification that the SCLeaks channel posts info or patch notes.

Patch 4.2 has been released to live. 4.2.1 is on the PTU and was opened to all backers this past weekend which usually means that it’s hitting the PU Relatively Soon(tm). 4.2 introduced some limited weather of the type we saw in last year’s CitizenCon demo, with driving rain and dangerous lightning storms which make flight very difficult. To showcase this, CIG has introduced a new event which tasks players with continuing the “regen crisis” storyline by breaking into a lab to steal stuff. The lab is, of course, located within one of these dangerous storms. CIG claims that this is a “PvE-focused” event, but CIG wouldn’t know a PvE-focused event if it bit them in the ass; there have been reports of players camping the spot and gunning down anyone who gets near to the objective, so it sounds like peak Star Citizen to me.

4.2.1 will supposedly have another “do what you want” style event in which players will be able to contribute to the cause by aligning with one of the four corporations of Stanton to deliver much-needed resources. Players can buy these, mine them, or — of course — pirate them, but it sounds a lot like the “community goals” featured in Elite Dangerous, where player’s contributions push a meter for a larger group, but where every participant benefits.

I might jump back in for 4.2.1 to try this out as I like that kind of structure for my events, but to be quite honest, Dune: Awakening has, for the moment, broken me of my obsession with Star Citizen. While I feel that I had grown increasing critical of the project over the past year or so, it wasn’t until I had stepped well away from it for just two weeks that I really started to resign myself to the very real possibility that CIG has fucked themselves into a corner they do not know how to get out of. Their answer seems to be to throw more events that please no one, release convoluted systems that annoy almost everyone, and side-step the need for some very real QoL fixes and additions that would satisfy the community exponentially. Back when the game was a bunch of unconnected parts I think it was harder to really and truly see how bad CIG is at this, but now that Star Citizen is a coherent package suffering from gaps and seriously rough edges, it’s easier to feel the bumps in the road. If the offerings in 4.2 and 4.2.1 are the kinds of progress that CIG believes they need for the project to reach 1.0 status, my doubts about the efficacy of the project are multiplied.