I could offer some advice about FDM printers, the kind that use rolls of plastic filament. They don’t have the fume issues that resin printers do. I can’t help on the resin ones as I’ve never used one. I’ve heard that resin is better for small figures. Most of what I print are larger pieces for robotics projects, I’ve never really needed the fine detail that resin printers can provide.

I will say that regardless of type of printer, you want it on as stable a base as possible. A super-sturdy table with an entry-level printer is going to give you better and faster and more consistent results than an expensive printer on a wobbly table, because you won’t need to slow down the print not to wobble everything like crazy. This is more of a concern with FDM than resin, but it’s a good idea even for resin from what I’ve heard. I do a lot of FDM 3D printing in a fairly small apartment. I’m using a couple of older entry-level Creality printers (Ender 3 V2 and Ender-3 V3 SE) on a small ikea kitchen table with an all-metal frame and legs and it works great. I think I have the older version of this table but mine has square legs instead of round ones. But you get the idea.

If you do go with an FDM printer, don’t even bother with whatever slicing software is provided by the manufacturer. Just use Cura if your hypothetical FDM printer is supported (which it probably is). It’s open source, cross platform, has a great interface, and runs fast even on very limited hardware. I regularly use it on an older laptop with just 8GB RAM and an integrated intel GPU and it still works amazingly fast for preparing print files.

Another good idea for FDM printers is to use magnetic baseplates. My V3 came with that setup, but the V2 came with a glass plate that’s far more annoying to maintain and clean and use. I got one of these kits to retrofit the V2 and life has been a lot easier since then.

If you do get an FDM setup, please feel free to message me, I’d be happy to help!

Also if you identified a fed, you can pile on them the boring work nobody wants to do. Let FBI fund you party activities.

This might make for a really funny mockumentary TV series. I have ideas.

But the key is to keep it all low stakes, because high drama with low stakes is inherently funny. Taylor Swift demanding exact adherence to a complex contract by a concert venue that can seat tens of thousands of fans is just tiring and expected. The local middle-aged Beatles cover band demanding exact adherence to a complex contract by a dive bar owner is ridiculous and funny.

And it would be much easier and cheaper to produce than something high-stakes with action. It also has the bonus of being adaptable to many cultures worldwide if it’s kept to a low-stakes local level. Not every western country has the FBI, but every western country has local cops.

The premise: local cops try to infiltrate a Marxist reading group and encourage adventure, but it gets nowhere because (a) the reading group doesn’t actually do any activism and is genuinely only there to read theory, and (b) they can spot infiltrators basically instantly because they’ve had so much experience at it.

There’s a series of infiltrating cops who just get bored out of their minds and try to get out of that assigned task because literally all they do is sit around reading and listening to theory. The two big running gags through the series should be about the local police chief. First is their problem with finding volunteers to do such a notoriously boring job that offers no career advancement. The second should be the police chief’s growing paranoia that they’ve accidentally turned their entire staff into Marxists and that their entire staff are being reverse-infiltrated. For the sake of comedy this needs to not actually be what’s happening, the comedic focus needs to be on the unwarranted paranoia of petty authorities.

And I have an idea for the big series finale. Throughout the series, have it hinted that the leaders of the reading group are planning something big, something attention-getting, something public. The cop-of-the-day is excited to finally catch some commies in the act of terrorism. The final five minutes of the season finale are the leaders taking the cop into their confidence in a post-reading-group meeting at another location. Talking in hushed tones, moody lighting, the leaders always looking around to make sure no-one is overhearing. Maybe some subtle dramatic music indicating something big is about to occur.

Actually I might get back into creative writing, maybe make this the premise of a novel. I know cops, I know Marxists, I bet I could pull this off.

For me it was hockey. I tried it one year in elementary school, and couldn’t figure out any of the things my teammates were doing, like crossovers and lifting the puck. I didn’t go back for a second year.

But I believe that hockey is a dying sport. Equipment and ice time fees at arenas are way too expensive for working families. And climate change no longer allows for outdoor rinks where kids can learn basic skills for free. There’s a good reason that basketball and soccer are picking up massively in popularity in Canada, they’re both sports that kids can play casually almost year-round with minimal and relatively cheap equipment.

Always beware the adventurist. Not all adventurists are feds, and every radical experiences wistful thoughts about adventurism from time to time but the genuine adventurists are either prime targets for feds or they themselves are feds. Either way, hard pass.

So much this! Socialism needs to be organically created, it needs to be a mass movement once material conditions are right. And material conditions are nowhere near right in most of the imperial core and “civilized” inner periphery.

Some have called me paranoid because of this belief. But they don’t have half their immediate and extended family working as cops of one sort of another. There’s no way I can simply lay low after a hypothetical adventure. I would be found real quick.

And due to the above, please don’t invite me into any orgs, online or IRL. The less I know about yours, the safer you folks are. I’m just here to chat about events and news and gossip that’s already very public. IRL the most I do is reading groups, and I always tell anyone there up front about my family. I hate that it makes me look like yet another all-talk-no-substance fair-weather Marxist but it’s the only way I know to keep everyone involved safe.

I’ve already had a few relatives try to gently and friendly-like ask me about my politics once they find out I’m not a chud. Innocently asking about what forums I’m on with phrases like “I’m pretty liberal myself, I just want to help people.” I just dodge that sort of thing with variations of “I just follow the news, I’m not really the activist type.” I neve go to any family event unless I am stone cold sober and I can stay sober. I need to keep my guard up even among family that cares for me. It’s such a fucked up situation.

Oh my god. My Wii will be old enough to vote in a few months. I got it a month or so after its release date.

I should set it up again and play some Metroid Prime Trilogy. The backported motion-control gun aiming makes the first two games a joy to play.

Well we do of course. We have to meet the right-wing halfway. To do otherwise would be uncivil.

Well I can think of another soldier that made a positive contribution to this world. For example:

In the case of Julius Streicher, reporter Howard K. Smith wrote that the initial drop was not fatal, and that “witnesses could hear him groaning”, upon which “Woods came down from the platform and disappeared behind the black curtain that concealed the dying man. Abruptly the groans ceased and the rope stopped moving. Smith and the other witnesses were convinced that Woods had grabbed Streicher and pulled down hard, strangling him.”

That sounds like a proposal that we can reach across the aisle to accomplish!

Maybe it’s time for a centrist approach, neither left nor right, something we can all do to appeal to the moderates and bring them into our big tent party.

Maybe we ought to bring in some outside consultants to advise on how to go forward. I hear McKinsey is known for their consulting expertise.

Youtube is enemy territory, a closed platform run by one of the wealthiest companies in the world with a keen interest in maintaining control over the flow of political conversation. I don’t think this is a war that can be won. I think it would be more productive to contribute to Peertube instances instead. Contributing original content, help with reporting and modding, donations to keep servers running, promoting Peertube sites both here and in other forums, that sort of thing.

Of course the really insane thing about Deus Ex is that the most unrealistic thing about it is the idea that Americans would become terrorists to get access to a pandemic vaccine.

Bread with visible mold, a week before the best-before date.

The most ironic part of the food security issues going into WW1 is that one of Germany’s most notorious and nationalistic chemists, Fritz Haber, developed the industrial processes that would soon lead to cheap and effective mass-produced fertilizers: the synthesis of ammonia through the “Haber process”. He won a Nobel Prize in 1918 for chemistry for that discovery. But it’s a dual-use technology. You can use it to make bulk fertilizers, or you can use it to make bulk explosives.

But Haber didn’t just take part in chemistry research. He was an enthusiastic advocate of chemical warfare. He relentlessly lobbied the German military to try using deadly gases, especially chlorine, as a weapon. German military officials agreed, and at the second battle of Ypres in 1915, Haber was personally there to supervise the first use of chlorine gas weapons. He would do this throughout the war on the western and eastern fronts.

Haber was one of the scientists who signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three. He was no dove. He knew what he was doing, he knew what his government was doing, and he had no moral issues with any of it.

And the DNC is perfectly happy with the outcome, because capital remains unthreatened.

CAN. FUCKING. CONFIRM.

And in that case… Dems might actually feel like they have to do a real campaign, rather than just bang the “orange fascist” gong a bunch more.

I’d actually bet on them continuing as the paid puppets of Wall Street, quietly propping up multiple Trump successors to split the base, and hoping that it’s enough to put them in power without either the popular vote or having to abandon their wealthy donors.

They are going to learn absolutely nothing.

Make Software Spaghetti Again!

Got you covered.

If you’re looking to write the types of server daemons often written in C, Go is another good choice. It’s very C-like in its syntax. It has a lot of the same safety features Rust has but isn’t nearly as complex to learn. It also has a huge standard library, so you rarely need to rely on third-party code.

Go isn’t too suitable for drivers or kernels or other kinds of system software though. Rust is definitely a better choice for those.