This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm always working on philosophical meanderings for storytelling and sensemaking purposes, and this one's a doozy -- though not related to Triessentialism, so posting it here instead of my TE thread.
I've been fascinated for a while by the concept of waves: why were sci-fi writers of the 30's through the 70's so fascinated by waves, rays, and beams? Think of how Captain America was not just injected with a serum but also bathed in "vita-rays". Why did they imbue them narratively with almost magical powers? (I've since realized it's just the evolution of technobabble, and "quantum" has taken the place of "waves". But I digress.)
But this focus on waves was also present in real science. What are 3d waves like, in contrast to the simplified 2D diagrams in all the science books? What does it even mean that light and matter have wave-particle duality? The interference patterns of the double-slit experiment are fascinating, but what's the physical reality behind it all? There was always something missing, something on the edge of thought which made waves a slippery concept for me.
At some point, I had an epiphany: waves are a copy of the shape of a thing impacting a medium, propagating through the medium.
Consider a diver, executing a flawless front dive with pike. When she hits the water, she displaces the water around her, carving a 3D tunnel through the water which collapses around her as the gravity returns the water to its lowest local energy state. The wave propagates outward, its shape initially precisely mirroring her shape as it touches the water. As the wavefronts of different continuous impacts of parts of her body interfere with each other, the shape becomes muddled, approximate, and eventually the shape is lost, having averaged out to a circle through this entropy.
Consider a metal cube touching the surface of a still pool. The cube makes a square wave on the surface, which quickly becomes a round wave the further it is from directly touching the cube.
Consider a hologram, a 3D recording of a laser wavefront on a special kind of film substrate. What's captured is multiple perspectives, continuously, simultaneously, and analog. Holograms have always seemed like science magic to me, but now they make a bit more sense.
But that wasn't the doozy! I've recently been considering how systems tend to lose focus on their original purpose and turn into simulacra of what they had been.
Consider problem-solving organizations. Whether that's a system of government, a system of commerce, or a charity with a specific goal, without constant refinement or straight-up replacement, they regularly become jobs programs focusing on makework.
Consider computer operating systems which start out with purpose and clarity, but through the entropy of installations and uninstallations, become slow and befuddled.
Here's the doozy: while a focus on entropy or on individual failures in systems may be useful in modeling them, it may also be useful to model them as waves with interference. Initially, the solutions are shaped by the problems, But over time, additional concerns will round the sharp problem-conformed edges of the solutions.
This suggests what's needed for a sustainable problem-solving system is not a problem-conforming entropic wave, but a solution-propagating wave, like a flute's finely designed and well-played sound waves creating a melody.
Hm. I need to read John Gall's Systemantics. I've heard that it may shed some light on how systems fail and why replacing them is easier than fixing them.
Parting thought: an answer and its question shape each other. ("Why? Because." "How? Thus." "What? This.") But is the answer a wavefront of its question, or the other way around? Hm.
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Whew, just barely remembered to post the thread on time (in CET anyway).
How are you doing @Southkraut?
Happy new year!
Managed to get in a few more hours of tutorials. Got a handle on using Blueprints to display narrative text, though so far it only runs through a limited number of hard-wired stages and cannot recursively pull and display new narrative objects. I'm currently writing a HUD class to handle that in code, because frankly no matter how well-done the Blueprints system is visual scripting has always been ass and this is no different. I'd rather do in code what can reasonably be done in code.
As for getting first-person controls set up, I've decided against just taking the default and am going through a fairly long-winded tutorial that covers this topic among various others. I find that I have a lot to learn about Unreal, and getting additional information beyond what I strictly need is helping me make sense of the engine.
I've also cracked open the Unreal documentation and some other text resources on C++ scripting for Unreal, and am leisurely leafing through those.
So it's a relaxed learning experience right now. I'd like to accelerate and get something done faster, but I also know that if I get stuck in some technical rabbit hole again I'll probably never see the light of day again, so I'll continue to take it easy for now.
Vacation is over now, so I'm also back to trying to find a way to establish some concentration time in my schedule.
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I think I want to get into 3D printing, so that I can start churning out toy soldiers and paintable models for role playing games, and environments for table top RPGs. I feel the market must have matured since I last eyed it 5-10 years ago.
Any recommendations? I am thinking of $500-1k to get my toes wet.
For paintable miniatures you don't want an FDM printer like Prusa, you want a photopolymer printer that makes resin models in a vat of liquid.
People usually buy Elegoo Mars 3 or Anycubic Photon Mono 2 these days, they are cheap and designed with miniature printing in mind. You might want to upgrade to a fancier one, given your stated budget, like Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra.
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Prusa is a good name according to an enthusiast friend of mine, with good software. Their mini printer does 18cmx18cmx18cm and is within your budget ($588).
https://www.prusa3d.com/ja/product/original-prusa-mini-semi-assembled-3d-printer-enclosure-bundle/
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I bought an adapter for my microscope, which allows me to affix my phone camera to the eyepiece and take photos/videos of reasonable quality.
https://imgur.com/a/dMzV2Vq
https://imgur.com/a/9uCJSW6
The photos/videos are at 1000x from the microscope with maybe 2x (?) optical zoom from my phone camera. Two are from standing water samples from the garden. The yellowish one that looks like modern art is a stool sample. The second link contains an earwax and dandruff sample. No eyebrow-mites to be seen.
As suggested by @5434a and inspired by a story from @George_E_Hale, I acquired a sample of semen and found, surprisingly, that the sperm were quite visible. Of particular note was the variety of behaviors that they had - some had broken tails or were stuck or sluggish, while others were quite energetic. If only they knew how futile their efforts would be. It was also interesting to see that the heads were more computer-mouse shaped rather than egg-shaped. I was always under the impression that the heads were radially symmetrical.
I was rather enthusiastic to see that sample, so the deed was done before the adapter arrived in the mail, which means I don't have any photos or videos to share. Perhaps another time.
Ah yes, the small and entirely unexpected differences we make in one another's experience.
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Nice!
Was wondering in previous threads if that was an option, so you share.
Yeah, I ended up buying a 3-axis adapter from a company called Move Shoot Move. I think it was a bit pricey for what amounts to be a few pieces of CNC'd aluminum and some screws, but most of the cheaper adapters on the market don't really allow for adjustment on the third axis (bringing the phone closer/farther from the eyepiece). It's high-quality and I'm pretty satisfied with it, and I can even use it on other devices in the future as well, such as a telescope or binoculars.
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