Personally I'll take the sporadic schedule, thanks, because it gives me a random check-in that I have to be aware of. It's highly motivating, actually. So this week has been about process. I gave up on the aquarium community when they had their two-year-long affair with kitty-litter planted tanks; everyone on the internet was dumping kitty litter (laterite) into their tanks because it was clay and it was turning into goo and they were convincing themselves that the plants loved it and their fish were dying and their water was cloudy and then they all stopped all of a sudden and nobody ever talked about it again and fuckin' hell, the 3D printer community makes the aquarists look rigorous. Remember kids! Always shake your resin! Here, we'll put that in 14 point font and underline it and highlight it red! That way you can be sure to get all these lovely bubbles in your prints! And ohhhh boy, better make sure you cure the ever loving shit out of your prints! Whatever you do, don't just sit them under an LED for two minutes! Gotta make 'em bright orange and brittle! To be fair, that was a torture test; I had forgotten that the garage and the kitchen were on the same circuit so a little microwaving and a little 1400W heater and suddenly the print stops abruptly. So might as well throw it under the lamps without getting the alcohol off and leave it there for half an hour to see what happens. Catastrophe. Catastrophe happens. Anyway. There's no real instruction on any of this stuff and the people you get advice from on the Internet are probably 14 and like their orcs with tits so you get what you pay for; I stopped watching one advice video when I noticed that a grown man had managed to bend a fucking allen wrench as if it weren't no thing and really, the little things largely print just fine out of the box but if you do venture forth to try and get some advice? Best not take it because these are the people who will spend fourteen hours building an LED discotheque when a frickin' $20 lamp and 2 minutes solves all your problems. So despite all the alarmism it turns out printing goo has gotten phenomenally easier and cheaper than the last time I did it (1997) and frankly, a modicum of common sense goes a long way with this stuff. We've had snow days last three days so me and the 7-year-old are a little sick of each other; I told her I'd print her something while she was at school today and she decided "a gathering of fairies" would be nice but unfortunately because of previous orcs-with-tits problems you can't just search for "fairy" on Thingverse you have to search for "fairy that is not also a streetwalker" and there just aren't that many choices in a place that is basically the id of the hikikomori. So she's getting "cute dragons" - two of them - and then I intend to start printing up some chess pieces because they seem like a good place to figure out some stuff. And really, all this "3d printing" nonsense is just a preamble to the main event. Yeah. Sold some stuff on eBay, rolled it back in. Basically a melting furnace and some consumables away from shit getting serious.
On a related note, quite a few bonsai tree owners (including myself) have their trees planted in specific brands of cat litter. It needs to be ones which are 100% moler clay. It's holds on to a lot of moisture whilst still providing good draining so that the roots don't become waterlogged. Unfortunately, the brand of choice in the UK has recently been discontinued.I gave up on the aquarium community when they had their two-year-long affair with kitty-litter planted tanks
Right? Trick is, you just need to soak it long enough. "Long enough" appears to be "more years than you are willing to deal with." The next move after "cat litter substrate" was "garden soil substrate" whereby people who will happily dip their plants in a 10% bleach solution for precisely 30 seconds were literally digging in fields and dumping it in with their cichlids.