Mechanismatic

Here’s a link to his blog version of the same thread I referenced. Seems like a hop issue among other stuff.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/14/compartment/

Doctorow recently said on Bluesky that the reason he’s such a prolific writer is that he’s constantly in pain and sitting down to write is an activity that helps him ignore it or get through it. So he said that’s why he wrote 7 books during the pandemic.

Or Linda Hamilton’s in Terminator 2, except literally.

It’s a partnership and the INDX isn’t a separate printer, just a new extruder, so it’s not like Prusa has no involvement. I would say “completely” is inaccurate here. If it were solely the effort of INDX, they wouldn’t need to partner with Prusa. There are other third parties that release mods for printers that aren’t collaborations with the original manufacturer.

If Prusa hired the INDX engineers from BondTech instead of partnering, would you still consider it completely separate? A company is just composed of current employees. At what point is it Theseus’ ship of development?

And that’s not even considering the CORE One, the recent CORE One+ update, the CORE One L announcement, the OpenPrintTag, et al. They’ve been announcing more new stuff in the last year at a faster rate than previous years.

Ever seen The Prestige?

Granted it’s from a partnership, but the INDX extruder seems to be on the cusp, so the idea that Prusa is behind seems odd. And the fact that they’re more open and consumer friendly than Bambu is great. There are a lot of affordable printers that have benefited from Prusa’s development while Prusa is still dropping new developments, seemingly at a greater rate now than previously.

I do this probably once a day at my makerspace. Sometimes it is the manufacturer’s fault and sometimes it’s just that the roll has gotten a tangle while being moved from machine to machine or machine to rack.

I don’t put my finger on the tangle, but usually the tangle isn’t obvious in the spool so you can’t even if you wanted to.

It’s really just a matter of spinning the filament around the roll enough to get some slack, then you pull it over the side and sort it out. Usually the fix involves pushing the filament around the spool to unbind it.

This is another one of those issues that you typically detect by hearing an abnormal sound since you’re not watching every print all the time across multiple printers.

Definitely consider if you’ll use it enough to justify the purchase, but buying a new one and spending the effort that you would have used trying to mod the old one could be better used on the new machine getting functional prints and advancing your skills.

The same amount of fiddling, accompanied with the uncertainty of the success or practicality of the mod, could be spent assembling a new printer and then printing and assembling new mods for the new printer that aren’t as essential or structural. The appeal just depends on how much focus and patience you have.

Yeah, that makes sense for your frustration. I get stabbed under my fingernails trying to take PETG remnants off the textured beds. I typically just deal with it because the solutions I’ve found are more time-consuming, but I guess it might depend on how much.

I’ve had people suggest heating the bed as high as it will go. PETG’s glass transition temperature is usually less than 90° C. I’ve seen some people print over bits to try to merge them to make them pull up easier, but that just seems like a waste of material to me. I generally don’t care for solutions that involve applying liquids or gels to the bed.

What material and what kind of plate? PEI textured plate or smooth plate? PLA, PETG, something else?

Not what you’re asking for, but I’d recommend using a laser cutter with a sheet of acrylic if you can get access to one since you’ll get a better quality stencil than 3D printing one. A vinyl cutter like a Cricut or Silhouette machine might also be able to do a better job of it on something like chipboard if you don’t have access to a laser cutter.

My natural inclination would be to make the body in a single color filament and then use a stencil to paint on the logos. It would print a lot easier and look more natural and authentic. The logos were painted on the planes historically. And if you use stencils to paint them on, the logos could be customized for individual prints.

To do process of elimination, I’d recommend trying a different brand of filament and a different type of filament (i.e. PLA), preferably freshly opened rolls. I’d also generally be wary of AliExpress, but that’s just been my experience of seeing multiple people be disappointed with what they get. If you’re looking for discounts on filament, there are a bunch of Black Friday deals going on right now.

That testing will at least tell you if it’s the brand or the type of filament that’s causing the issue. If you eliminate those by seeing no change, then you know it’s the printer itself and can start troubleshooting that next.

It looks like you’re printing it with the right side of the model in the picture angled down from the left, so you’re getting more layers to the left, which is giving you some unfortunate border and infill lines. Is it possible to print this all flat so it’s one smooth layer? If it’s the top layer, you might play with ironing as well. It’s hard to tell without seeing the whole model in context though.

When wanting more weight, but not wanting to add anything extra to the print, I use modifiers in Prusaslicer to add an internal shape that I set to 100% infill in contrast to the rest of the print. So if I want a weighted bottom to prevent a printed object from tipping over, just throw the modifier in with 100% infill at the bottom of the model before printing.

It’s especially nice to eliminate machine issues so you know that subsequent print issues are due to modeling problems or orientation while slicing or something else.

That one depends on the job. Some managers will love to exploit your inclination to hyper focus on solving problems and following the rules. They won’t ask you to work unpaid after hours but if you want to they won’t protest… Doing a third of the work for a team of six people? That’s great, but your next performance review will include the criticism that you’re not as social as your coworkers because you’re too busy doing the job.

The fragments can be a stylistic choice. Ultimately all writing “rules” are arbitrary and often decided by consensus, often based on “what we’ve always done” as much as based on a specific reason for better communication or possibly a reason that is moot now. It’s good to know what your potential readers are likely to prefer and it’s good to know what an editor or agent will want if you’re hoping to get published in a traditional manner.

That being said, I’m a fan of breaking “rules” when you have a good reason to and know why you’re doing it. If the narrative is reflecting the fragmented thoughts of a character, fragments might thematically work really well.

That said there are also ways of rephrasing the fragments to make them flow better. Some readers might find them abrupt because they’re looking for the noun and the verb with some kind of active action.

For the heavy chain, some readers won’t think of it as a grade or gauge of chains. Sometimes technically accurate isn’t better than stylistically smooth. But it isn’t a significant difference, so definitely keep it if you like it. You should write for yourself first of all.

I liked it in general. It was an interesting glimpse into a world where there are implications of greater detail I’d be curious to know more about, such as how the main character’s age and knowledge of magic works. Some of the characters are necessarily one dimensional in such a short peic of writing. Scared and concerned victims of witch trials and puritanical patriarchal male authoritarians is what I’d expect because that’s what’s been depicted before, in the Crucible, in the Sleepy Hollow movie, and other fictional depictions.

If you share a Google doc link instead of a PDF, people can make comments in the document itself, so it’s easier to provide direct feedback to specific text.

You have some tense issues. “Behind him, sat a woman.” (past tense) then “…she stares down…” (present tense).

Some of the sentences are incomplete sentences. “Her posture, in direct contrast to that of the Good Reverend.”

“A red mark wraps around her neck, and a heavy chains secure her delicate wrists.” Wraps is odd as an active verb unless the mark is appearing in the moment. Usually an inanimate thing is wrapped around rather than wraps. I’d suggest something like “stretches around.” “Heavy” is redundant with chains. Chains are rarely light. “a heavy chains” has an agreement problem. A is singular, chains is plural.

“and the Reverend’s clearly dire distress,” It hasn’t seemed like he’s in dire distress prior to this descriptor. Earlier he was described as having a “posture proud with authority…” “full of fire and fury, but steady and deliberate.”

Some of the narration seems to be Colette’s internal monologue and should probably be in italics to distinguish it from just third person omniscient narration.

For example: “This poor girl has not a speck of magic in her – And the vegetables from Reinette’s garden aside, neither does anyone else within a thousand kilometers.”

But then the next paragraph mentions Colette in the third person again.