deathmtn

The tl;dr slider on this article is brilliant. You can get more and more detail (or less and less) as you needed.

I took a shot at this problem in a more complicated way a while ago. To be fair to my 2013 self, though, I was hoping to tackle a little more than letting a user control the amount of detail they'd get.

Anyone have a favorite non-Amazon place that they like to order out-of-print books from? I usually go with my local bookstore, but this time, they don't have it.

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"Show me London Bridge!"
[Shows an image search result for London Bridge]
"Show it falling down!"

Katt and I were last night about how everything is at least 10% harder to do when you have no optimism when I realized we've been running under those conditions for about two years now.

It's surprising to realize how optimistic I was a few years ago. I always thought of myself as skeptical and somewhat cynical, but really, I believed that, people, technology, and our system of government would deliver an incrementally better world, despite their many flaws. There were flaws I didn't see at all.

Busy day. 10-7-7 on the bar at home.

Visited another school this morning.

One, they had really cool ways of programming without typing code in a keyboard – by drawing, by sequencing blocks that get scanned.

Two, in a fifth grade social studies class discussion, they were counting and cataloguing the human rights violations that had occurred in some chapter of history they just read about.

These are amazing things that never happen in my schools, even in college.

I was just thinking about whether I should block out time to model a D&D dungeon in 3D, and I backed away because it would seem puerile to serious artists.

Fuck that! If I only make things that would further my career or gain the respect of the tech art community, I have basically enslaved my own soul.

I've been rather impressed by the accessibility of Tinkercad.

Back in the day, I got a copy of a Blender book really tried to get into making 3D stuff. I bounced hard. Even other entry-level 3D software like SketchUp is really boggling to me.

In Tinkercad, most things just work the way I think they would. (One exception I just hit - if you cut a hole into a shape, it won't actually cut that hole unless the hole is the same color as the shape.) I'm sure the cost of this intuitiveness is that it does way less stuff that something like Blender (not even sure you can apply textures in this), but I'm fine with that. I just want to make 3D shapes and export them! Which I appear to be able to do.

It's actually for 3D printing. I've heard talk about making a simple 3D modeler for decades. It seems as though the motivation to fund that was low but since 3D printers cost a lot, it is worth paying to provide an actually simple 3D modeler to their users.

We have a sort of strategy for the kindergarten lottery. The lottery is complex, and the schools are all really good, so it's kind of overwhelming, so I'm glad we have something.

Earlier today, my son told me that he wanted to "make the earth out-of-batteries so that it would stop turning and would be morning forever."

Kid threw up; cat threw up. Easy like Sunday morning

It occurs to me that I'm now a "I'll make you McDonald's at home" guy, except with technology.