Adiwan's nerdy dungeon

I'm a geek/nerd who likes all stuff that involves to be a geek/nerd. Retro games, computer science, Dungeons & Dragons, sci-fi, fantasy, animation.

[adiwan]

This year I planted about 40 tomato plants of 15 different kinds. There were a couple of plants that fell victim to disease but it was for the greater good and prevented greater loss. Despite of that the last few weeks I struggled with consuming the tomatoes as they ripened but it was fine. Just now I'm really overwhelmed by my own hubris. I already gave tomatoes away to family and neighbors and yet there is no end in sight. At least it is a good problem to have.

In this picture shows a sample of what I'm faced with: 2kg of yummy fruits.

[joshua-wright]

Slack Wyrm #1295 - Dragon terrorizes castle

[adiwan]

I own a garden and want to grow tomatoes that are not very common to buy in the super market. These ones are Black Krim tomatoes that are still growing and far away from being ripe. They'll turn dark pruple with a deep red when they're ready to be plucked.

I'm curious how they will taste like. According to some people on the Internet they say these ones taste firm, sweet, and a little bit spicy.

There are also other sorts of tomato plants I grow in my garden but they aren't as developed as this one.

[falseknees]

Get a print in the False Knees shop!

[breegadey]

Dungeon Meshi Board Game (2022) - "Shuro's"' Party

[tofublock]

floating duck 🍑⁣

[389]

Eric Kogan

[tabletoptinkering]

🪿HONK HONK 🔥

Another day, another mini. This time with a handsculpted airdry clay base and a removable fireball made of superglue and cotton wool. This was a commission piece.

[1028374882927373-deactivated202]

"I am a tiefling, and I will not suffer without retribution."

[todaysbird]

Today's bird is this bleeding heart dove!

[adiwan]

Star Wars Cargo Box

This one I did a few years ago and I rediscovered this image on my hard drive just now. I made it as a gift for a former colleague and Star Wars fan. It was about 20 cm in length, 10 cm in height and width and filled with candy up to the top.

I modeled it on my own by using reference images from the Star Wars series The Bad Batch. After 3D-printing it in PETG, spraying it with a lot of body fill, sanding it to remove as many layer lines as possible, it was painted with cheap acrylic paints that luckily matched pretty well, especially with some drops of metallic model paint. I weathered it with more metallic paint to give it some scratches (maybe I went a little bit overboard with it) and slathered the box with an oily black wash to make it appropriately grimy. As soon as the paint was dry enough (accelerated with a hair dryer) I varnished it with a matte airbrush varnish from Vallejo.

Seeing this again makes me want to make one for myself to put on my desk.

[adiwan]

I really love Linux... but sometimes...

... it is hard when it doesn't love you back. I guess the pain is of my own making: I have a Debian installation with experimental packages. Big red flag here. Also it is an old installation that I carry on for almost 12 years. Second red flag. Also I have a ton of developer packages AND i386 packages installed due to Steam, HUGE red flags.

Once in a while I update my system and when I do the changes are BIG.

It took me a good few hours to straighten out over 700 conflicts in a way that doesn't mess up my install too much. The most annoying thing was that my old Thinkpad X201 takes forever to calculate conflicts each time I changed the state of a package. In the end to safe my sanity I removed Steam and all the accompanying i386 packages. I had only a few games that worked on that laptop anyway and my desktop Windows PC is mainly for gaming and heavy duty stuff.

Still better than dealing with Windows updates. A few years ago my Windows 10 installation decided to hang up on an update, trying to update that update and then reverting the update, so that it can try to update the same update without really updating the update next time. It took me over half a year to fix that trying random shit to fix the installation. At least I know where to look when I mess up something with Linux.

[adiwan]

Recently I was helping out clearing a house and while taking out the old furniture out my eyes fixed on a little box in the corner. It was a wooden box from a sparkling wine producer called "Matheus Müller". The old owners of the property liked drinking alcohol. The box was empty and in a good shape, except from some minor discoloration from age because the wood had no varnish on it to give it any protection.

I have no idea what it contained in the past but I knew what it could contain in the future: my miniature paint! My paint was stored in a rather small box that was way too small for the paint I gathered over the years. As you can see in the picture above it's not a little amount. I just needed to expand my storage.

When I got it home the first thing was to get my hands dirty and use sand paper to get rid of the wood discoloration and a huge printed picture. Removing it was quick and the over all cleanup of the surface made it instantly more pleasant. As much as a depiction of a scene with a river with boats and a castle in the background in poop brown has its charm I wanted to give way to a more cleaner look. After that I gave the box a good layer of matte wood polyurethane varnish that I still was good. I prepared a stencil of the D&D logo and printed it out with my 3D printer and used it to airbush a good layer of black primer in the hopes it sticks well enough the the varnish. I wanted an extra protection in case I messed up the stencil part but luckily it was OK. I had some problems as the air pressure of the airbrush lifted parts of my stencil. For my first attempt I'm satisfied. Originally I wanted to put another red layer on top of that but I chickened out and the black was good enough for me.

For the inside I had the idea to use the Gridfinity system. It is an open source system that uses a grid to keep inserted bins and other types of inserts in place when the whole thing is tossed around (within reason of course). I downloaded this file for the grid and bins and this one for my paint in drop bottles. I could print bigger inserts but firstly I wanted to get rid of ABS filament that warps too much if it were any bigger and secondly I wanted to keep it small enough if I wanted to reconfigure the inside of the box in the future. The ABS filament was a huge pain to print out to begin with. It was the cheapest filament imaginable as it was part of a 3D pen. Not only gave me the filament head aches from the fumes but also many many many print failures due to extreme warping and the filament breaking apart.

The only thing that I can rant about is the AWFUL Citadel paint. It dries up way too fast. The STUPID tubs don't seal well enough and it's TEDIOUS to get paint out without contaminating the paint with other paint. It's another story for another time. As soon as I empty the Citadel paint I won't buy anymore of them. This is why I didn't made any special inserts for them.

Despite all the problems I had I am somewhat OK with the result. Yeah... I see the flaws at every corner and step I made, the prints aren't as clean as it could be but I made something from stuff I was already getting rid of for something another one wanted to get rid of. I rather have it at the state it already is instead of chucking it into the bin and doing all the work all over again for minor flaws that don't impede the functionality and practical use of the box.

[adiwan]

Oh boy... Concrete Bulbasaur

I got a request from a family member to make a Bulbasaur from concrete for their garden. I explained that I never did it and 3D-printing any kind of mold will be expensive and may result in many failures AND it will take a long time but they have faith in me.

I think I will 3D-print a positive and use silicone for the mold. It'll make it easier to remove the mold from the hard concrete in comparison to a hard shell mold. BUT to conserve the extremely expensive silicone I need to create a tightly fitting box that can be reused for the concrete pour. I predict that there will be bubbles galore in both the silicone and the concrete. Nobody I know has a sufficiently large vacuum or pressure chamber for removing bubbles. I ain't gonna buy that.

Gonna need to figure out what's the "real" size of Bulbasaur. The size entry in the pokedex seem to be quite off to what I see in screen shots of the anime. I think I'll stick to the smaller anime size.

[thecollectibles]

Art by Raja Nandepu

[adiwan]

Thank you tumblr for reminding me of my own mortality with an image that could be straight out of a MS Word clipart CD from the early 2000s.

[adiwan]

Ruins of Alph Ho-Oh replica

I was yet again approached by one of my friends to create something from Pokémon, namely the Ho-Oh puzzle from the Ruins of Alph from Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal. I did such a good job with my previous Pokémon creations that they felt compelled to have something too. This time I was compensated fairly.

I used a screen shot from the Game Boy Color game, traced it in Adobe Illustrator. Instead of trying an exact copy I tried to imitate a look of a ragged outline that resembles the pixelated look without being too on the nose.

Then the file needed to be converted into a SVG in Inkscape (because of some wonkyness importing it into Autodesk Fusion 360), and then imported it into Autodesk Fusion 360, where I extruded the areas into a 3D-printable giant cookie cutter model. With that giant cookie cutter printed out I put that immediately into action and stamped an equally-sized slab of polymer clay (about 15cm x 15cm) and textured it with a balled-up piece of aluminium foil. After 30 minutes of baking and a little bit of cool-off time the most arduous part began with the painting process. It took me about 6 hours of carefully building up (and messing up) the paint job with the crappy acrylic paint that won't get used up fast enough. I messed it up a few times trying some color experiments and using my miniature painting washes. The last part was that gave me the most head ache as they are hard to fix when applied. Washing or rubbing it off meant that the crappy acrylic paint would also be removed. I felt stuck at some point using the wash as it made the surface too glossy and the brown darkened a ton. I was disheartened for a bit but rolled with that mistake. All I wanted was to have some minor darker variations. The majority of the time painting on it was to create a more coherent look by switching between dry brushing and applying very thinned layers of more washes. I got to a point that made me happy again with the outcome (also a little bit of sleep helped too).

For the photo I used my Canon EOS 350D (Canon EOS Rebel XT), for which I needed to buy a new battery. The old battery couldn't hold a charge. Next to my house there is a big patch of moss I find quite appealing to look at and I thought it would complement the golden-brown paint job very well. I propped it up with a small box so the whole thing wouldn't sink completely into the squishy moss bed.