Who’s to say alien snot isn’t geologically identical to a rock?

This is my favorite gift from my crow buddies:

I feel like this is too general. I’d want to customize based on specific IRL traits or jobs or hobbies.

You feed and befriend crows? Druid with animal skills focus.

You’re some kind of a carpenter, engineer, craftsman? Artificer.

Phlebotomist’s assistant? Vampire thrall backstory.

Retail salesperson? Bard with psychic damage skills.

Live in a basement? Homebrew troll obviously.

Software and coding? Sounds like arcane languages and warlock pacts to me.

A pattern I’ve noticed isn’t the legal aspect, but rather the monetization. Everyone is offering a platform where an obscure writer can pay to give away their writing for free or pay for an ad campaign where you’re spending more on ads than you will otherwise make off your work. One of the significant advantages for writing is that it requires very little overhead versus another activity like making physical objects that require equipment and material. But the market is saturated and publishing platforms are harder to access unless you’re a guaranteed seller who is already somewhat famous or has a built-in following. And there’s always someone out there willing to “help” by taking your money for the promise of connections and exposure.

It reminds me of the old poetry contest scams where you submit a poem, they tell every poet that they’ve “won” and will be published, and then they offer a “discount” for poets published in the book to get print copies for you and your friends and family, but the book is only advertised to the poets.

It does seem like there should be more open and free resources for this—websites where authors and readers connect without barriers or monetization. There probably are, but they don’t show up high in search results. Obviously they’re not going to be seen before all the paid options with ad funding.

The print instructions mention sticker paper as an option. There are some types of sticker paper that work fine on inkjet printers. Then you could just stick it down on pieces of wood or something like that. If you have access to a vinyl cutter like a Cricut or Silhouette machine, you could cut them out more easily.

The license is Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial 2.5 Mexico, which allows for remixing. It could be cool to make a 3D printed version of the board and pieces.

About 18 years ago when I was a dispatcher, I had someone call 911 to report their drug dealer stole their laptop because they couldn’t afford to pay for the drugs they wanted to purchase. I asked them a few times if they would like to file a police report that states that they intentionally purchased illegal drugs. They didn’t seem to understand the angle of the question and we asked them to stay where they were so a deputy could go out and take a statement.

Bed adhesion is usually the biggest issue, often attributable to the z height being off, and a lot of older printers didn’t have z-axis sensors or the software to accommodate for the variances, so it involved the old paper test. Depending on the printer, it might shake itself out of its z height setting while printing. A lot of people ended up spending as much as the cost of their printer upgrading with after market parts to try to resolve some of these issues.

I haven’t used the Monoprice before, but my research says that Monoprice doesn’t make their own printers. They just rebrand someone else’s. So the Monoprice Maker Select appears to be a rebranded Wanhao Duplicator i3, which looks like it came out sometime in 2016. So while you might have bought it six years ago, the actual printer design is much older and missing out on possibly 9 years worth of innovations.

If you can eventually afford to replace it with something else, there are some sub-$400 printers out now that might give you a much nicer experience. I started with an Ender 3 v2, which was a pain, similar to what you experienced. I upgraded to a Sovol SV06, which was great (and recommended to me by a professional with a print farm and wide variety of printers). Now I’m on a Prusa CORE One, but I don’t recommend spending big until you know you’re really into 3D printing. If you do consider buying a newer printer at some point, I’d recommend seeing if you can see someone else’s in action so you can experience the difference. Makerspaces might be a good resource for this.

Unfortunately, with the factors you mentioned, you might want to cut your losses because I’m guessing you’ll just become more frustrated if you try to get more out of it. There is a learning curve for 3D printing, especially with older models like the one you have. The quality of printers has vastly improved for beginners in the last six years. Without the ability/funds to upgrade to a newer printer, what you have may be more trouble than it’s worth because it would likely take a lot of effort and learning to get it working decently. You might also need new filament since anything old is likely brittle after absorbing moisture over the years.

That said, I wouldn’t give up on 3D printing entirely. It can be a great experience. Maybe find a local makerspace that can help you or that has 3D printers of their own to learn on.

What’s wild is that there are “crows” in other places that look like what we consider “ravens” and the terminology is all arbitrary. And the Indo-European root source for the words crow and raven seem to be the same despite seeming so different.

I recently hallucinated a conversation with the crows on the college campus where I work. I’m taking a non-credit course on corvids, so I asked the crows that I feed on campus if they were taking the corvids course also. They said “no,” and asked if I take human courses. And I said, “well, yeah, we take lots of courses about humans—humanities, sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, etc.” They thought it was quite silly. “Why do you need lessons to be human?” And actually, I’d rather be a crow. But the corvids course probably doesn’t cover that.

For around $300, there are some newer models that are significantly better than an Ender 3. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon has been getting good reviews. I started with an Ender 3 V2, spent much of my time dealing with bed adhesion issues, then moved on to a Sovol SV06 which has a lot fewer issues and in some scenarios printed better than the Prusa MK4Ss I have at work. I recently upgraded to a Prusa CORE One, which is great, but I wouldn’t recommend spending the money if you don’t think you’re going to print much.

But like… have they seen all the plastic stuff you can buy with money?!?

Wait, they probably have. Never mind.

In case anyone else was wondering:

“Earth orbits around the sun at a speed of 67,100 miles per hour (30 kilometers per second).”

So 9000 kilometers away in 5 minutes.

But then the milky way spins at around 200-250 km/s, so there’s that displacement also.

If a time machine only travels through time and not space, would parts of the time machine travel through time at miniscule differences such that the power source is hundreds of kilometers away from the controls and thus the machine wouldn’t work beyond the initial activation?

They do get a nice iridescent sheen going in the sun light.

The website would have to verify the lack of a print photo. I’m guessing at this point it would probably be some AI image recognition filter so they don’t need to have humans verify all the uploads manually.

I would guess someone invented the handshake in prehistoric times and we just have no medium in which a record could exist aside from an undiscovered cave drawing or something like that. Humans seem to naturally touch hands outside of any social influence or cultural history. Babies reach out and people touch their hands. It seems like a pretty intuitive human action. We touch things with our hands, so other hands seems natural as a thing to touch. The shake just seems like a minor variation on that.

In the same way that Printables has an option to hide AI-generated content from the search results, you could just have an option to exclude models without print photos.

Don’t dead open inside!

Yeah, the crows at my work know I always have treats on me.