I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the direction this thread has taken.
You mean the sticking of rubber plugs into holes?
I meant geek topic to subsequent geek topic, but that works too!
No hate. I’ve got a husband who collects Marvel action figures.
That’s an older Texas law.
What a nerd!
(Ignore the shelf I have covered in Captain America shit right above my computer, and the shelf above that with 8 different Marvel heroes from the Disney Infinity video games, and Captain America wall artwork around my PC, and…)
Fuckin’ loser!
(Carefully positions himself to block the view of his shelf full of custom printed D&D miniatures)
Hero Forge…?
(Not that I know anything about that. 
)
Yep. Whenever I start a new campaign, I offer to buy all my players HF minis for their characters, with the caveat that I get to keep them when it’s over.
I’ve got about thirty, including my own characters, at this point.
I have only gotten 3 or 4 of them (it depends on whether a broken one counts) but the level of customization you can get is staggering. I adore Hero Forge.
So the MAGAs have just discovered an animated series called Dead End: Paranormal Park three years after it aired in 2022 as two 10-episode seasons and then was cancelled. One of the characters on the show is trans, and therefore they are OUTRAGED that it exists. Here’s the latest hyperbole:
“Obviously, there are a lot of laws against this kind of stuff,” MAGA influencer Benny Johnson told Burchett. “And I think that there should, quite frankly, be some penalties when it comes to companies that are overtly putting sexually explicit content into children’s programming.”
Except there is absolutely nothing sexual about the character or the series. It is beeing deemed obscene because (as has been discussed in this thread) characters exist that aren’t straight and cis. In fact it is a pretty mediocre and forgetful series (except possibly for people who identify with some of the character struggles) as you can see from my extensive review from 2022
Wonder if these people are aware of Steven Universe?
I was thinking the same thing.
Back in the day, those molds for plastic toys were amazingly expensive (like, tens of thousands of dollars each), so you had to be able to sell a lot of $5 pieces of plastic to make back your cost. Which meant re-using them as much as possible.
Ultimately, 3D printing and related technologies are probably why Adam’s actually scrawny in the new shows.
Having worked in injection-molded plastics a bit, “tens of thousands of dollars” is pretty much par for the course for a plastic mold. When you produce plastic parts by the hundreds of thousands the price per unit of making that mold is actually pretty cheap. This is true of all plastic parts, including those selling for pennies apiece. It’s the volume that picks up the tab. Selling Masters of the Universe action figures at $5 apiece is going to pay off those molds pretty quick. I think you’re overplaying the costs.
Yeah, but how many $5 Prince Adam figures would they sell? That’s not going to be a high-demand character.
Some forty years ago a member of the model railroad club I belonged to made an inquiry of making dies for a diesel model that was not available commercially. He was quoted $8,000. Turned out that was for making a simple, hollow-bodied rectangular cuboid about six inches long without any of the details modelers like to have. Thiat would cost a lot extra.
Me, too. One summer in college, 3rd shift, for McKechnie Plastic Components. (I see that ownership of that that company has been shuffled quite a bit in the decades after that, but the building I wirked in is still in operation under a different name.) They had dozens of presses ranging from car-sized to pretty much house sized. The molds in the presses are machined from thick slabs of steel, and have ejector pins to push out the finished part making them even more complex. Of course the molds are expensive to make.