Soon after the Spring semester ended, Adrienne and I headed out to Oakland for some friends’ “50th” birthday party. Neither of them is 50 yet, but that’s not the point. We went out a few days early to meet up with other friends and then spent a few days with the old crew.

A surprising number of my conversations at the festivities included discussion of jewelry (maybe because that was my easy answer to “what have you been up to?”). I agreed to work on a collab with my friend Spider to try to incorporate my dodecahedra and her chainmail expertise. I used this as an excuse to get a resin printer so that I can tighten the iteration loop for castable prints.

Because I’d rather not have resin fumes in the house, I set up an elaborate enclosure with a filter and a fan exhausting them outside.

I did a few test prints of linked pieces, and got to work modeling more complex things.

Travel

Our big trip this year was back to Indonesia for more diving. The boat that we were on for our Raja Ampat trip spends its off season in the Derawan islands near Borneo. This year we met the boat for the second half of the voyage between the two.

We started our trip with a few days in Singapore, a country neither of us had visited before. We met up with a friend from my college days, who showed us around and gave us recommendations about what to do. Singapore has a very different vibe than anywhere I’ve visited before. It is simultaneously very tropical and very modern. One thing that surprised me was how green it is. We spent a lot of our time walking in wilderness parks (on very well maintained trail). I’ll have to go back to Singapore because I only had great food, and the food there is supposed to be amazing, so clearly I did it wrong.

From Singapore, we flew to northeast Sulawesi in Indonesia, where we found a guide who was willing to drive us around and try to spot birds and show us the weird mammals. Tarsiers! Cuscus! Adrienne got a lot of lifers.

Then it was twelve days on the dive boat. We started in the Lembeh Strait, which is famous for muck diving. Rather than colorful corals and brightly colored fish, there’s a silty bottom and weird creatures. Crustaceans, nudibranchs and other sea slugs, cuttlefish, and weird fish like frogfish.

The boat followed Sulawesi west, and we dived a lot of sites that were barely on the map. There might be divers there just a few times a year. We saw more unusual creatures, a lot more coral than in Lembeh, and pretty good fish life.

From Sulawesi, we crossed towards Borneo, stopping in the Derawan islands, which had more muck diving and weird critters. Over the course of the trip, Adrienne and I identified over 500 species of creatures!

We couldn’t visit Borneo and not attempt to see orangutans, so we hopped a flight to another part of the island and got on another boat. This time, a “houseboat” which cruised into Tanjung Puting National Park. We’d dock, do hikes in the National Park, return to the boat, and head along the river, trying to spot birds and other animals. We did see orangutans, both fully wild and at rehabilitation centers, along with tarsiers, and various kinds of monkeys. On one of the most memorable evenings on the river, we were treated to hundreds (thousands?) of flying foxes heading out for their evening.

Our flight back was routed through Narita, and we had a 12 hour layover, so we spent the day poking around Tokyo and eating.

Back in Texas

Borneo may have a lot of flying foxes, but Bracken Cave, near San Antonio has the largest known concentration of mammals in the world, a colony of 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats. We visited there as part of Adrienne and our friend Emily’s birthday weekend.

Asmbly had a benchtop injection molding system donated, and I spent a good chunk of time trying to 3D print molds to injection mold. So far I have not gotten any to work. I definitely had some problems with draft angles early on, but even after figuring that out, I couldn’t get the injected urethane to release from the print. I tried wax-based and spray release agents without any luck.

Cheap silicone molds work fine with the injection molder, so my next attempt will be to 3D Print a positive and a jacket and use them to make a silicone mold that I can inject into.