u/ClubEar99

Ok, so after the replies from my last post it seems like getting the electromagnets to work is going to be much more difficult then I thought, so I wanted to give a more detailed description to see if it’s even worth pursuing.
The option that I talked about in the last post is having two large foam panels held by rubber bands and able to be separated by an electromagnet’s repulsion on a permanent magnet.
The other option that I’ve been attempting to avoid (and my original idea) is to have the panels resting on springs while open and able to be closed by pulling them together with strings/cables. There would then be a lever that could release the strings causing the panels to open. I have a couple main problems with this that I wanted to avoid with the electromagnets. First, the springs being under tension when closed means it is going to be under that tension 99% of the time (I would rarely be opening it). The second, more minor issue is that it would just be an annoying inconvenience to have to pull back against four springs at once every time I close it (I only showed one pair above because it makes the diagram more readable.)

Anyway, is it even worth trying to get the electromagnets to work for this project?

Ok, so I'm working on a project where I want two objects to be able to be pushed apart by a single action. I settled on using electro magnets so I could have them resting together until turning them on, causing them to repel apart and separate the objects.
However, after testing the two magnets I bought (cheap, crappy, round, 1"-diameter ones from amazon) I cannot get them to repel each other at all. When meeting same-pole they simply don't have any effect, no attraction or repulsion. I tried with a normal little cylindrical neodymium magnet but it seemed to always attract without exception, it stuck to any side of the electromagnets no matter which way either were facing.

I'm truly out of ideas. I don't know what I'm missing, is it something wrong with the cheap magnets I'm using? Am I just missing something super obvious?

Been working on this project for a while and I'm just about finished with the head of the hammer (I've done seam filling since taking the photos but it still needs paint of course). The cylinder at the top of the handle is built but everything else on the handle still needs to be done, and I'm still working on how to get the mechanism of the panels opening to work. I've gone through many concepts with one involving electromagnets being the most appealing atm.

Anyway, this is the first prop I've ever built and I have a long way to go, but I think it's looking pretty nice! Would love to hear what you think :)

Been working on this project for a while and I'm just about finished with the head of the hammer (I've done seam filling since taking the photos but it still needs paint of course). The cylinder at the top of the handle is built but everything else on the handle still needs to be done, and I'm still working on how to get the mechanism of the panels opening to work. I've gone through many concepts with one involving electromagnets being the most appealing atm.

Anyway, this is the first prop I've ever built and I have a long way to go, but I think it's looking pretty nice! Would love to hear what you think :)

Ok, so, I'll explain my ideas on what we thought this could be later in the post, but I want to tell the story how I saw it first.
Me and my brother were visiting Tucson (we live in Washington) and had driven up to the peak of Mt Lemmon to watch the sunset. We followed a little trail into the woods past some fenced off buildings until we found a nice spot and stayed there until a little after the sun had fully left the horizon, the sky was that dark grey-blue you get before it shifts full into night. In the shadow of the trees the trail was just barely not pitch black, you could still make out the grass and gravel in the minimal light. As we were walking back to the car I heard a noise and looked over to see something running past us in the opposite direction around ten feet off the trail or so.

It looked to be roughly 2 feet tall, it was relatively thin, nearly perfectly upright, it was all white, featureless, had no head or arms, and ran on two stumpy feet. It waddled past us in a very uncanny fashion until it swerved off the trail and stopped a good distance out just to stand there. My brother caught sight of it just before it started to run away from the trail and stop. It stayed there for probably 5-10 seconds while we frantically fumbled for our cameras. By the time we had done so I took one lightless video (literally nothing but black I couldn't figure out how to get the flash to be on for a video) and the thing ran away again to stop further out. I figured out the flash and my brother used his empty InstaX's flash to try to help too, but by the time we got that done it had left at some point.

All in all I was pretty shocked in the moment, especially because this perfectly fit the description of a goofy cryptid/alien "sighting" called the Fresno Nightcrawler. I truly couldn't think of an animal that would fit what I was looking at. Anyway, me and my brother spent the next 2 hours or so discussing what we thought it could have been. We don't live in the area so we spent a lot of that time simply coaming through native wildlife looking for anything that could possibly match what we saw. We ended up with a couple rough hypothesis. Maybe it was an abandoned farm/runner duck that someone, for some reason, took to the top of the mountain and abandoned. It fits the shape well, and maybe it's beak and eyes were too dark to see in the very poor light. We considered for a bit that maybe it was a chicken in a similar circumstance with a bone disease that makes them upright but quickly ruled that out. The most likely conclusion we came to was that it was a wild turkey with luecism, giving it white feathers and maybe a black head. This would alloy for it's head to be possibly lost in the darkness so we only saw it's neck? Maybe the body of the turkey was hidden by a trick of perspective? It still seems highly unlikely, but that was our best guess.

Does anyone have any idea of what this could have been?

(Images: #1: One of the many empty frames we captured [I have more videos but there's no real content to them besides me and my brother saying "what the hell?!" in darkness] #2: A very rough drawing I did of what it looked like off the side of the trail. #3: A little diagram of the path it took. #4: An image of the Fresno Nightcrawler thing I associated it with.)

Hey, so I just found out about this game a couple days ago and it has quickly become one of, if not my favorite depiction of a Grimdark setting. Never heard about or played the game but the art design and aesthetics are just absolutely stunning and I immediately started searching through lore and stuff. However, the faces of the human characters look very out of place compared to the grimy, realistic texturing of the environments and outfits. Before I learned more about the actual lore I assumed they must be some form of synthetic human or android or something but it appears they are in fact just normal people.

Does anyone know why they went with this hyper stylized approach to the faces as opposed to the high detail griminess of the world's texture?

Quick edit: Another thought that I forgot to mention above is, since the faces are so stylized, what does a mother courage's face look like if it were in full realism? would they have near human features blended into their robotic body? Or do they really have a much simpler angled shape to their features and don't, in fact, resemble real people?

It took longer than expected, but I'm actually quite proud of this lol

I started this damn piece so long ago lol but I finally got around to finishing it.

(Nutcracker coming soon)