A Cute Space Hut Year in Pictures
‘Lo child!
Gracious, it’s been a bit, right? I just never picked up a social media habit, is the problem. It never occurs to me to take pictures of stuff for other people to see; it never occurs to me to go on Instagram or whatever and post things; it rarely dawns on me that I even have a phone. Been trying to remind myself to take more pictures, but since that reminder lives on my phone, it’s been intermittently effective at best.
But I’m trying to replace “sorries” with “thank yous,” you know what I mean? I’m trying to be less apologetic about my limitations, and more grateful to the people who help me deal with them. So, I’m not gonna apologize for not taking more pictures or writing more this year… I’m just gonna thank you for sticking with me and believing that inevitably I’ll come back with more thousand-word paragraphs for you. I always will, as long as I know you want ’em.
I normally have my phone dump all the pictures I take into a single folder in my Dropbox, and then sort them out later into folders organized by month and year. I’ve been ignoring my phone so intensely this year that the oldest picture still sitting in that unsorted uploads folder is from July 2024. Oof.
But I’ve just gotten a new phone and I’m about to clear out the old, and since I’ve got about nine emails from Actual!Work awaiting my attention, this seems like a swell time to procrastinate! Want to help me sort through the last year and change? I’ll leave out the dross and dupes, don’t worry; we’ll just hit the highlights.
The Dregs of 2024
…And the lowlights, I guess. Hey, you know how sometimes you get into an Uber and there’s blood on the walls?
That doesn’t happen in your neighborhood? Damn, you must live somewhere classy.
We’re about one year in from starting our Etsy shop now — don’t click that link, actually, there’s gonna be more later — and it’s been going better than my cynical ass had ever dared to hope!
It’s a weird market, the 3D-printer-for-hire space. Home 3D printers remain largely the province of technofetishists like myself, even though you can build one yourself for under $100 these days. And it’s cool to have, because there are TONS of sites where people post entirely free 3D models, all kinds of stuff. If the idea of just manifesting random objects out of thin fucking air in your living room doesn’t make you squeak with glee, what in this infinite universe does?
But honestly, unless you’re gonna be running it nonstop, there’s really no reason to have one at home. I’ve got one, and I’ll print you anything you want. We do stuff unpainted, like this:
…and then you can assemble her and paint her yourself at home. The unpainted, unassembled versions are easier to wrap and ship, and require basically nothing of me, so they’re cheaper, usually in the $80-$120 range. And these are big models; we’re not talkin’ miniatures anymore, Vi up there is ten inches tall!
But some people aren’t into the painting part, or don’t have the stocked paints at home to get it done — you do require a lot of materials just to get started on something like this, and it’s not stuff you’d buy for just one project.
Orin was the first painted model we sold, about a year back. Most shops don’t sell models this size pre-painted, because they’re so hard to ship that way without damage. Painted Orin is easy, as they go — just wrap that braid up real good and she’s pretty much fine. You want to see a packaging nightmare?
2B from Nier Automata. She’s standing on her toes on nearly vertical supports, she’s got two incredibly delicate swords held out at different angles, and then there’s that lil robot on a cable hovering next to her. All of that’s got to be swaddled and padded in case your mailman kicks her down the stairs. It’s murder, not gonna lie. We spend a lot on bubble wrap. But I’ve never had a complaint — we know how to safely transport a lady, never fear!
Late last year, Lady Viki and I had a weekend in New York City. I went with two primary intentions:
See my best friend play Judas in the thundering high-gloss performance of Jesus Christ Superstar they’ve been dreaming of for twenty solid years of local theater, and
Find someone who can pay the rent on a brick-and-mortar storefront in Manhattan by selling miniatures, and pick their brain till they beg me to stop.
And though it took much toil in the trains and subway lines of the city, (made me understand Barker’s The Midnight Meat Train so much better!) we achieved both aims. The show was unforgettable, of course — the six-foot-two nonbinary King Herod in a Dior gown walked off with my heart before I even realized they were the last-minute understudy — flawless!
But it turns out there is indeed one person in Manhattan who can keep a storefront open serving this small niche hobby of building and filling small niches. We hit up the Tiny Doll House, and while Viki browsed amazing things like this handful of banquet:
I DON’T KNOW WHY TINY FOOD DELIGHTS ME SO
…I interrogated the proprietor. Are you busy, I wanted to know, do people come in here a lot? Do you have regulars? What kind of people are they, demographics — is it all just kids and moms? What kind of stuff do they ask for that you don’t have?
She was incredibly forthcoming and helpful. Busy, no, not as such, but steady, and a large contingent of regulars. The regulars, well, there are a lot of kids that come in, but they’re not the big spenders. The whales are the middle-aged ladies working in the standard 1-to-12 scale, which is the scale of most modern dollhouses.
A Brief Sidebar on Scale
It’s about to become pertinent, so endure just a little more math, if you would. The standard-sized Barbie doll is 1-to-6 scale — one inch of Barbie to six inches of human, so Barbie is twelve inches tall and represents a six-foot-tall woman. Most of your traditionally handmade dolls and dollhouses will be half that size, because have you tried to build another house inside your house at scale? Ain’t nobody got room for that!
This is 1-to-12. The patriarch there is six inches tall, so he’s meant to be six feet tall. Makes all the scaling math very easy.
But… these days, the proprietor told me, precious few have room even for something this size. A dollhouse still takes up a whole table, or a small room — something that has its own space on the floor, more furniture than decoration.
The unexpectedly robust demographic at Tiny Doll House, apparently, is the middle-aged man looking for things at half-scale, 1-to-24. This fellow, it seems, would like a little model of his office, or his house, on his desk to mess around with during phone calls. He might want a little model of his best design work in situ, or a micro-version of the very office he’s currently sitting in — he can rearrange the furniture easily until he finds a configuration he likes.
There wasn’t much to serve such a person’s needs at that shop — this was about it:
Even that - sure, the furniture’s a little mod, but it’s so cluttered, and so basic, no real detail, and let’s be honest… the scale’s a bit off. How big would that doll be sitting on that sofa? He’d look like a toddler.
And that’s the problem, apparently, with people wanting 1-to-24 scaled things — it’s reaching the bottom of what traditional materials can be persuaded to do at an acceptable level of detail. Think about it — if you wanted to make a model of a toilet out of the traditional ceramic or porcelain, you could go ahead and do that at 1-to-6 scale or even 1-to-12 and it would look great, very elegant, nice work.
Now make me a porcelain toilet at 1–to-24 scale. The hell you say! It looks like a rounded lump! It’s too small to look good, and at that size, you’re not getting the main benefit of using traditional materials, which is that the model feels roughly like the genuine article — a tiny piece of upholstered wood does not feel much more like an armchair than my 3D-printed armchair, and mine looks considerably better when it’s an inch tall, trimmed in braid as thin as thread!
The Official Digest of Social Mobility
We’ve covered how I was raised by wolves in this space before. My folks were social climbers — smart kids from poor backgrounds, the first in their families to go to college, and they never went back home from there.
So we had Metropolitan Home in the little magazine basket in the bathroom. I grew up reading Elle Decor and Dwell. We were too poor to really go hard with their taste for midcentury modern furnishings, but we had a couple old Eames chairs they found at estate sales and brought home for the cats to destroy. As a result, I too have a real fondness for midcentury modern design.
Here’s the thing: so does that guy who wants a little office on his desk. That guy goes to sleep at night dreaming of the Eames Lounge Chair. He thinks about it more than he thinks about sex. And he would never have sex in that chair, no matter who he was with — he’d choose to save the chair first, if it came down to it. Because it’s a seven-thousand dollar chair!
You Can’t Have A Seven-Thousand Dollar Chair
You just can’t. If you can, hit me up; I have some other, better suggestions for how to spend your money, and apparently you care a lot about what I think, for some reason.
You can’t have a seven-thousand dollar chair, but you know what you can have? A forty-dollar model of the exact same chair, beautifully rendered at 1-to-24 scale and ready to install at the mini-desk on the regular desk of your choice.
It’s cute, right? I want to make a bunch of this kind of thing — little nubbly rugs and weird light fixtures and blob-shaped endtables and gloriously mod foam-green desks from the 60s…
Yeah. So the plan is to make packs of that kind of thing — the chair and its ottoman and a desk, say — and have them painted ahead of time so people can just buy ‘em. Diversify the revenue stream, y’know. And give me something to paint while I’m waiting for coats to dry on a hulking beast or whatever.
And Now, Because You’ve Been So Good…
I shall cease the word-vomit and just show you some super-secret behind the scenes pictures of the stuff we’ve made this year. I’ll put a link to the model in each caption so you can see the finished product:
Fractured Vi from Arcane — her base fits together with Jinx’s to make a cool diorama
And finally… she gets a drum roll because I’m so, so proud of her…
Our Lady, Mother of Humanity, Lilith.
We had to take down the listing for her, because as you know Blizzard has gone over to the Dark Side, but I wanted to paint her so bad that I just did it anyway. Those wings were so much fun, you guys. Check ’em out from the back, it’s super grody:
Anyway, that’s been the year, for the most part. Just painting away in the depths of the night and swaddling things in bubble wrap. New year resolutions include: more writing, more diverse types of 3D things to make, more making ridiculous art just because I want to, goddamn it, and more kissing of wonderful beloved faces.
We can do it together; bring your face.
Lemme paint something for ya! I’ve got OCD and I’ll put it to work for you!
