the superposition of yearning and mourning

You might know him from a thread where he was getting wowed by free appetisers in a Mexican restaurant.

Firstly: He is doing a bit pretending to be a wandering samurai. It's a joke and his posts are all made up. This is very obvious if you actually look at his account and website:

He does purport to be Japanese but based on some of the other content he posts there's reason to believe he's British.

Which brings me to my second point: his Samurai content is interspersed with posts like this:

And this:

Yeah this is also the guy from the truck thread going around. That's what prompted this post and in retrospect I should have said so explicitly.

He claims he just uses AI to translate his posts from Japanese. He also says the art on his website isn't AI generated. I think he is full of shit on both counts.

I only gave a couple of examples but even on a brief look through his twitter it was apparent that he posts a LOT about UK politics to the point where he's quite patently British. He is a Restore supporter which is a party that split away from mainstream far right party Reform due to feeling they weren't right wing enough.

It might not surprise you to hear he does not seem to know shit about Japan? Both the salsa story and the truck story failed the smell test for people who are familiar with Japan. There's also a story about going to a potluck where he seemingly couldn't come up with a single Japanese dish for the character to cook??

Spin the wheel to find out what!

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.