Man-Made Horrors: September 2025 - Happy Labour Day!
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Man-Made Horrors for Your Pleasure!
Happy Labour Day for all of those who celebrate it on the first weekend of September instead of the 1st of May. Be assured this is sent automatically and we’re all taking a bit of time for ourselves and our families. Though there haven’t been any videos posted in the last 2 months, we've been working on a lot of projects that have been growing through the summer. Yes, growing. There’s no rushing biology, especially when you want it to grow big!
But speaking of videos, our newest video is already up ad free on Nebula, there was a delay in shipping the review items for the sponsor which has been holding up the release on YouTube. Have you ever wondered, is that steak I just got from the grocery store still alive? Or what’s death to a biologist with access to a lab?
Store announcement and De Minimis exemption changes:
This does not affect the general print on demand (POD) merch, but it’s going to affect our Handmade posters, Bio products and Lab equipment. As such, we have disabled their sale to US customers for the time being.
We’re figuring out how to charge and collect this tariff upfront as we have to provide proof of payment for the mail carrier to accept the packages. Unfortunately, but also not unsurprisingly, the price of the tariffs will be paid by the importer, in this case, our US customers. As Canadians, we'd normally apologize, but it's not our doing.
For the rest of our international customers, there are no changes to announce and this policy should not affect you.
From the Cutting Room Floor
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, and yet he still serves the Emperor! For those of you who haven't seen our servo skull build, we splashed in some good old literary references for levity. As far as Torment Nexuses are concerned the Imperium of Mankind in the 40K universe definitely takes the cake. Made to be hilariously over the top with its depiction of the Grim darkness of a future where there is only WAR.
Our levitation system was inspired by Hyperspace Pirate's build, an appropriately named channel for our Grim Dark inspiration. As he goes over the circuitry in detail we didn't feel like covering it again, so if you're interested in some truly mad science and engineering, check out his channel. We just thought this levitation method would work best for the esthetic of a Mechanicus cobbled up office assistant.
As for the assistant itself, it's just a speech to text program running on a Raspberry Pi 4 that has pre-programmed text to speech responses. It's utterly devoid of what most people call AI, or Large Language Models. Mostly because these LLMs have a tendency to hallucinate and completely drop the "act" of being an Imperial Servo Skull. Maybe we could have wasted weeks training such a model to perform the basic tasks a very simple voice activated program from 20 years ago could do.
We know there's some interest on the CAD files of the backdrop, we'll need to clean them up and once it's done we'll put it up on our GitHub. Stay tuned to this newsletter for an update on that front!
In The Works
So we mentioned the growing bio project, all things continuing as planned you’ll get to see this in October. We’ve got a few more proof of concept cooking in the incubators that should make for some fun content down the line. In the meantime while all of this is growing we’ve been tackling some more spy tech from the real world and science fiction. We should be releasing alternating videos going from bio project to tech project in the immediate future. Hopefully this helps us maintain more consistency in our video output.
We've also started work on a sequel to the Tactical Hot Dog and plan on building a developing range of "Tactical" single use absurdities for y'all!
Neat Finds
Sunlight powered multicolor luminescence in plants?
A team from China created ultra-bright multicolored luminescent plants using micro-particles. I think the picture speaks for itself!