AKDragonFish3D

 As the old saying goes "a friend in need is a friend indeed" and, as I've experienced this firsthand, Google Maps is that friend.  How so you ask?  I'll give some brief points and then elaborate below. ** Map Spotting Locations ** Safety ** Navigation First point is MAP SPOTTING LOCATIONS .   What do I mean by that you ask?  You can technically do this technique with anything reference mapping so long as you have knowledge about what your looking at.  It's a time-honored skill taught to most militaries and their strategists.  Wars have been won, cities conquered, firefighters saving cities from wildfires, rescue crews saving people stuck in perilous locations, and people traveling from point A to point B and not dying in the process.......  all from Map Spotting. Map Spotting in a nutshell is looking at a map, its surrounding terrain, apply your knowledge of the subject at hand, and make an educated decision based on the data from the map an...

 On this edition of Friday Night Fights, I want to write about a "fight" that is a little more personal.  This time, it is between my love of the game called Dungeons and Dragons and my perceptive view of others' views on the game. First, I want to make one thing perfectly clear:  I love this game.  It has allowed me to accomplish so much on the social levels that as a social outcast most of my life I would have never been able to do otherwise. It has encouraged me to allow my imagination to flourish.  From that imagination, a massive homebrew world was created, each continent, zone, region, biome, city, state, small town, run-down village, barbarian camp, past cultures, past histories, and the like to be fleshed out, little by little, over the course of 20+ years. However, in the light of Dungeons and Dragons becoming "maintstream," I have developed a bit of internal conflict I cannot resolve with myself.  It is this conflict that I will address and the re...

Spring Is Coming. Well, this week is the first week where temps will be above 0 degrees F.  We might get  "lucky" and have one final "Snowpocalyse" between now and April, but I doubt it.  10 days of above zero temps is the first sign of spring. I'll give it until mid-March before I begin to check lakes and rivers for melted, exposed water to start fishing in.   This temp change is only more motivation to continue my craft and prepare for fishing, which is the purpose of this post here.  A lot of my lure prep involves 3D printed lure parts, and lures themselves, which is covered on my YouTube Channel. However, there is a lot of talk about "making 3D printed parts waterproof if exposed to water."  Face it, there's no easy answer to this, but PLA in general by itself is good enough.  If a lot of my parts were just bareboned 3D printed, then yes I would say i'm good and fish with it.  Unfortunately, that is not the case, as I print the part, pain...

Today is 2/18/22 and I asked my youngest for a random word.  She gave me the word Cat.  I shall now attempt to write about this word in terms of tabletop gaming, fishing, and 3D printing. Tabletop Gaming The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about cats in reference to tabletop gaming is Dungeons and Dragons races.  There have been many o' cat races over the years since the mid 90s when I started playing.  I recall the Wemic race, which was a lion-taur race that the top half looked like a ThunderCat and the bottom half was a Lion.   A Wemic (courtesy of Forgotten Realms Wiki) In the more current editions, the two races that come to mind are the Tabaxi, a sentient leopard-like race and a Leonin, a bipedal Lion-like race. A Tabaxi (courtesy of Forgotten Realms Wiki) A Leonin (courtesy of Wikipedia) Fishing First thing that comes to mind when thinking about the word cat with regards to fishing is catfish.   We don't have catfish in Alaska, ...

  3D Printing 2022 Struggles So I've Had Some Struggles... ...Most of them have been minor mechanical issues - tramming the bed, clogged nozzles, and the like.   Others have been more... mental struggles... that are harder to overcome.   Yes, 3D printing is a fun hobby.  It's a blast to be able to print anything that I can find on Thingiverse or Yeggi or other sites and print them.  I made a cool 3D printed Halloween Costume.  I have printed a variety of gifts for family and friends.  I've created 3D printed 40k and D&D terrain. ...but at what cost... I know the 3D printing world has become more and more cost efficient over the years.  To replace most of my parts is less than $20 and a couple more in shipping from either Amazon or EBay.  Filament runs ~$25 a roll. ... but at what cost to me mentally... I've put a lot of time and effort into these two machines.  When they are working, life is good.  When they are n...

A LONG TIME AGO... A long time ago, when I was 19-20, bored in my barracks room, I had just recently bought a stop-motion camera that came with some video editing software.  Back then, I had begun rebuilding my Transformers collection since I was an adult now with my own paycheck.  It gave me something to do and kept me out of trouble during the week.   I would do various stop-motion animations of my Transformers doing things and post the videos on my MySpace page.  My then girlfriend at the time, now ex-wife, thought I was a nerd but she helped and liked the outcome of the videos in question. FAST FORWARD TO 2022 Let's fast forward 20 years or so.  I'm now 40.  I decided that in 2022 I would build up my presence online again, but this time for those things I like to do - fishing, tabletop gaming, and 3d printing - and hopefully someone learns along the way. I've recently started a series of videos where I do fishing activities with my daughters, prima...

Introduction Since 2019, the year before COVID struck hard, a certain collection of waterways have been contaminated with PFAS and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) published an Emergency Order saying these waterways were catch-and-release. The latest 2022 update to the Emergency Order has been published, and the list has expanded.  The link to the current publication can be found here: Emergency Orders & Press Releases - Sport Fish - ADF&G (alaska.gov) What are PFAS? PFAS stands for Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances.  As defined by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, PFAS are.....  "a large, complex, and ever-expanding group of manufactured chemicals that are widely used to make various types of everyday products. For example, they keep food from sticking to cookware, make clothes and carpets resistant to stains, and create firefighting foam that is more effective. PFAS are used in industries such as aerospace, au...

Introduction Greetings everyone.  I did not have anything worthy in my opinion of writing about for my weekly Friday Night Fights (FNF posts), so I asked my eldest for a word.  She gave me the word "Worms."   With my RANDOM WORDS posts for now and in the future, I will take a random word given to me by someone around me (family, friends, co-workers, etc) and then write about it as it pertains to the three main points of AKDragonFish3D:  tabletop gaming (board games, card games, Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, etc), the over expansive topic of fishing , and 3D printing . Tabletop Wargaming First, I will cover tabletop wargaming as it comes to mind when I think about the word "worms."  There are three things off the cuff that come to mind. The first thing that comes to mind is a play on words:  "Worms" becomes "Wyrms" or "Wurms."  A type of dragon species, a Wyrm is a dragon with no arms and no legs.  The most prevalent example that sho...

  Tonight was a fun little adventure.  I made a "mess" on my table with all of my fishing lure parts, past lure projects, and future lure projects.  Now that it's all cleaned up, repacked into flat plastic sorters and stored in a reused Amazon box, my table is now clean and the Mrs. won't be too aggravated ... unless I dropped a bead or hook i'm not aware of and she stepped on it. I'd like to do a blog post to recap the video and consolidate some of my ideas in an effort to formulate more lure making content in the (hopefully near) future. A link to the video in question  here! First, my camera skills with my phone are atrocious.  I have some smaller off-brand GoPro cameras with mounting equipment and such.  In hindsight, I should have used that equipment instead of my Galaxy 9 smartphone.  (It still works, the OS still updates, don't judge).   I also needs to work on my verbose, but this was an impromptu video, so cut me some slack. Mov...

 Hello and thank you for reading yet another one of my blogs part of my Friday Night Fights series, where I rant/discuss/share about fights related to Dungeons and Dragons.  This week I thought I would share my rant and breakdown about passive skills.   Breakdown:   I recently got in an argument with my brother, whom is one of my DMs when I'm a player, and he and I got into a very heated discussion about passive perception, which evolved into him thinking "there is no such thing as passive skills" and my counter is "so humanity has no instinctual behavior then?" and he responded "not in D&D they don't.  Passive skill checks are DM's discretion, and I say they don't exist."  This is also one of the many reasons why he won't play at my table / I don't DM for him is because I do use and incorporate passive skill checks. So allow me to break down my reasoning behind passive abilities/checks from my point of view and how I perceive t...

  SUMMIT / PAXON LAKE TRIP PLANNING  2022 Thanks for stopping by to read my blog.  If your looking for some ideas for a fishing trip to Summit / Paxon Lake area, hopefully my ideas can help you out.   Please note that I've never been to this region before, so everything is pure research, map spots, and leaning on all of my other fishing experiences in other parts of the state.  I intended on going in 2021, but the trip has been delayed until this year, 2022. I'll break my post down to three distinct points: *  Locations *  Time of year *  Gear taken  Locations Paxon Lake         ADFG: Paxon Lake Summit Lake      ADFG: Summit Lake (Paxon) From map spotting, you will reach Summit Lake first, followed by Paxon Lake when traveling from Interior Alaska, passing through Delta Junction, going south along the Richardson, over the mountains, and then you're there.  Hwy 8 that connects the region to Cantwe...