Let's open a gift shop

[erictom333]

Now that there's an official textbook and people (like me) are making or thinking of merchandise, how about we open a store somewhere online? We could sell things like the textbook, pcallahan's still life tiles, and other things. What to you think?

[yujh]

Again, I do think everything needs to be free.

[otismo]

Greetings Awesome Wonderful LifeEnthusiasts !

I agree with BOTH posts above !

Everything SHOULD be FREE !

But there also needs to be stuff that we can pay for, because it would not otherwise EXIST !

That's Right ! The only reason it EXISTS is because of people who are willing to PAY FOR IT !

I have many CGoL-related URLs/Domains where a Shop with Merch would be a good fit -

How about Shop.Conway.Life - it could be a simple Catalog-Style Shop a la OSCommerce

but we can think about it for now, it is easy to make things like this a reality...

Cheers !

[erictom333]

Again, I do think everything needs to be free.

You're missing the point. I'm thinking of a store selling physical merchandise.

[yujh]

Again, I do think everything needs to be free.

You're missing the point. I'm thinking of a store selling physical merchandise.

I do know that. But who really needs to buy textbooks when they can have someone else payed to print them?(I guess?)

[hotdogPi]

Someone else (not sure if it was the forums or Discord) mentioned earrings that looked like the dense phase of an XWSS where the loop went through the "eye" of the spaceship.

Also:

• pcallahan's tiles (had the wrong name here before)

• a handheld battery-operated simulator

• wallpaper that looks like settled ash

• [s]NFTs[/s]

[hkoenig]

I do think everything needs to be free.

I disagree. People who put in a lot of effort should be compensated for that effort. That textbook was a non-trivial task, taking up a lot of their time. Especially producing a physical product. Why should they not get paid the equivalent of what they could have gotten if that time had been used for their paying jobs?

So, are you going to buy a printed copy of the book, or at least get the non-watermarked PDF? The Kickstarter site shows only ten backers, even though they reached their goal. If Paul Callahan makes (or licenses) his Life tiles, I would gladly buy a set or two, to at least help defray his costs of prototyping them and doing all that research on what works best.

[dani]

I don't have that much money but I do plan on securing a copy of the textbook. And maybe those earrings, although my ears aren't pierced...

This idea has come up before some years ago, and I remember someone suggesting plushies loosely based on the bugs from LTL. While these would be even nicher than the CGoL related stuff, I would gladly accept another plushy in my life.

[pcallahan]

If Paul Callahan makes (or licenses) his Life tiles, I would gladly buy a set or two, to at least help defray his costs of prototyping them and doing all that research on what works best.

I can already make (and have made) the still life tiles a variety of ways. See viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2188&p=141915&hilit=tiling#p136495 The acrylic ones are a little pricy (less so if I could do a quantity order) but the least work for me. I have taken a break from ordering laser cuts to explore the limits of using a Cricut die cutter. Anyway, if there is serious interest, I can produce them.

I'm not sure I feel the need to license the patterns. I can definitely produce some SVG files suitable for laser cuts. These could either be simple jigsaw puzzle style (which leaves 0.2mm kerf) or kerf-corrected versions of the pieces (or just the boundary pieces).

The process that interests me most now, though it's labor-intensive, is using layered cardboard to mold polymer clay. The pieces hold together better than slippery acrylic, and it may be possible to avoid some of the jigsaw complexity of the internal parts and keep them symmetrical.

Another notion that I have not explored as completely is gluing the layers of cardboard into pieces. This is a simple idea, but I am trying to think of the fastest way to do it and keep the layers aligned.

If you mean the more general set of 5 Moore neighborhood tiles, those are easy to print and cut on magnetic sheets and I have linked to PDF files for them. I could try something fancier, e.g. with polymer clay, but the amount of work would make it prohibitive.

[pcallahan]

I probably should have added, that if a CGoL gift shop existed, I could think of a lot of merchandise, some purely decorative. I don't have the time or motivation to try to set up my own Etsy shop, but I'd be happy to contribute.

[pcallahan]

I made a drink coaster based on the pulsar by cutting six layers of cereal box cardboard on a Cricut. Each generation of the pulsar is made up of two layers of cardboard glued to hide the printed side. Live cells are represented with holes because otherwise the result is entirely disconnected in the middle and would be too fragile anyway.

The coasters are 4.6mm thick and 92mm across on the longest side.

Cut pieces:

Screen Shot 2022-04-29 at 8.44.31 AM.jpg (711.36 KiB) Viewed 11922 times

Finished coaster, top and bottom:

Screen Shot 2022-04-29 at 8.45.43 AM.jpg (546.01 KiB) Viewed 11922 times

No live cell (hole) is entirely hidden from view, if you look at top and bottom. There are 8 cells that are only live in the middle generation, but they are visible on the edge:

20220429_082329.jpg (80.78 KiB) Viewed 11922 times

I am not sure if anyone would really want to use it as a coaster, but it's entirely functional. It could be sealed for durability. Note that while the materials are scrap cardboard and white glue, the amount of work involved would make it hard for me at least to charge a reasonable price in an actual gift shop.

This idea would probably work better with transparent materials such as clear acrylic. You could layer them and fill in the cells with an opaque casting liquid. The same basic idea could also be done with less labor using a 3D printer (but all I have a is die cutter).

[pcallahan]

Maybe this thread would have been a better place to post about my pulsar suncatcher.

pulsarart.jpg (708.63 KiB) Viewed 11410 times

It seems to be languishing in sandbox with just 10 views (several my own). As I wrote there:

I had another go at the Pulsar, this time using a Cricut to cut 50mm shapes from red, blue, and red color filters. Cells are represented as holes, so one that goes all the way through is a stator, one that's on two out of three generations shows the color layer where it's missing, and other cells show a subtractive mix of the layers where they're missing.

The cells that are present only in the yellow layer are hard to see, but detectable in the center bottom image.

I wrote this, but it is incorrect: "Since there are no cells that are only present in the middle layer (blue) I can improve this by using yellow for that layer. I think orange will show up better than dark purple." In fact, there are and they show up as red in the photos because the yellow filter has a weak effect.

I plan to set this in clear resin to use as a suncatcher. Right now, it's a little fragile.

[apg]

Maybe this thread would have been a better place to post about my pulsar suncatcher. pulsarart.jpg It seems to be languishing in sandbox with just 10 views (several my own).

Beautiful! Would cyan/magenta/yellow work better as base colours? I'm concerned that some of the tips of the composite appear to be red, but logically they should be a subtractive mix of red and yellow.

(Yes, the sandbox is low signal-to-noise ratio so I never really check it, and I imagine that other Lifenthusiasts feel the same way.)

[pcallahan]

Beautiful! Would cyan/magenta/yellow work better as base colours? I'm concerned that some of the tips of the composite appear to be red, but logically they should be a subtractive mix of red and yellow.

Yes, probably. I simulated it in Inkscape using transparent fill colors of cyan/magenta/yellow. These just come from a pack of plastic sheets I could get on Amazon. I am not sure how much choice I have with colors.

Added: In fact, here's what it looked like in Inkscape. I hadn't even thought to make a comparison.

rect7338-6-3-2.png (86.03 KiB) Viewed 11402 times

The flat sides are semi-intentional. They came about when I intersected a square with a circle that was a little too big, but then I realized it helps in aligning the layers.

Update 2: I took a closer look and there is really not much difference between red and red through the yellow filter. It fooled me when I assembled this. I agree I need a better choice of colors if I want accuracy.

[pcallahan]

Here is the pulsar set in resin alongside a Belousov-Zhabotinsky pattern generated with symmetric constraints.

20230210_080238.jpg (722.18 KiB) Viewed 11356 times

Unfortunately, the irregular surface of the resin completely destroys the shadow cast by the pulsar and distorts the other one in places. It is probably fixable just by adding more resin to the top and letting it level out. I don't know if it's worth trying to fix these or better just to move on to new ones.

[otismo]

Please see the Novelty Items thread in the SandBox.

Thank You !

[pcallahan]

I'm going to continue on this thread rather than sandbox, because it is relevant to CGOL. After many impractical, labor intensive approaches, I think I finally have a design for 19 still life tiles that can be 3D-printed pretty reliably (I am using PLA on a Flashforge Adventurer 3 Pro 2 and still a novice after two weeks). I have written about it here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2188&p=178194#p178194

The eater looks like this, using a slightly older version of the loneliness tiles.

20240213_080616.jpg (3.26 MiB) Viewed 8278 times

I plan to make more and build some larger patterns. I think these are pretty fun to put together, but you do have to start out knowing what you're making. The "puzzle" would be: given specific numbers of pieces required to make some still life, figure out what it is, and put it together. Some would be ambiguous, but this could be checked when generating the set. This could probably get challenging for larger still life patterns. With a big set of pieces, the challenges could be provided on cards. Alternatively, each one (such as a block, beginner level, or eater) could be packaged separately.

[pcallahan]

I had some extra silicone, already mixed, that would have gone to waste, so I quickly 3d-printed a frame for a glider and made a mold. I coated the mold with more silicone afterward to smooth away the 3d-print artifacts. It does nothing, but it could be used for keychains or pendants.

This resin is filled with bubbles, and I think it's because my mixing cup had a drop of water that I missed. I'll go for clarity next time but here is the proof of concept.

20260518_065535.jpg (311.83 KiB) Viewed 1439 times

and

20260518_071655.jpg (404.21 KiB) Viewed 1439 times

[dvgrn]

While I'm thinking of it -- the lists of gift shop ideas from a few years ago don't seem to have ever mentioned T-shirts.

We've seen several T-shirt ideas, like the "I Heart CGOL" T-shirt (and lots of other wild ideas in the same thread, some of them tongue-in-cheek borrowed from Spaceballs, and some along the lines of "which spaceships would make the best plushies") --

and the rather awesome omniperiodicity T-shirt.

That link was hard to find -- I had to do some creative searching to dig up LotharBot's Discord post from 8/12/2023.

[pcallahan]

While I'm thinking of it -- the lists of gift shop ideas from a few years ago don't seem to have ever mentioned T-shirts.

Does anyone plan to open a gift shop seriously? E.g. as an Etsy store? I am increasingly full of ideas for what to stock it with, and getting a lot better at resin craft (so not T-shirts but those are easy to outsource). I have been more fixated on Penrose tile variations lately, but I can shift focus if there's an actual marketplace. The most common Life objects could be cast as a charm bracelet.

Given food safe silicone, ice cube and candy molds are another branch to explore. I don't fully trust the kind advertised as food safe and shipped direct from China (though I have made ice cubes for personal use). There is a company Polytek in PA that actually certifies CFR 177.2600 on some of their products.

Update: A silicone mold of the most common eaters, starting with the fishhook. For high concept chocolatiering. The edible eater!

This is now well within my skill set, though I haven't worked with chocolate before. I can print the master like this: https://www.printables.com/model/164059 ... in-triskel, make a silicone model, smooth out the artifacts with a thin coat of additional silicone, and then I'm in business.

Update 2: Beyond eaters 1 and 2, they get pretty big but could be scaled down. The disconnected cells are not a problem if you put the whole thing on a connected base. The block counts as an eater of beehives. To make the patterns a little more interesting and on topic they could be shown with the eater reaction, beehive on block, glider on various eaters.

[B468S02357]

I thought of: Top hat with massive wooden glider attached on the top

[pcallahan]

I seem to be having really bad luck with bubbles. It might be inevitable when I mix just a few ml at a time. I will have to make a glider as part of a larger pour.

20260519_062411.jpg (673.16 KiB) Viewed 1343 times

I also smoothed out the mold too much. I want to get rid of the texture visible on the 3D print, but I should use less silicone in the coat.

20260519_063053.jpg (299.15 KiB) Viewed 1343 times

This started out as a way to print something quickly to use some left over silicone before it cured, and I haven't been as careful as I should. With some work I can make clear resin casts of the most common life objects. This has a cell size of about 8mm. For disconnected objects, I can raise the base but leave out the top square.

[pcallahan]

One more post on this. I made new mold with only a little coating in the top cell squares and mixed a clear batch of resin. This finally came out the way I wanted and you can see we get some magnification because of the silicone meniscus, which is concave in the mold and convex in the cast. The graph paper has 1/8" spacing (3.175mm).

20260520_183712.jpg (340.88 KiB) Viewed 1272 times

Here's the progression from cloudy in the old mold to clear in the new one.

20260520_183456.jpg (454.39 KiB) Viewed 1272 times

I read somewhere that Eric S. Raymond proposed the glider as a hacker emblem. Maybe I can sell a lapel pin.

[otismo]

back in the day it was the "ScrewBall" -

a ball-bearing welded to a screw and a pin and brass - plated . . .

i want to encourage you; i agree Glider is the way to go ( i may name one Viro )

<3

[NNlk05]

A design I shared on Discord:

Life is Life!

lifeislife.png (106.4 KiB) Viewed 1212 times

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