wirehead

@wirehead@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x04 "Vox in Excelso"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yah, wasn’t really trying to glorify the Ottomans. Have to think about how to re-state that more neutrally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x04 "Vox in Excelso"⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The Klingon Episode. Also the Jay-Den episode. We really haven’t gotten a lot of details about Jay-Den before this episode, just vague hints.

  The Klingons are near and dear to my heart, I’ve not gotten around to watching the Discovery and DS9 and Enterprise eps, but I do so love some of the classic tales and not-canon stuff from John M. Ford.

  I can totally see the Klingons being hit hard from the Burn specifically because of the martial society. Learn to run a ship’s reactor by running a nearly identical reactor on land, whereas less martial societies would look at the stack of antimatter containment chambers that would blow a sizable chunk out of an inhabited planet and decide that … maybe not.

  Also, if you know your history of the Middle East, one way to view the extremists there is that, in centuries past, the Ottoman empire tried to be more cosmopolitan and eventually Europe and then the US went in and took advantage of them. Ergo, they tried being like the rest of the world and that didn’t work, let’s be more fundamentalist. So, whatever direction they were moving in the past, I can see how the Burn would cause them to be fundamentalist-Klingon in less than a century. It making less sense from an American perspective is probably a good thing – the US has caused so much damage to the Middle East and Africa while bumbling around lacking empathy.

  They’ve clearly set up some thrown bricks here? When Jay-Den was a bit weird with how he spoke in the first ep, that was here to set up him really messing it up in the debate society not because he was having problems getting the character’s voice right or because they were having problems digitally altering it. When he freaks out in the first ep about healing Lora Thok that’s because he had just not healed his brother 18 months prior.

  Poor Terry Farrell did a damn good job while being thrown through the wringer to represent being Dax, ancient joined Trill, but … Holly Hunter gets to show Capt Ake being similarly old without the benefit of swapping bodies. Including a complicated relationship with Obel and personnel files that took the dadmiral seven years to work through.

  Also note that David Keeley is white and … they kept his skin light for Obel. Like, compare how he looks to how Gowron looked. Taking white people and darkening their skin to make them look black is … totally offensive these days. But Klingons are within the normal range of human melanin, which makes it somewhere less offensive than blackface but something that people have changed how they look at these days. A lot of people I know in the cosplay community are dead-set against the darkening or lightening of skin (not counting changing skin colors to something not on the human melanin skin color range) and this thread of discourse is fairly new.

  I kinda figured out where the story was supposed to go the second that Faan Alpha was mentioned that it was going to be important for the Klingons to conquer their own new planet. Also, I had just lately watched reruns of “Heart of Glory” and “A Matter Of Honor” and there’s a lot of shared story beats. Presumably all parties knew that it was not a battle-battle but, like in “A Matter Of Honor” they needed to do the ritual and get punched in the face. Hence the USS Riker. What did come as a bit of a surprise was Lura Thok being the Klingon elder and re-interpreting Jay-Den’s father’s arrow missing.

  It feels like maybe Capt Ake should have come up with the solution on her own. Riker did, while being distracted by the question “One … or both?” Then again, there’s a certain amount of Starfleet in a Klingon suggesting a course of action for his own culture vs a part-Lanthanite Human saying it and I don’t think it would have made Jay-Den’s path better for him to have gotten the idea that Capt Ake came up with it herself ahead of him.

  I found the debate club the least interesting part of the story? I love that we’re returning to the Judge Aaron Satie quote and showing the kids trying to learn, but for me the more important notes was the other kids interacting with Jay-Den outside of the debate. But … there’s a thing there. The colonialist perspective is that we’ve got things to help the “lesser” people of the world so of course we should go in and fix things, but at the same time we’ve got a really really really bad history of really screwing things up. The kids will join the Academy with a perspective that they are there to fix the problems of the universe and will need to become Captains who can answer questions like Tuvix and part of how they get there is not just making good arguments but making bad ones. I dono, not the debate club type.

  But, yah, there’s that Problematic Masculinity point with Jay-Den, amplified with Klingon-ness about how one deals with their own trauma… by bristling and being angry instead of by being open.

  Lesee, so things keep moving quickly so while a it would be nice to have a little more time to “breathe” and let Caleb and Reymi be bigger assholes to each other, there’s only so many episodes in the season? Lura Thok was all mentor no drill sergeant.

  Oh, and the musical callbacks. One thing that I noticed with the Trek movies is that they’d work their own themes in while preserving the big core TMP theme within the larger suite. Klingon music, the TMP theme, the TOS theme … one thing that was I guess less fun about all of the Trek after mid-series TNG was that they did not really preserve the musical language. The soundtrack here was just grand and I’m realizing that I’ve been mad about post-mid-TNG soundtracks for decades now.

  I’m not the person to suggest the what, but I’d love to see someone taking the non-white perspective in the writer’s room figure out how to return to Klingons in this timeline in a later piece of Trek. Klingons are brash storytellers. The truth of the American Revolution is far less grand and much more nuanced if you study it in college but the not-quite-as-brash American storytellers turned into it’s own cultural mythology. A follow-up could show, on one hand, the grand mythos of New Qonos. On the other hand, a way of honor and warrior culture that is … a little more Jay-Den and a lot less corrupt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Annotations for *Star Trek: Starfleet Academy* 1x03: “Vitus Reflux”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I really want to see that joke, done well, now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x03 "Vitus Reflux"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Where I am right now in the real world is such that I could use … I dono, somehow low-stakes but fun? I get that good scifi is sometimes high stakes / somebody might die / high drama entertainment, but sometimes something that’s more … down-to-earth is good. I think that scifi has spent too much time lately trying to be intense, but hey I’m just a rando on the internet so what do I know?

  I still adore Capt Ake. I don’t think that Capt Ake had the actual plan that they implemented in her mind. She was expecting them to settle this “their way” or I guess “her way” which she was trying to imprint upon Starfleet. She figured that the Vitus Reflux spores would be really funny. And they had no way of knowing one critical piece of information, which was how to get into Kelrec’s hidey closet, and I’m imagining that she was probably totally surprised and delighted as to how they fit things together into a proper workable plan. And this is kinda how you get people to grow? If they don’t have the complete plan right away (hacking their computer during exam week is a bad idea) but look like they just need a poke in the right direction, don’t give them a plan, give them a poke.

  Likewise, Capt Ake didn’t go to Kelrec for the first prank, she went there once it was clear that he was acting as ringleader.

  “Leadership, according to Capt Ake” is clearly a book. It’s a different, more eccentric book than “Leadership, according to Capt Picard” but no less useful.

  I was spoilered that Thok and Reno were going to be a thing but the scene where they show it had me dying with giggles. “It’ll brie allright?” And then also Thok’s earlier “They shenanned once, they’ll shenann again” shows either that one of them has been encouraging the other or that they are two peas in a very bad pod.

  Also, I am glad that we can welcome Darem into the ranks of disaster bisexuals without quite as much need for subtext as … well, Kirk or Riker.

  I think it’s funny that Thok can’t just say “there will be tryouts for Calica” without tossing in a mini speech about how lucky they will be to live until tomorrow or stopping a potential fisticuffs by saying that no blood shall be shed without her permission. And then returning it to the end with the line about meditating on decapitation. Her over-the-top “RELEASE THE DRONES” and everything.

  I love the extra bits of silly Klingon lore. Klingons loving blood in their cuisine … yeah, that is saying what was logically there the whole time. But then the “what is this gagh doing in my aO’mat Gri?” joke.

  And it was really funny to have the quality of the Mugato mascot costume be … at about the level of the actual Mugato costume in TOS.

  With the Romulan cadet Dzolo from the War College, Genesis, and Capt Ake, you have three very small and unassuming women being very spicy. I also love that B’Avi stood up with the same sort of Vulcan “have you prepared new insults for me?” energy that baby Spock was on the receiving end of in the 2009 Star Trek.

  Oh and they put everybody in the underwear without nearly the same energy as the decom room on NX-01 or Star Trek Into Darkness.

  There’s a little bit of Starship Troopers, the movie, in here. Enough to maybe even be a bit intentional? Same mixed-gender showers, recruiting video, etc. Even the tryouts for Calica felt like they were channeling it. And … just like I hope people are getting the intention of Trek trying to show what a better future might be like, I am hoping that the writers knew what Paul Verhoeven was trying to show in that movie.

  This supports the War College vs Starfleet Academy thing that I was hoping to see. The ending with both the notion that you can use empathy to win without combat as well as Capt Ake’s follow-on to Caleb’s question about what to do when somebody does want the fear. Also Jay-Den being a pacifist.

  There’s a lot of speeding-up here, e.g. Darem could have been a little more show and a little less tell, but also it’s a short season? Clearly making room for whatever the Caleb / Tarima story is going to be.

  So, yeah, it’s accidentally what I wanted right now, so I’m still having fun watching it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Annotations for *Star Trek: Starfleet Academy* 1x03: “Vitus Reflux”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My headcanon suggests that they were either running out of words on the cladistics tree and went to Slavic languages because all of the Latin had been taken … or a space Slav decided to honor their roots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Very minor Academy spoilers] Does anyone else think the marketing undersold Holly Hunter as Chancellor Ake?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that what makes the character fun is all of the combinations of different seemingly-incongruent elements and so I don’t think there’s a way to cut a trailer that shows all of the different parts in context.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" & 1x02 "Beta Test"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ep 2 thoughts …

  So, in present day history, we’ve got the US Space Force, newly created, with a logo that looks an awful lot like the Star Trek arrowhead. But Trek has gone back many times to remind people that Starfleet is not the military. There’s a lot to unpack here because actually exploring means that you are potentially wandering off into dangerous places, where you need either semblance of order and discipline (think civilian ships where the skipper tells you to do something) or the ability to defend yourself against someone who might not be friendly.

  Thus, Lura’s drill sergeant act fits this model. She doesn’t want to turn you into a killer so much as making sure that you can stare death in the face and not loose your shit.

  Likewise, if they write the whole plot with the War College and the Academy next door to each other right, there’s the potential to restate the original base idea behind Star Trek TOS but adjusted for the present day. There was a lot of back and forth about the rank braids on people’s sleeves because they wanted something that shows authority but isn’t too military. Kirk’s stripes were two solid stripes and a broken stripe, whereas the navy would have him wearing four solid stripes because emotionally Gene thought that was the right combination of Authority but not Military.

  The Vulcan xenomythology class was perfect, for me. You’ve got one of the many great Vulcan deadpan moments as well as keeping to the very Starfleet ideal of understanding.

  Given that they did not know what the heck to do with Troi’s powers as an empath and if they had Luxana Troi there the whole time, the episodes would have been boring a.f. as she’d mind-read powers out of everybody, I guess I respect the choice to play with betazeding. I’m interested in the potential for Tarima in the War College with everything just because I like the never-explored idea that Troi as Counselor was supposed to be Counsel and not Therapist.

  Tarima’s cinematography is almost cloying? Science fiction, coming from its roots as boy’s magazine fodder, is always a little bit about that eternal quest to find exotic, sometimes alien, women … and bang them. And the camera lingers, kinda obviously. We have had a bunch of scenes with Caleb shirtless in Ep 1 where the colored lights gave him some amazing muscle definition so it’s equal opportunity. It was far better than Alice Eve’s somewhat notorious underwear scene in Into Darkness.

  The Namibia instead of Paris for the Federation HQ was a nice throwaway line.

  The … international dialogue in front of the Academy was … something. I really like the 1988 play “A Walk in the Woods” by Lee Blessing and they way they showed the process was two diplomats going for a series of casual walks where they do not at all talk about the negotiations over the course of a year. You could have written almost the same story between Caleb and Tarima and migrated a decent percentage of the story beats over as-is but also I think you’d loose the audience. So having the speeches with an audience where leaders make their demands and then following up most of the time with something else got the idea across while keeping things moving. And I do think that Tarima’s primary goal was to be a member of the diplomatic staff where actually liking Caleb was more accidental. Who better to get the real story than the person who is the least Starfleet out of the entire cadet corps?

  Also, diplomacy was always one of the things that Starfleet did, not so much being a diplomat at an embassy but understanding how to avoid conflict and make a good first impression on the species you made first contact with.

  Caleb keeps chafing at the order of things and that’s good. I’m assuming that Nahla intentionally put Caleb and Darem in the same room. And so there’s his quest for his mother (however they are going to resolve that) and disrespect but at the same time he’s able to put himself second, albeit with effort. One bit I really like is the reference to his mother studying physics. An oft-ignored thread of Trek was the waste of people’s lives in the 20th century on account of them not having access to that which they need to grow on account of today’s capitalist system. And then also Nahla cutting him off with “It’s not about you”

  I knew that there was a Red Dwarf reference coming in Ep2 and it still caught me unawares.

  I am curious if they are going to reveal anything about Gideon S. Turner. I can’t entirely tell if Caleb is making stuff up and Tarima is playing along or if Gideon S. Turner has a very strange history. It would be cool if it was a brick joke.

  Caleb, Ocam, and Darem all in a room has some serious potential to show … 31st century bros, charmingly?

  It really got me towards the end, the idea that rebuilding does not mean rebuilding it exactly as it once was.

  So, yeah, it’s landing well for me. Nahla keeps serving as my surrogate in the story because … I watched TNG when it was new and I do think about the world we’re handing the kids of new generation. Uniting the galaxy in peace and understanding is what the Federation was supposed to be out and if they can keep the story moving well enough people won’t be yearning for a big battle scene that kills off a bunch of characters?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" & 1x02 "Beta Test"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, didn’t see that it was a spoilerific thread. Edited for ease of reading.

  I went in cold, LOL. I’d not bothered with the trailers or the preview reviews. Yesterday, I saw a post on reddit that said that people were mad because it wasn’t white enough and impulsively decided that I’d watch it before bed … which then caused me to go to bed late because I had to rewatch the fun bits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | 1x01 "Kids These Days" & 1x02 "Beta Test"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just watched Ep 1. Spoilering everything.

  spoiler

  Star Trek (and science fiction) exists as a mirror of it’s time, different enough so that we can look at ourselves from a distance, with a required added component of playing with the ideas about what the future might be like. TOS and TNG were both mirrors of their time, with a Klingon on the bridge predicting the end of the cold war. I definitely feel the “ok, the present generation of kids is inheriting a shitshow” vibes to this show. If you understand that there were a bunch of past efforts to do the Burn in Star Trek, it seemed like something that floated around for a long time now to break the universe (the abortive Star Trek: Final Frontier animated series being one) and … I dono, I’m more OK with it now than I would have been in 2009 because, as I said, Trek is a mirror of it’s time. Comparing things to Star Wars, the sequel trilogy started out with the idea of “Guess what, fighting nazis again!” and it was prescient and it’s altogether too bad that they hadn’t actually thought things through well enough to bring it to a really smashing conclusion. There are a lot of threads (Caleb’s mom being a big one) where they could totally bungle things. So, we start with family separation. Wonder where that came from! And then we kinda bounce around the subject, too. Nahla having done a thing, regretted it, leaving Starfleet, trying to make it better while also showing that whatever they do end up doing, it’s not “solving” what they did in the first place. Nus Braka chews up the scenery. This is important, in a Trek series. Yes, it can be quiet and thoughtful and serious but we always come back to the spectacularly overplayed antagonist. I’m fairly OK with NuTrek trusting the audience less and driving a point home harder. A lot of people ascribe old Trek with values that it never had and part of that’s because the writers trusted the audience to see the point, but folks just don’t have the same attention span to do that anymore. Very very nerdy side note: on Outpost Pikaru there’s a whole set of grating panels that I assume are a deliberate callback to the freezer spacing grates that were all over the TNG-era Trek serieses as well as a bunch of other science fiction properties. They look very very similar but they aren’t. On the reddit side of the fence, someone suggested you look up Gina Yashere’s standup to realize just how Lura Thok is basically Gina playing herself but in the 31st century. She reminds me of one of the assistant principals at my high school, actually, except she’s got more drill sergeant edge to her. Jay-Den Kraag… when I was but a wee little trekkie, I knew a trans person who was deep into hardcore Klingon fandom and I think part of why it made sense for him was that Klingons was part of how he settled into his new gender? So the idea of Klingon males as a mirror to masculinity … toxic and otherwise … has been a thing, at least for me, for a while. I feel like Jay-Den Kraag was someone looking at the Klingon Therapist meme and making an actual character out of it. The entire scene where the Klingon is de-escalating things between two cocky assholes is something at least I needed. SAM’s first few scenes I skipped past the first watching and then when her character made sense, I had to go back and actually watch them because they were a lot less cringe. Genesis is an interesting version of charming because at first glance she starts out as a “mean girl” but then you realize that she’s parodying it hard. Okay, and the Doctor back as the anchor to the very past. Robert Picardo is keeping the Picard name alive in that he kinda aged to a certain age and he hasn’t really aged much since, much in the same way as Patrick Stewart does. There’s lots of fanservice, but in a good way. The half-white/half-black species from TOS, a green Orion, the Doctor, etc. One thing that’s interesting with the characters who don’t stay locked up in the dorms when the big action is happening is that they all have plausible reasons to be there. Caleb has been living a life on the run for a long time now. Jay-Dem is a Klingon and shows some moments of self-doubt. Genesis has been living on starbases her whole life, shades of Beckett Mariner actually. Darem is cocky and it gets him in trouble. And then SAM, doesn’t know better, but also doesn’t know fear in the way a biological would. Meanwhile, one of the other cadets is screaming senselessly. And I guess back to Nahla … she goes from “just following orders” to “Bajor schoolteacher on ice cream day” to supportive nurturing captain to playing high stakes poker with a space pirate and back. And she’s small, except for the part where she’s able to exude authority when being towered over. They were asking her to sell a lot and I think she did it. I looked through her IMDB and my past experience of her was the mom from Thirteen and Elastigirl. One thing I hope, as a long standing Ex Astris Scientia reader, is that there’s … some sort of sense to the programmable matter, the wild 31st century designs, et al. TNG had a lot of particle-of-the-week stuff but Voyager was a crazy-quilt of nonsense particles. It’s important for the viewer to, albeit not from the first episode or two, gain some vibes for where the boundaries are, otherwise there’s no stakes. A transporter ruins basically any “locked room” detective novel puzzle. Likewise, how they wrap up Caleb and his mom is going to either make or break the emotional arc of the series?

  So, overall … it landed with me, based on where I am in my life. I empathized with Nahla in a bunch of ways that make me angry about the world I empathized with Jay-Den in a bunch of ways that made me content about the world. I’m not sure how the younger generation or casual Trek fans are going to react to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What If There’s No AGI?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, think about it this way…

  You could hit AGI by fastidiously simulating the biological wetware.

  Except that each atom in the wetware is going to require n atoms worth of silicon to simulate. Simulating 10^26 atoms or so seems like a very very large computer, maybe planet-sized? It’s beyond the amount of memory you can address with 64 bit pointers.

  General computer research (e.g. smaller feature size) reduces n, but eventually we reach the physical limits of computing. We might be getting uncomfortably close right now, barring fundamental developments in physics or electronics.

  The goal if AGI research is to give you a better improvement of n than mere hardware improvements. My personal concern is that that LLM’s are actually getting us much of an improvement on the AGI value of n. Likewise, LLM’s are still many order of magnitude less parameters than the human brain simulation so many of the advantages that let us train a singular LLM model might not hold for an AGI model.

  Coming up with an AGI system that uses most of the energy and data center space of a continent that manages to be about as smart as a very dumb human or maybe even just a smart monkey is an achievement in AGI but doesn’t really get you anywhere compared to the competition that is accidentally making another human amidst a drunken one-night stand and feeding them an infinitesimal equivalent to the energy and data center space of a continent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New God tier filament for me⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So, one thing I did note is that a lot of the PETG vendors these days have been ratcheting up the speed that their normal non-rapid PETG filaments are printable at as well.

  For example, Prusament PETG is good up to 200 mm/s and Elegoo’s Pro PETG is good up to 270 mm/s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Advice wanted!] Things to consider when printing parts for a self-watering planter?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can always mock some stuff up and try it out in PrusaSlicer to see how long it thinks it’ll take?

  Wall thickness potentially depends on the size of the object? I guess 2mm would the the starting point, fill one with soil, see how sturdy it feels. Complexity for 3D printing is “free”, kinda. A lot of the best container designs incorporate ribs to strengthen them without using up too much material. Given that the joins are the weak part, you’d potentially want that a lot thicker.

  You also want to look at “vase mode”. Some of the fastest printing objects you can get on a 3D printer are where you design around the constraints of vase mode and then you can use a fat nozzle with thick layers to print really fast.

  You can always print plumbing instead of using PVC pipes? I’ve definitely seen self-watering pots such that they just have a pipe incorporated into the design such that it just sticks up along the corner. So, worse case, each module has a watering port. If you want to get fancy, you could make a manifold such that a single pipe sticks up in the middle and fills 4 reservoirs, although the fancier the plumbing the more likely you are to have one of them get dried out faster unless your filling routine tops them off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Advice wanted!] Things to consider when printing parts for a self-watering planter?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, see if you know Python, then OpenSCAD is not a hard jump? One of the reasons why I really like OpenSCAD is that libraries like BOSL2 have parametric joiners and snaps and stuff. And you could totally write modifiers for FreeCAD or Blender to do it, sure, but it’s a lot less trouble to get it done with OpenSCAD. This way your end-result would let you input the size of the bed and it would figure out how many sections it needs, etc.

  Lesee… 120x40x40cm is a lot of plastic to print, even with a single printer running all day all night.

  What I’d suggest is that you make the wooden outside for the 120x40x40cm shelf and make 20cm x 20cm x 40cm units. At which point you can make bigger multi-part modules. It might actually make sense to keep the cups separate because you could adjust the holes and stuff based on the plant’s needs. Whereas the reservoir section is going to be happiest as a single tub. But the important part is that if you are a few modules short, just add a spacer for this season. And it gives you more time to experiment on the tub and allows you to swap that out mid-season.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Advice wanted!] Things to consider when printing parts for a self-watering planter?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is pretty darn ambitious for a starter project. I say this as someone who is trying to get some fancy new 3D printable tomato cages going before the plants get tall and dangerous and I’ve been doing this for a while.

  So you really probably want to de-complicate this, either by only making planters that are sized for the printer or finding a existing planter that’s the right size but not self-watering and designing just the self-watering part. You’ll probably learn a lot about the right way to do one this year and then next year you can attack the next generation of the planters.

  The problem with printing in pieces is that you are going to have to make sure that the joints are strong enough for the weight of the soil. This is why using a ready-made outer container might help. In the same way, what you really want is something finger-ish or jigsaw-ish so that the pieces align themselves more easily and interlock.

  You will probably want a fatter nozzle, otherwise this is going to take forever to print.

  PETG seems to have worked fairly well for me for outdoor stuff? Coating or paint or whatnot is handy. You might want to look at the epoxy family? If you can print on the balcony, you might consider ASA which is totally fine for outdoor use with no paint.

  FreeCAD is a bit of a learning curve? The thing that FreeCAD would make easier is a parametric model, where you say that you want a 400 x 400 x 300 planter. Except that if you are really serious about making large self-watering planters that are parametric, you are going to end up wanting to write code to make it all happen, which either means the Python in FreeCAD, the Python in Blender, or maybe just use OpenSCAD.

  One avenue, which is also too big of an ask for this season, is making a multi-part model to cast the large pieces in concrete.

  Another avenue would be to just design around the outside being wood and the 3D printed parts being brackets and jigs and connectors and the self-watering bits.