3D printing is wonderful, but sometimes you just don’t want to look at a plastic peice. Beethoven’s bust wouldn’t look quite right in front of your secret door if it was bright orange PLA, after all. [Denny] over at “Shake the Future” on YouTube is taking a break from metal casting to show off a quick-and-easy plaster casting method— but don’t worry, he still uses a microwave.

Most people, when they’re casting something non-metallic from a 3D print are going to reach for castable silicone and create a mold, first. It works for chocolate just as easily as it does plaster, and it does work well. The problem is that it’s an extra step and extra materials, and who can afford the time and money that takes these days?

[Denny]’s proposal is simple: make the mold out of PLA. He’s using a resin slicer to get the negative shape for the mold, and exporting the STL to slice in PrusaSlicer, but Blender, Meshmixer and we’re pretty sure Cura should all work as well. [Denny] takes care when arranging his print to avoid needing supports inside the mold, but that’s not strictly necessary as long as you’re willing to clean them out. After that, it’s just a matter of mixing up the plaster, pouring it into the PLA, mold, and waiting.

Waiting, but not too long. Rather than let the plaster fully set up, [Denny] only waits about an hour. The mold is still quite ‘wet’ at this point, but that’s a good thing. When [Denny] tosses it in his beloved microwave, the moisture remaining in the plaster gets everything hot, softening the PLA so it can be easily cut with scissors and peeled off.

Yeah, this technique is single-use as presented, which might be one advantage to silicone, if you need multiple copies of a cast. Reusing silicone molds is often doable with a little forethought. On the other hand, by removing the plaster half-cured, smoothing out layer lines becomes a simple matter of buffing with a wet rag, which is certainly an advantage to this technique.

Some of you may be going “well, duh,” so check out [Denny]’s cast-iron benchy if his plasterwork doesn’t impress. We’ve long been impressed with the microwave crucibles shown off on “Shake the Future”, but it’s great to have options. Maybe metal is the material, or perhaps plain plastic is perfect– but if not, perchance Plaster of Paris can play a part in your play.

According to web portal darkdot.com and anonymous journalist Darkdotfail, the popular darknet forum Dread has been down for a month. The well-known forum, which was a place for darknet market (DNM) patrons to discuss operations security, rate specific vendors, and talk about stealth delivery ideas, has been absent for 30 days. However, the forum’s founder, “Hugbunter,” has stated that it will relaunch in the near future.

Dread Forum Founder Announces Plans to Relaunch

In the underground world of darknet markets (DNMs), the forum Dread was known for being a go-to source of information. According to a Jan. 1, 2023 update hosted on darkdot.com, the forum has been down for a month. “Dread is a critical source of truth in an anonymous community proliferated with scams,” the update notes. “The popular Tor freedom of speech forum went offline on Nov. 30, 2022, and has yet to return.” The update adds that while the Dread admin team typically posts status updates on Reddit at /r/dreadalert, communication has been sparse.

The anonymous journalist known as Darkdotfail has written about the issue on Twitter and their website, dark.fail, also indicates that Dread is currently offline. According to a Jan. 5, 2023 update on the website, Dread is offline due to a DDOS attack and readers should follow /r/dreadalert for updates. On Jan. 2, 2023, the DNM and Tor researcher wrote that Dread’s founder, Hugbunter, had privately confirmed that the forum will return. “Dread’s now been offline for a month, Hugbunter privately confirmed to us that it will return,” Darkdotfail wrote. Two days later, Darkdotfail shared an update from the Reddit forum /r/dreadalert.

The privacy advocate and anonymous journalist said:

Hugbunter posted an update regarding Dread’s downtime to /r/dreadalert. Meanwhile, the team behind Incognito Market opportunistically coded and launched a competing forum, Libre, during Dread’s downtime. Never boring around here.

The message from Hugbunter, which includes the founder’s PGP signature, explains that the team has been “working extremely hard to restore service.” In the message, the Dread founder estimates that the team is about a week away from a solid estimated time of arrival (ETA).

“As of right now, we’re about a week out from being able to give a solid ETA on a return of Dread, but I will say we’re hopeful of it being next week,” Hugbunter detailed. “This depends on there being no further issues as we finalize everything on the server side and also if I manage to work through some rewrites of the codebase in a timely manner, however, it is not an easy or small task — So no further pressure please.”

This is not the first time Dread has experienced a significantly long downtime. On Sept. 30, 2019, Bitcoin.com News reported on the forum’s first major outage. At that time, Hugbunter’s dead man’s switch was triggered, resulting in a temporary loss of control over the forum. However, Hugbunter returned shortly after and validated the forum owner’s identity through the PGP keys associated with the Dread founder. The forum remained active, with some exceptions due to DDOS attacks, until Nov. 2022. In addition to Dread’s outage from DDOS attacks, the Tor Project reported that the Tor network itself has slowed by close to 50%.

In the Jan. 3 message, Hugbunter, the founder of Dread, detailed that the forum’s DDOS issues would be solved by the time it returns and “any other service who needs assistance.” Hugbunter promised that Dread will relaunch with a revamped user experience and proper DDOS protection, saying “the plans I have with the relaunch and also for the near future are going to allow all of us to move forward significantly and we will continue to innovate this space. We are not going anywhere and I still have much to provide and share.”

What do you think about Dread’s current downtime and Hugbunter explaining that the forum will return soon? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.