Gimptears - Died A Thirsty Boy - Tumblr Blog

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, Susan Sontag.

Dendrogaster (a crustacean that parasitizes starfish)

i love my messy desk more than life itself

Oh, my rats!

/made to order/

why are printers so hated? it's simple:

computers are good at computering. they are not good at the real world.

the biggest problems in computers, the ones that have had to change the most over the time they've existed, are the parts that deal with the real world. The keyboard, the mouse, the screen. every computer needs these, but they involve interacting with the real world. that's a problem. that's why they get replaced so much.

now, printers: printers have some of the most complex real-world interaction. they need to deposit ink on paper in 2 dimensions, and that results in at least three ways it can go on right from the start. (this is why 3D printers are just 2D printers that can go wrong in another whole dimension)

scanners fall into many of the same problems printers have, but fewer people have scanners, and they're not as cost-optimized. But they are nearly as annoying.

This is also why you can make a printer better by cutting down on the number of moving elements: laser printers are better than inkjets, because they only need to move in one dimension, and their ink is a powder, not a liquid. and the best-behaved printers of all are thermal printers: no ink and the head doesn't move. That's why every receipt printer is a thermal printer, because they need that shit to work all the time so they can sell shit. And thermal is the most reliable way to do that.

But yeah, cost-optimization is also a big part of why printers are such finicky unreliable bastards: you don't want to pay much for them. Who is excited for all the printing they're gonna be doing? basically nobody. But people get forced to have a printer because they gotta print something, for school or work or the government or whatever. So they want the cheapest thing that'll work. They're not shopping on features and functionality and design, they want something that costs barely anything, and can fucking PRINT. anything else is an optional bonus.

And here's the thing: there's a fundamental limit of how much you can optimize an inkjet printer, and we got near to it in like the late 90s. Every printer since then has just been a tad smaller, a tad faster, and added some gimmicks like printing from WIFI or bluetooth instead of needing to plug in a cable.

And that's the worst place to be in, for a computer component. The "I don't care how fancy it is, just give me one that works" zone. This is why you can buy a keyboard for 20$ and a mouse for 10$ and they both work plenty fine for 90% of users. They're objectively shit compared to the ones in the 60-150$ range, but do they work? yep. So that's what people get.

Printers fell into that zone long, long ago, when people stopped getting excited about "desktop publishing". So with printers shoved into the "make them as cheap as possible" zone, they have gotten exponentially shittier. Can you cut costs by 5$ a printer by making them jam more often? good. make them only last a couple years to save a buck or two per unit? absolutely. Can you make the printer cost 10$ less and make that back on the proprietary ink cartridges? oh, they've been doing that since Billy Clinton was in office.

It's the same place floppy disks were in in about 2000. CD-burners were not yet cheap enough, USB flash drives didn't exist yet (but were coming), modems weren't fast enough yet to copy stuff over the internet, superfloppies hadn't taken over like some hoped, and memory cards were too expensive and not everyone had a drive for them. So we still needed floppy disks, but at the same time this was a technology that hadn't changed in nearly 20 years. So people were tired of paying out the nose for them... the only solution? cut corners. I have floppy disks from 1984 that read perfectly, but a shrinkwrapped box of disks from 1999 will have over half the disks failed. They cut corners on the material quality, the QA process, the cleaning cloth inside the disk, everything they could. And the disks were shit as a result.

So, printers are in that particular note of the death-spiral where they've reached the point of "no one likes or cares about this technology, but it's still required so it's gone to shit". That's why they are so annoying, so unreliable, so fucking crap.

So, here's the good news:

You can still buy a better printer, and it will work far better. Laser printers still exist, and LED printers work the same way but even cheaper. They're still more expensive than inkjets (especially if you need color), but if you have to print stuff, they're a godsend. Way more reliable.

This is not a stable equilibrium. Printers cannot limp along in this terrible state forever. You know why I brought up floppy disk there? (besides the fact I'm a giant floppy disk nerd) because floppy disks GOT REPLACED. Have you used one this decade? CD-Rs and USB drives and internet sharing came along and ate the lunch of floppy disks, so much so that it's been over a decade since any more have been made. The same will happen to (inkjet) printers, eventually. This kind of clearly-broken situation cannot hold. It'll push people to go paperless, for companies to build cheaper alternatives to take over from the inkjets, or someone will come up with a new, more reliable printer based on some new technology that's now cheap enough to use in printers. Yeah, it sucks right now, but it can't last.

So, in conclusion: Printers suck, but this is both an innate problem caused by them having to deal with so much fucking Real World, and a local minimum of reliability that we're currently stuck in. Eventually we'll get out of this valley on the graph and printers will bother people a lot less.

Random fun facts about printing of the past and their local minimums:

in the hot metal type era, not only would the whole printing process expose you to lead, the most common method of printing text was the linotype, which could go wrong in a very fun way: if the next for a line wasn't properly justified (filling out the whole row), it could "squirt", and lead would escape through gaps in the type matrix. This would result in molten lead squirting out of the machine, possibly onto the operator. Anecdotally, linotype operators would sometimes recognize each other on the street because of the telltale spots on their forearms where they had white splotches where no hair grew, because they got bad lead burns. This type of printing remained in use until the 80s.

Another fun type of now-retired printers are drum printers, a type of line printer. These work something like a typewriter or dot-matrix printer, except the elements extend across the entire width of the paper. So instead of printing a character at time by smacking it into the paper, the whole line got smacked nearly at once. The problem is that if the paper jammed and the printer continued to try to print, that line of the paper would be repeatedly struck at high speed, creating a lot of heat. This worry created the now-infamous Linux error: "lp0 on fire". This was displayed when the error signals from a parallel printer didn't make sense... and it was a real worry. A high speed printer could definitely set the paper on fire, though this was rare.

So... one thing to be grateful about current shitty inkjet printers: they are very unlikely to burn anything, especially you.

(because before they could do that they'd have to work, at least a little, first, and that's very unlikely)

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

the things about gentrification that are “good,” ie, increased walkability of neighbourhoods, renewal and renovation of unused buildings, increased mixed-use zoning, the opening of a variety of businesses that (theoretically) increase access to more diverse goods, are (correctly) interpreted as portents of doom by local residents not because poor people are stupid and reactionary and hate good things, but rather because the privatised character of urban “renewal” (gentrification) means these goods are only available to the middle classes who are coming into these neighbourhoods and “flipping” them. walkability and access to goods are not evil, but privatising them is, and that is what gentrification is - it is renewal in privatised form. I think it’s helpful to view it this way, both to call attention to the fact that a public, state-led version of this kind of renewal is possible, a version where these things benefit all residents, and also to respond to YIMBYism, to the middle classes who stand to benefit from gentrification because it provides comparatively lower costs to operate businesses, own property, and pay rent than in other parts of cities or other cities altogether. this is part of the same phenomenon as people “flipping” homes (a part of the process of gentrification itself); it is not to create a pretty and liveable home where there was once an abandoned one, but to turn a profit

Fuck a personality test. Which label sticker r u?

Pedestrian affirmations:

YOU ARE INVINCIBLE

AUTOMOBILES TREMBLE AT THE SIGHT OF YOU

GOD'S DIVINE LIGHT SHIELDS YOU

CROSSWALKS ARE YOUR HOLY PATH TO SALVATION

Losing my mind over this

angel on the operating table

insta

epic

roughs

Sunday afternoon drive ☀️

Random PNGs, part 147.

(1. Metal & coral cutlery from 1580, 2. Sculpture by Max Shuster, 3. Jewelry box from c. 1810-1820, 4. Owl-shaped blister pearl with ruby eyes, 5. Deep Sea Spiny Crab (Paralomis hystrix), 6. Gold fish from c. 1875, 7. Seashell teacup from 1800s, 8. Coral necklace, 9. Metal & coral spoon from 1600-1650)

egg oooo

driving over a carton of eggs and it ticks up to EGG 0012

Jller by Benjamin Maus and Prokop Bartonicek - a kinetic artwork that sorts thousands of random river stones by age

hey guys i just wanted to let u know that i finally opened up my shop!! so far i'm just listing prints but keep an eye out fer stickers, pins and other fun stuff in da future :-) reblogs highly appreciated <3

stardust the isopod!! 🌌⭐️🪲

gift for @nekochan700 and pattern by TumAnnArt!

Mystery / Koan

“the fffuuuu rage face guy is actually the funniest joke” says st peter at he casts you out of heavens pearly gates. you clasp your sweaty palms together. “you mocked it"he said. “you thought it was shit”

even from a young age things have been happening to me