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foone · 7 months

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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)

#printers #my writing

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truthsinwhispers · 9 months

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DuskJustTryingToDoHisJob.png

#I KEEP BEING PUT IN SITUATIONS.#I LITERALLY. *LITERALLY* ONLY NEED PRINTER INK.#BUT THE FUCKING IT GUYS ARE ON THEIR WAY LIKE. I SWEAR I KNOW HOW TO REPLACE AN INK CARTRIDGE.#WE JUST DON'T HAVE ANY IN THE MF BUILDING AND I CAN'T LEAVE.#but without my printer i can't do ANY of the vital functions required to check guests in.#i need to print reservation documents. i need to take copies of their id and credit card. this is MANDATORY.#my boss let me use the Forbidden Printer in her office except guess what?#IT WON'T CONNECT TO THE COMPUTER SO I CAN'T PRINT RESERVATION DOCS.#BUT I CAN COPY! SO I'M GONNA FUCKING COPY!#(i copied an existing reservation card then used whiteout on all identifying info. and now i have a template.#in which i manually write out people's names and room numbers.)#i deserve a fucking raise.

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pattidickinson · 1 year

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How an HP printer can bring me to my knees

The small cardboard box, about the size of eight pop tarts stacked on top of one another, came in the mail. It said HP in big, bold letters. Replacement printer cartridges. The printer was still putting ink on the page, so naturally I was in no hurry to “poke the bear”. I am a huge subscriber to the if-it-ain’t-broke mentality. Several weeks go by and then the inevitable message, “Ink supply is…

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#copy light #HP #incompatible #paper jams #replacement ink cartridge

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bisquitt · 2 years

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i called my printer a fucko and told it to watch its back so that’s how my night’s going

#little shit wouldnt print in colour #i ran so many print diagnostics before finally just replacing the colour ink cartridge #im trying to redecorate and the ink is being antisocial like wtf #like i get it man its been a long day but this is the third time this has happened so ur out now buckaroo

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gender-trash · 3 months

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(i am seriously late in posting about this due to The Problems BUT whatever! its here now!!)

somewhere around late november 2022, i asked my dad "hey are there any out of print technical books you'd like a reprint of for christmas?"

he linked me to a dubious black-and-white pdf of Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy. now, i wound up checking out a copy through link+, and the original edition is a really nicely put together book! the chapters are themed around various types of measurements (length, angle, etc), and they all have these cute little diagrams which the endpapers reuse in a lil repeating pattern... the image captions are done in this really lovely dark red that did not scan for SHIT... tons and tons of diagrams and illustrations and images (both color and b&w)... just, all around, a fucking nice book!! (see also @morrak's post about it here.)

and that made me feel kind of bad about the crappiness of the pdf, which is where the Problems began. i used my phone to take pictures of all the photos and color diagrams in the original and went about replacing them in the pdf, using what turned out to be the world's worst pdf editing software (i also got through replacing all the image captions in chapter 1 of 5 before my dad convinced me to give up). i did NOT finish the pdf editing before christmas 2022 (i was going somewhat off the deep end, because both my housemates were away visiting family and i had zero external structure in my life so it was just me and my cat and this stupid FUCKING pdf wrecking my sleep schedule together); i poked away at it for most of the rest of my time off and then got so goddamn sick of it i put the project away for months. "it'll be a birthday gift instead", i said optimistically (my dad's birthday is in april! it should have been enough time!)

gentle readers, i did not finish the pdf editing by april. mostly because it was such a miserable slog that i put it off until the last possible moment and then tried to make up for it with another death march.

hating both myself and the project again, i decided i was Not going to let myself typeset Anything Else before it was done, and then took a break to bind my immortal (using the renegade publishing typeset! i didn't do any typesetting!!). SURELY, i said, i can finish this in time for christmas 2023.

i'm sure you know where this is going.

in my defense i DID finish the pdf editing by christmas, despite first doing every other possible procrastination project (including a second edition of the little second century warlord book), because by this point my dad had managed to convince me to lower my standards. on the evening of the 22nd i kicked off the print job and said to myself "this will finish printing overnight and then tomorrow i can work on sewing the textblock!"

late on the 23rd, after lots of babysitting and using at least one cartridge of every color ink in my printer, the print job was finally done. (my sweet and lovely cat wants SO BADLY to hunt and stalk the printer while it is printing -- more specifically, the printed pages, i think because they tend to make noise and move and then STOP moving. for this reason, the printer is kept in the craft room, because the cat can be shut out of the craft room and thus prevented from chewing on the pages when i have an all-day book printing job going. unfortunately the craft room was also being pressed into service as a guest room at the time so 80% of the floor space was consumed by an air mattress which i had to repeatedly trip over in order to reach the printer and replace the ink cartridges.)

then i went to my parents' house on the 24th and 25th and apologized to my dad (again) for not having the book finished. but this worked out well because we finished putting together my awesome new book clamp:

(the feet still aren't done being painted so they're just dry-fit on for now but you can still clamp books in it and that's what matters!!)

i came home, sewed the textblock (french link stitch over four linen tapes, with sewn endbands made of variegated embroidery floss over linen cord, and kozo paper glued over the spine)

... and promptly realized i SHOULD HAVE PUT IN MORE OF A GUTTER because some of the text was getting reeeeeeal close to the spine. "it's fine!" i said. "i just have to make sure it lays flat!! what better time than to try out K118 binding, a technique i have literally never done before and which people on the bookbinding discord notoriously have a hard time pulling off first try! i even have tyvek tape for it!"

so it turns out that tyvek tape isn't actually tyvek with glue on it, it's tape FOR attaching pieces of tyvek TO EACH OTHER, which maybe i could have guessed if i'd done even the slightest amount of research or planning. at this point i think it was the 27th and i was still angling to get this thing done by new year's, so no time to order Actual Tyvek.

fortunately, i had ALSO received An Package in the mail with yarn for a totally unrelated knitting project... shipped in a tyvek envelope.

i peeled all the shipping labels and stickers off my tyvek envelope, cut that shit up, and glued it on there.

and THEN it was time for gluing on covers, which i thought was going to be easy because i had actually thought ahead and ordered materials (specifically acid-free museum board), except when i cracked open the box of museum board i decided i Didn't Like It because the surface was too soft and easily dented, so i glued onto it the too-thin board material i'd previously been using (so that the cardboard goes on the outside of the book). this worked super well (the cardboard stuff has a tendency to curl up from the glue moisture, but the museum board doesn't!) and i'll probably use it on other stuff in the future.

i thought the blue bookcloth i used was kind of boring but i showed my dad the available cloth options and he really liked it, so... what do you know? i cut the piece i used on the back cover very slightly too short but it wound up being covered by the leather, so you can barely tell.

and the leather... a scrap just baaaaarely big enough from my bag of leather scraps from discount fabrics... and this the first time i'd ever attempted to put leather on a book... AND YET the only complaint i have is that i didn't manage to put an even amount on the front and back. it's reasonably square and straight!! amazing!!

i am super super happy with how this project came out (especially given the number of problems i encountered) and oh my god check out how much the spine bends

AND, AS A NEW YEAR'S PRESENT, I FINALLY MANAGED TO GIVE IT TO MY DAD

#and promptly got sick after i got home from my parents' house.#which is part of why this post was so long delayed #the trashcan speaks #devil venerable also wants to exploit the memoir class for evil purposes #bookbinding

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betweenheroesandvillains · 20 days

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hearing ppl talk about lamy like it's fancy when it was everyone's first school fountain pen here like. THAT lamy???? the wood with red/blue plastic/rubber grip???? the one that meant you had to buy special cartridges and if you ran out and nobody had a replacement you'd have to macgiver your ink by pushing the tip into a normal cartridge and pray to the ink gods that you'd be able to finish your exam like this???

#german stuff

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

If you own an Alexa, you might enjoy its integration with IFTTT, an easy scripting environment that lets you create your own little voice-controlled apps, like "start my Roomba" or "close the garage door." If so, tough shit, Amazon just nuked IFTTT for Alexa:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/25/23931463/ifttt-amazon-alexa-applets-ending-support-integration-automation

Amazon can do this because the Alexa's operating system sits behind a cryptographic lock, and any tool that bypasses that lock is a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. That means that it's literally a crime to provide a rival OS that lets users retain functionality that Amazon no longer supports.

This is the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece, a moral hazard and invitation to mischief that tempts Amazon executives to run a bait-and-switch con where they sell you a gadget with five features and then remotely kill-switch two of them. This is prime directive of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

So many companies got their business-plan at the Darth Vader MBA. The ability to revoke features after the fact means that companies can fuck around, but never find out. Apple sold millions of tracks via iTunes with the promise of letting you stream them to any other device you owned. After a couple years of this, the company caught some heat from the record labels, so they just pushed an update that killed the feature:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/10/30/apple-to-ipod-owners-eat-shit-and-die-updated/

That gun on the mantelpiece went off all the way back in 2004 and it turns out it was a starter-pistol. Pretty soon, everyone was getting in on the act. If you find an alert on your printer screen demanding that you install a "security update" there's a damned good chance that the "update" is designed to block you from using third-party ink cartridges in a printer that you (sorta) own:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Selling your Tesla? Have fun being poor. The upgrades you spent thousands of dollars on go up in a puff of smoke the minute you trade the car into the dealer, annihilating the resale value of your car at the speed of light:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/

Telsa has to detect the ownership transfer first. But once a product is sufficiently cloud-based, they can destroy your property from a distance without any warning or intervention on your part. That's what Adobe did last year, when it literally stole the colors from your Photoshop files, in history's SaaSiest heist caper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

And yet, when we hear about remote killswitches in the news, it's most often as part of a PR blitz for their virtues. Russia's invasion of Ukraine kicked off a new genre of these PR pieces, celebrating the fact that a John Deere dealership was able to remotely brick looted tractors that had been removed to Chechnya:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Today, Deere's PR minions are pitching search-and-replace versions of this story about Israeli tractors that Hamas is said to have looted, which were also remotely bricked.

But the main use of this remote killswitch isn't confounding war-looters: it's preventing farmers from fixing their own tractors without paying rent to John Deere. An even bigger omission from this narrative is the fact that John Deere is objectively Very Bad At Security, which means that the world's fleet of critical agricultural equipment is one breach away from being rendered permanently inert:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

There are plenty of good and honorable people working at big companies, from Adobe to Apple to Deere to Tesla to Amazon. But those people have to convince their colleagues that they should do the right thing. Those debates weigh the expected gains from scammy, immoral behavior against the expected costs.

Without DMCA 1201, Amazon would have to worry that their decision to revoke IFTTT functionality would motivate customers to seek out alternative software for their Alexas. This is a big deal: once a customer learns how to de-Amazon their Alexa, Amazon might never recapture that customer. Such a switch wouldn't have to come from a scrappy startup or a hacker's DIY solution, either. Take away DMCA 1201 and Walmart could step up, offering an alternative Alexa software stack that let you switch your purchases away from Amazon.

Money talks, bullshit walks. In any boardroom argument about whether to shift value away from customers to the company, a credible argument about how the company will suffer a net loss as a result has a better chance of prevailing than an argument that's just about the ethics of such a course of action:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Inevitably, these killswitches are pitched as a paternalistic tool for protecting customers. An HP rep once told me that they push deceptive security updates to brick third-party ink cartridges so that printer owners aren't tricked into printing out cherished family photos with ink that fades over time. Apple insists that its ability to push iOS updates that revoke functionality is about keeping mobile users safe – not monopolizing repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

John Deere's killswitches protect you from looters. Adobe's killswitches let them add valuable functionality to their products. Tesla? Well, Tesla at least is refreshingly honest: "We have a killswitch because fuck you, that's why."

These excuses ring hollow because they conspicuously omit the possibility that you could have the benefits without the harms. Like, your tractor could come with a killswitch that you could bypass, meaning you could brick it at a distance, and still fix it yourself. Same with your phone. Software updates that take away functionality you want can be mitigated with the ability to roll back those updates – and by giving users the ability to apply part of a patch, but not the whole patch.

Cloud computing and software as a service are a choice. "Local first" computing is possible, and desirable:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

The cheapest rhetorical trick of the tech sector is the "indivisibility gambit" – the idea that these prix-fixe menus could never be served a la carte. Wanna talk to your friends online? Sorry there's just no way to help you do that without spying on you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism

One important argument over smart-speakers was poisoned by this false dichotomy: the debate about accessibility and IoT gadgets. Every IoT privacy or revocation scandal would provoke blanket statements from technically savvy people like, "No one should ever use one of these." The replies would then swiftly follow: "That's an ableist statement: I rely on my automation because I have a disability and I would otherwise be reliant on a caregiver or have to go without."

But the excluded middle here is: "No one should use one of these because they are killswitched. This is especially bad when a smart speaker is an assistive technology, because those applications are too important to leave up to the whims of giant companies that might brick them or revoke their features due to their own commercial imperatives, callousness, or financial straits."

Like the problem with the "bionic eyes" that Second Sight bricked wasn't that they helped visually impaired people see – it was that they couldn't be operated without the company's ongoing support and consent:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

It's perfectly possible to imagine a bionic eye whose software can be maintained by third parties, whose parts and schematics are widely available. The challenge of making this assistive technology fail gracefully isn't technical – it's commercial.

We're meant to believe that no bionic eye company could survive unless they devise their assistive technology such that it fails catastrophically if the business goes under. But it turns out that a bionic eye company can't survive even if they are allowed to do this.

Even if you believe Milton Friedman's Big Lie that a company is legally obligated to "maximize shareholder value," not even Friedman says that you are legally obligated to maximize companies' shareholder value. The fact that a company can make more money by defrauding you by revoking or bricking the things you buy from them doesn't oblige you to stand up for their right to do this.

Indeed, all of this conduct is arguably illegal, under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits "unfair and deceptive business practices":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

"No one should ever use a smart speaker" lacks nuance. "Anyone who uses a smart speaker should be insulated from unilateral revocations by the manufacturer, both through legal restrictions that bind the manufacturer, and legal rights that empower others to modify our devices to help us," is a much better formulation.

It's only in the land of the Darth Vader MBA that the deal is "take it or leave it." In a good world, we should be able to take the parts that work, and throw away the parts that don't.

(Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com, Sam Howzit; CC BY 2.0; modified)

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

#pluralistic #alexa #ifttt #criptech #disability #drm #revocation #nothing about us without us #futureproofing #graceful failure #darth vader MBA #enshittification

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satoriberry · 6 months

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"there's no ink." "yer kinda cute." - karasu tabito

★ resume: you need to make photocopies of a correction sheet for all 35 of your classmates. also, karasu can't use printers.

★ heads up: karasu is potentially ooc but imo he acts the way he does when it comes to football outside of bllk he's CRINGE BOOOOO, reader has hair that can be tucked behind her ear so it can be short or long yknow and uhhh nothing else ig, maybe just karasu being cringe but what's new. also reader is so fucking sick and tired of people in this so she's a bit rude but its justified :3

★ berry's note: oh wow im WRITING!! [😱😱] n e way, i hate this guy a lot and i cant imagine him excelling at using a printer by himself, so time to make a cutesy scenario out of it where he makes a fool of himself!!! enjoy!! :3

maybe it was because of the big, fat, red "57" that was surely an adequate and representative grade for your work - and not just your geography teacher being a bitch - but for some arbitrary reason, an itch developed in the back of your brain and made you feel a bit less tolerant of stupidity. at least until you get back home and sleep like a comatose patient.

you felt a slight comfort in knowing that even the self-proclaimed class genius got a gut-wrenching 60 on the same test, which isn't the nicest way of finding inner peace, but who cares? besides, geography is for losers who want to make statistics about the declining birth rate, and you couldn't care less about women giving birth to less and less children with each passing decade. strutting down the empty hallway, you gripped the sheet containing the answers to the questions with a bit too much intensity and aggression, slightly creasing it in your hand but you had bigger things to worry about. the printer room.

the godforsaken printer room - that served as the only motive to still keep hallway number 4 of the third floor accessible - possessed a myriad of faults and problems, the worst one being that they rarely kept the ink fresh; 'they' being the student body whose only involvement was that. keeping the ink fresh. they didn't even have to buy it, their only job was checking the printer's ink every 4 to 5 days and replace the cartridge if needed so. but, suprisingly (considering how competent they usually are), no one was bothered enough to accomplish this single task. nevertheless, it seemed that you weren't the student to first stumble upon this inconvenience today. the door to the printer room was slightly ajar and the lights were clearly on, so someone had to be in there.

taking the final steps, you lightly pushed the door all way to the end and gazed upon the wall where the (shitty) printers sat on an alignment of old desks. there was someone, you knew that already, but that someone seemed a bit familiar.

oh. it's that super soccer guy from bambi osaka. kawaru tamiko.

or at least you thought that was his name. you weren't good with names.

he was leaning forward against a table carrying an old canon®, tilting it forward with a grip on either side, and his hair flattened against the wall. almost like a person checking the label on the back of a cargo box that was too heavy to move. he was probably trying to look at the wires in the back, there was no other explanation for such an awkward posture.

it took him a few seconds to notice your presence, partly because he was so engrossed in the printer, and partly because you didn't care enough to say a word and instead opted for standing awkwardly with a hand on the doorframe. he turned his head towards you a first time and immediately went back to the printer before rapidly turning his head towards you again, this time fully absorbing your existence. kawaru abruptly let go of the table, producing a loud noise as it hit the wall, making you slightly wince at the idea of an even more damaged printer. you walked towards him.

running two fingers on the dust coating the surface of the printer, you lazily muttered, "it's not working, is it?", expecting nothing less from junk that was probably in use from before the fall of the soviet union. he had stood up straight and begun to awkwardly swing his arms back and forth, a clear attempt at de-stressing. "err, no, pretty sure there's a wirin' problem," he answered, though you were moreso talking to yourself than him, but that didn't matter.

"and uhh, this button right here hasn' stopped flashin' ever since i turned the thing on. prob'ly needs a technician," he continued, forcing a more assertive tone towards the end. you asked him to show you what button he was talking about, so he eagerly pointed at a flashing button located on the left side control panel of the printer. a button that had the image of an opaque drop on it. a button that had the faded word "ink" written underneath it.

the printer was working fine. it just needed ink.

and he thought it was broken.

you stood there in silence, physically and mentally unable to comprehend how someone can miss such an obvious clue. you didn't take your eyes off the flashing button, breathing quietly, trying your best to not lash out on kawaru. you noticed a frizzy lock of hair sticking out from your head and proceeded to tuck it behind your ear, then put your hand over your mouth in an attempt to hide your frustration, eyes still on the flashing button.

karasu, on the other hand, was waiting next to you, though his eyes were moreso fixated on you than the printer. did he know you? he didn't think so, but you seemed like someone he can find interest in, definitely the thinker kind since you appeared to be pondering a solution to this ordeal in a rather sophisticated manner. other questions flowed through his mind: what class were you in? were you a 3rd year? were you in the advanced course? did you have any mutual friends? did you do any extracurriculars? did you like soccer? have you ever been to one of his matches? he couldn't stop the flow of possiblities as to how to get to know you.

"there's no ink." "yer kinda cute."

you slowly turned your head to face him, body stiff and unmoving. he realized how outlandish the comment he just made was, and possibly inappropriate considering the circumstance.

"huh?" "what?"

you blinked at him with gradually developing bewilderment, fully certain that you heard what you heard but that didn't change the fact that you weren't awaiting that from him.

and sadly, you couldn't say that it displeased you. the opposite actually.

"i err, i...anyway, you said ink? there's a few cartridges in the desk's cubby. whaddya need? black? magenta? cyan? yellow?", he started to speak again at a fast pace, wanting to get done with this interaction and dwell in sorrow from his incapacity to talk to cute girls. "black's fine," you answered, looking away to make it less embarrassing from him. he dug in the cubby for a moment, hand banging the sides of the metal compartment before he got hold of a blocky object. he read the cartridge's sticker and made sure it was black ink before standing up again.

you expected him to press the button that dislodged the upper half of the machine and replace the cartridge, however, he stood quietly, fiddling with it while nervously looking at and away from you multiple times. oh. he doesn't know how to replace ink. exhaling through your nostrils, you stuck out your hand, wordlessly demanding him to hand it over - an order he prompty followed.

karasu felt you snatch the cartridge before he could even fully place it on your palm, making him feel even more guilty for wasting your time. he watched as you effortlessly pressed a series of buttons, took out things, replaced things and before he knew it, you snapped the top of the printer back on, which caused the flashing button to stop doing so. was he a loser or were you just a printer connoisseur? he didn't care enough to think of an answer though, he was once again focused on subtly seducing you and make you notice his more pleasant qualities.

you chose to ignore him for the rest of your stay in the printer room, procuring 35 copies of the sheet and preparing to leave when you felt a hand (his hand) lightly tap you on your back.

"yes?," you said, though you recognize you could have said it with a bit less bluntness in your voice. he took no notice of this however, and asked, "what's yer name? i think we've met before."

"(last name) (first name). no, we've never met, or at least i don't think we did," you replied before staring at him with more attention than before, noticing a few details about him that you missed. for example, the mole on his upper left cheek, or the weird angle at which his hair was styled. what kind of fucking product would you need for that?

"ah, hahaha, my bad, i was prob'ly thinkin' of someone else. umm, i...i meant what i said earlier," he mumbled his words more and more. you raised an eyebrow, not getting what he meant by 'what i said earlier', before remembering that he had called you cute. oh, right. that happened.

you involuntarily flashed a face of understanding, then lowered your head to bite your cheek. you didn't want to look like a loser while trying to hide your smile, a smile you rarely gave to guys with bad flirting skills, albeit this one was of the more good-looking variety so you can superficially excuse his lack of skills. "thanks, that was very sweet. i wasn't expecting it but it's still sweet. thank you."

"i can help ya' carry those papers to your classroom, that looks a bit heavy-"

"it's fine, really. but i do have a question. what's your name?"

his expression changed from nervous suaveness to a giddy grin, feeling honoured that you were interested in his name. "karasu tabito. i play for the local youth team, bambi osaka. you didn't ask fer that but, y'know...," ah. that was his name. karasu tabito. kawaru sounded a bit too childish for a guy like him.

"karasu tabito. yeah, i've seen you play. you're fun to watch." you tried to lighten the mood a bit cause the boy was seconds away from developing a rash if he kept scratching his neck like that.

"fun to watch? me? oh, thanks. i've been called a 'good player' and 'excellent' even, but 'fun', i've never gotten that before. w-whaddya mean by that though? what's fun, my playstyle or my presence or-,"

you couldn't afford wasting any more time than you already have, so cutting him off, you replied, "fun as in watching you in your element is rather entertaining, i don't do much sport outside of PE, but i can tell you love what you do. sorry, i have to leave, my teacher is gonna be up my ass about taking so much time."

karasu's lips formed a thin line, bitter about not making much of this exchange. and before he could even hold himself back, his mouth let out, "wanna watch my practice after school? you don't have to stay fer the whole thing, jus' to show you how i play outside of official matches."

"sure."

"what? hu-"

"i said, 'sure'. i'll watch you, i'll even stay for the whole practice, i've got nothing. catch you at the shoe lockers, bye."

and with that (plus a quick smile to soften the blow), you speedwalked out of the printer room and began to go down what felt like a dozen floors.

you didn't allow yourself to think about what happened up there, to avoid cringing at your bizarre attitude and not think about the fact that a (weird) guy you would consider somewhat out of your league, just asked you to watch him play.

bonus!!

lunch break finally rolled around, and your friends typically hung out in an obscure part of the courtyard to eat while hiding their cellphones from any faculty members. checking your messages, you noticed an instagram dm from someone whose username already crossed your mutual recommendations but you never took the time to open their profile.

kr_tabito23.

-> coach is sick but i still want an excuse to talk to you

-> there's this really rad crepe shop in namba parks

-> im paying :]

-> you can't say no

-> lol kidding

-> sorry that was weird

you giggled at whatever he was trying to achieve, he was definitely a dork. you didn't mind that.

-> sure. still gonna catch you at the shoe lockers c:

and somewhere in the school, on the opposite side of the main building, next to the fountain where he and his friends usurped the benches, karasu jumped from his seat and into the air, bumping his fist and yelling unintelligible words while his friends watched, confused but happy for their normally cool and collected fellow.

★ berry's post-writing note: guys im gonna be honest i hate the ending my inspiration juice ran out so i just came up with something but i feel like it could've been a bit better. still happy that i wrote something cause ive been in a long ass writer's block since?? what??? february? anyway, criticism is always accepted and uhh thank you for reading till the end!! <3

#berry.writes <3 #blue lock #blue lock x reader #bllk x reader #bllk x you #blue lock x you #karasu x reader #karasu tabito x reader #karasu tabito #tabito karasu

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kleefkruid · 7 months

Text

Buying a printer is truly the symbol of late stage capitalism. Every review is like:

"It refuses to scan if your ink has run out" "It's cheaper to buy a new printer than to replace the cartridges." "I tried to use a 3rd party cartridge and it pulled out a gun and shot my wife and my dog."

#guess I'll go with the one that holds scanning hostage bc I just need one to print postage labels and prints of my tattoo flash to #trace onto the stencil paper

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kinodraws · 10 months

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hello! I was wondering if you had any tattoo machine recs for a total beginner?

LOL i literally made a thread about this on twitter the other day!

Here's a bunch of stuff for someone who's learning to tattoo.

DISCLAIMER

DO NOT TATTOO OTHER PEOPLE FOR MONEY IF YOU ARE NOT WORKING IN A SHOP

DO NOT TATTOO OTHER PEOPLE OUT OF YOUR HOME OR ANY PLACE THAT IS NOT A SHOP

TATTOO FRUIT, PIG SKIN OR SILICONE FAKE SKIN

TATTOO YOURSELF IF YOURE BRAVE AND CAN ACCEPT THE RISKS INVOLVED

That being said:

MACHINE PICKS: - high end: bishop power wand packer ($1200 for full set, $649 on sale at kingpintattoosupply.com rn for the machine itself which would require purchasing a separate battery) - midrange: FK Irons spektra xion ($574 on painful pleasures, requires power supply or battery) - beginner: MAST archer ($179 on Amazon) Be aware that with this machine, the battery is rechargable but NOT replaceable, so if the battery dies, the machine dies. IMO not a big deal at $179 tho. You can also get coil machines from just about anywhere but they're less foolproof and you need to know how to tune and maintain them, and they aren't cordless so there's much more risk of dragging the clip cord through contaminated material which is gross and dangerous

POWER SUPPLIES: - Critical is kind of my go-to for everything. If you buy an RCA compatible machine, you would need a critical RCA Battery which comes in two configurations, the regular one gives you about 10 hours of running tattoo time and the shorty gives you 5.

BLACK/WHITE INK PICKS: - Allegory BLAK - Dynamic black - Empire white COLOR INK PICKS: - Electrum (flows nicely, doesn't crust over if left exposed to air in the ink cap for a long time) - SOLID Ink - (flows nicely, highly pigmented, haven't used this much) - Eternal ink (good all rounder but most of their opaque highly pigmented colors tend to go thick over time and do not flow easily)

CARTRIDGE PICKS: - High end/best for very experienced artists - Black Claw - Midrange: Kwadron, Electrum - Budget: MAST

Other things you need to tattoo safely: - Tattooing/medical tray - Cling wrap - pen covers/clip cord covers - masking tape - ink caps - stencil printer - stencil paper - shaving razors - green soap - wash bottles - madacide/cavicide/opticide (NOT OPTIONAL) - Paper towels - vaseline - single use individually wrapped tongue depressors - Fake skin (get it at pound of flesh or amazon) - Scissors - Stencil transfer solution (I prefer Dynamic's stencil magic) - Wash bottle bags - Rubbing alcohol - Dental bibs - Laser/Inkjet printer - GLOVES

ALSO GET YOUR DANG BLOODBORNE PATHOGENS CERTIFICATE! IT's $30 on the red cross website and cheaper on other sites!

you also need like at least some cursory drawing skill and the knowledge of how deep to go in skin to prevent blowouts and faint lines! There are lots of folks on youtube who can give you the rudimentary knowledge you need to get started, but the best way to get into tattooing professionally (if that's what your after) is to build up a portfolio of flash pieces that you feel best express your style, and to start getting tattooed at local shops by artists you like & respect.

Anyway! Hope this helps!

#tattooing #tattoos

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