#generic ink cartridges

[krawdad]

So I've figured out that for whatever reason the ink that pentel packs in its brush pen cartridges comes out sloppier than the rapidograph ink. I think it might have been enough to put me off trying to use it more when I got it.

While it is beautifully dark and even, it feels like it leaps off the brush into the paper. I had chalked that up to user error since I didn't have any other point of reference. Surely that would get better with practice.

But I've felt the difference myself, the rapidograph ink doesn't do that. It's so much easier to control the beginning and ending of strokes what the hell.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge

Animals keep evolving into crabs; it's a process called "carcinisation" and it's pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/

By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.

All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

That GE fridge that won't make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:

https://www.wired.com/story/sonos-admits-its-recent-app-update-was-a-colossal-mistake/

But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.

For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of "subscription ink" (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages' worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a "lifetime subscription" plan. With this "lifetime" plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.

Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the "lifetime" in question was the lifetime of HP's patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars

It would take many pages to list all of HP's sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won't let you print a black-and-white page if you're out of yellow ink. The company that won't let you scan or send a fax if you're out of any of your ink.

They make you "recalibrate" your printer or "clean your heads" by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they "expire."

HP raised the price of ink to over $10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added "security chips" to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.

Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.

Third party ink companies have options here. One thing they could do is reverse-engineer the security chip, and make compatible ones that say, "Actually, I'm full." The problem with this is that laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) potentially makes this into a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine, for a first offense.

DMCA 1201 bans bypassing "an effective means of access control" to a copyrighted work. So if HP writes a copyrighted "I'm empty" program for its security chip and then adds some kind of access restriction to prevent you from dumping and reverse-engineering that program, you can end up a felon, thanks to the DMCA.

Another countermove is to harvest security chips out of dead cartridges that have been sent overseas as e-waste (one consequence of HP's $10,000/gallon ink racket is that it generates mountains of immortal, toxic e-waste that mostly ends up poisoning poor countries in the global south). These can be integrated into new cartridges, or remanufactured ones.

In practice, ink companies do all of this and more, and total normie HP printer owners go to extremely improbable lengths to find third party ink cartridges and figure out how to use them. It turns out that even people who find technology tinkering intimidating or confusing or dull can be motivated to learn and practice a lot of esoteric tech stuff as an alternative to paying $10,000/gallon for colored water.

HP has lots of countermoves for this. One truly unhinged piece of fuckery is to ask Customs and Border Patrol to block third-party ink cartridges with genuine HP security chips that have been pried loose from e-waste shipments. HP claims that these are "counterfeits" (because they were removed and re-used without permission), even though they came out of real HP cartridges, and CBP takes them at their word, seizing shipments.

Even sleazier: HP pushes out fake security updates to its printers. You get a message telling you there's an urgent security update, you click OK, and your printer shows you a downloading/installing progress bar and reboots itself. As far as you can tell, nothing has changed. But these aren't "security" updates, they're updates that block third-party ink, and HP has designed them not to kick in for several months. That way, HP owners who get tricked into installing this downgrade don't raise hell online and warn everyone else until they've installed it too, and it's too late:

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

This is the infectious pathogen business model: one reason covid spread so quickly was that people were infectious before they developed symptoms. That meant that the virus could spread before the spreader knew they had it. By adding a long fuse to its logic bomb, HP greatly increases the spread of its malware.

But life finds a way. $10,000/gallon ink is an irresistible target for tinkerers, security researchers and competitors. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but the true parent of jaw-dropping ingenuity is callous, sadistic greed. That's why America's army of prisoners are the source of so many of the most beautiful and exciting forms of innovation seen today:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention

Despite harsh legal penalties and the vast resources of HP, third-party ink continues to thrive, and every time HP figures out how to block one technique, three even cooler ones pop up.

Last week, Jay Summet published a video tearing down a third-party ink cartridge compatible with an HP 61XL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE

The third-party cartridge has what appears to be a genuine HP security chip, but it is overlaid with a paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit board that is skinny enough that the cartridge still fits in an HP printer.

This flexible circuit board has its own little microchip. Summet theorizes that it is designed to pass the "are you a real HP cartridge" challenge pass to the security chip, but to block the followup "are you empty or full?" message. When the printer issues that challenge, the "man in the middle" chip answers, "Oh, I'm definitely full."

In their writeup, Hackaday identifies the chip as "a single IC in a QFN package." This is just so clever and delightful:

https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/man-in-the-middle-pcb-unlocks-hp-ink-cartridges/

Hackaday also notes that HP CEO Enrique J Lores recently threatened to brick any printer discovered to be using third-party ink:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

As William Gibson famously quipped, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." As our enshittification-rich environment drives more and more companies to evolve into rent-seeking enterprises through printerinisation, HP offers us a glimpse of the horrors of the late enshittocene.

It's just as Orwell prophesied: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a HP installing malware on your printer to force you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink – forever."

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

Image: Jay Summet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0ya184uaTE

[3liza]

here's what I've learned to never pay full price for, because people are giving these items away for free or almost free on Craigslist, Nextdoor, Facebook, at Goodwill, and on eBay (which has a local pickup section) in every sufficiently populated location in the USA.

cost of acquiring these items ranges from "carrying it home from the sidewalk" to "getting a friend with a car to help you pick it up" which is the same amount of effort as going to IKEA for worse quality that costs more, with the notable exception of it being a pain in the ass to coordinate with craigslist sellers, and you often have to wait and watch for what you want to actually show up. it took me about a year to find an acceptable gamer chair left out on the sidewalk, for example. but they cost $100+ new, so I chose to wait.

a lot of this stuff is the kind of thing you don't necessarily intend to keep, just to use in transitional housing or until you can afford a better one.

1. printers of any kind. basic office inkjets are free. ink is easily refillable or has generic ink cartridges way cheaper than brand name for any inkjet up to about 2015, not sure how difficult the newer smart printers are to hack but there's no reason to own a newer one because printing technology has not improved since about 2005. you want a color laser for making zines and wheatpastes? it's on Craigslist RN and someone's mom is desperate to get rid of it

2. bedframes

3. desks

4. tables

5. chairs

6. bookshelves, nice oak bookshelves that don't bend like al dente spaghetti when you put books on them, are rotting on sidewalks rn because they didn't fit in someone's house. go get them

7. scanners. I find a working scanner by a dumpster at least once a quarter, and I don't pick them up because I already have one that I picked up from a dumpster years ago

8. hot tubs. everyone thinks they want a hot tub and that the maintenance and upkeep will be worth it, and they are wrong. Craigslist.

9. sofas, with the caveat that if you are in a bedbug region like New York State you need to be very confident in your bedbug screening skills

10. quality leather shoes. these last forever and are expensive new. eBay is best for these

11. plates, glassware, silverware. all of these are able to be sterilized to whatever standard you feel comfortable with but if you eat in restaurants you've already put a fork in your mouth that hundreds of people have drooled on so try not to fool yourself

12. televisions and computer monitors

13. houseplants. similar to the bedbug warning above, you need to screen these for pests like fungus gnats and mealybugs

14. dressers, wardrobes, china hutches, cabinets, chests of drawers, etc

15. mirrors

16. clothes hangers

17. moving boxes

18. mattresses to a certain extent. I don't like secondhand used mattresses but unstained, unused mattresses are surprisingly common, especially since the foam mail order mattress boom started and people keep getting told by the mattress companies to just get rid of/keep any mattresses they want to return for flaws or wrong sizes or whatever. bedbug warning on this obviously

19. sheets and towels. you gotta launder them obviously

20. basic clothing, especially for kids. normie type clothing is so numerous people often just throw them away because they can't get anyone to take them

21. kitchenware like cooking utensils and pots n pans. don't use chipped or scratched Teflon/nonstick if you can help it. everyone needs one basic steel chef knife, which can be sharpened and maintained indefinitely. people throw these away CONSTANTLY

22. household consumables like laundry soap and dish soap. people often accidentally buy the wrong brand, scent, or develop allergies and want to get rid of extra

23. pet supplies like collars, leashes, dog crates, litter boxes, litter itself, dog beds, toys, carriers, etc

24. medical equipment of all kinds. people who take care of all kinds of patients end up with tons of leftover, sealed, miscellaneous stuff when that person recovers or dies, and they often give it away. adult diapers, hospital beds, IV stands, crutches, walkers, wheelchairs, fracture boots and splints, knee braces, canes, catheter packs, ice packs, heat packs, sterile paper sheeting, gauze, slings, over-the-door stretching and rehab pulleys, mattress protectors, etc

25. washers and dryers, both the basic household cube type and the small twin tub or rock tumbler type. people upgrade these when the old ones are still working, just squeaky or a little weird or sometimes just old

26. vacuum cleaners. secondhand ones are sort of icky but you can get rid of the ickiness by wiping them down with a rag and isopropyl alcohol inside and out. use an exacto or utility knife to slice off the hair and string wrapped around the roller. buy a new filter on Amazon. people throw away vacuums that work perfectly all the time because they don't actually know how to clean them out or do maintenance. bedbug and pet hair warning obviously

27. microwaves

28. refrigerators

30. lamps

31. any kind of exercise equipment including stationary bikes, ellipticals and weights/weight benches

32. any kind of piano. there's a grand on my local Craigslist for free rn

33. scrap wood and lumber

34. pallets

35. wood shipping crates

36. newborn, toddler and baby equipment like breast milk pumps and storage, bottles, bottle racks, diapers, etc. anything a little guy will grow out of fast will end up being given away

37. air conditioners, humidifiers and dehumidifiers. these will be most numerous during their respective off seasons

list updated 2/13/24 based on recent Craigslist trawling

38. jars, both canning type jars and clean food jars like from pickled or jelly bought at the store

39. rugs. most of my rugs are sidewalk finds. rugs will almost always be dirty. a decent consumer grade rug cleaner costs under $100, it's cheaper to just buy one if you have the space to store it. flushing the scavenged rug with soap, hot water, vinegar, alcohol, etc will clean almost anything but huge bedbug and allergen warning on this item

[dye-it-rouge-et-noir]

I just found a sleep-deprived essay in my drafts???

I have controversial pen related takes that sound incredibly pretentious. Anyways, the Pilot G2 is not that good and I say this as someone who has Pilot as their favorite pen brand. It's okay, but there are better options. I can write an entire argumentative essay on this subject.

[jayrockin]

Hi, what are your favorite fountain pens and inks?

For entry level, I would recommend Platinum Preppy. For affordable/reliable, I would recommend Lamy Safari or Kaweco Sport. The only TWSBI Eco I ever bought was a lemon, so I can't recommend, but I know a lot of people who love them, so ehhhh? Sailor Compass is also a great writing pen, or fine liner. If you want something higher end for drawing, BlueDew Flex has blown my socks off with the insane bendiness of their nibs. I don't use pens for writing much so I don't have a particular preference for any high-end writing pens lol. I would just recommend finding a pretty vehicle to insert a Jowo nib and converter/cartridge in. And imo, generally, if you are paying more than $100 for a pen you are paying for the jewelry aspect of it. Which, like, no judgment, but also if someone tells you that you NEED to buy a gold nib pen for any functional reason they are lyyyyyyinggg.

Ink I mostly just buy dozens of 3-5ml samples to fuck around with because I like hoarding vials of colorful fluid, but Diamine Ink is affordable, has a wide variety of colors, generally has wet (high flow) inks, and offers $8 30ml bottles which are great if you want to buy a color but not like, a LOT of it. Though, my most used ink color is Vinta Hanan because I am the rare pastel yellow ink-liker. I also generally dislike shimmer inks, I find the effect underwhelming and they love to clog pens.

Also obligatory warning that Noodler's is affordable but the owner is kind of a libertarian shithead and their pens are great to start but break down in like 1-2 years (At least, every pen I've gotten from them). Also their inks areeeee all over the place in quality...

[b1asho]

Round one of the species introduction!!!!

Prectikar Master Post:

Here's some info on them, and if you want to see some other drawings I've done of them (albeit some occasionally older n crustier ones), check out my deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/blasho

Anyway let's get into a terribly long string of paragraphs about some of their info:

Prectikar are a large sentient species, usually standing at around 8-9 feet tall when fully upright and weighing anywhere close to or upwards if 1000 pounds

They are covered in feather-like fur (or is it fur-like feathers? They're occasionally branched like feathers, and all have quills, but some are more hairlike) due to the cold climate they evolved in, though length and thickness of it now varies by region.

They are omnivorous, and while they have many traits to help them hunt and kill, most of their diet tends to be plants.

Originally rush-down predators, they use their considerable strength to move in quick bursts and their specialized tusks to either ram prey to death or gouge into it as they grapple it.

Their jaw strength is also insane,with their skull actually sacrificing brain space in favor of it, which helps them eat pretty much anything they come across. They pay a lot of attention to food and cooking because of their high calorie needs and very sensitive nose/tongue.

They have manganese as an oxygen carrier is a result of the scarcity of other metals in their environment and potentially because of its general affinity for oxygen.

This causes their blood to be an amber/orange brown and shades of pink depending on its exposure to oxygen.

Through a network of cooperative bonding and other adaptations (like better oxygen retention in muscles and the easily carried size and longevity of the molecule) they’ve managed to bring this manganese transport molecule close to hemoglobin in terms of effectiveness, though they can also make use of manganese’s catalyst properties to temporarily push it to bring lots more oxygen to their tissues at a time (used for short bursts of speed and strength that allow them to take down large prey and plants for food).

their large body size (selected by their colder environment) lets them use their own high body heat to keep the O2 fixation and liberation going in their highly effective lungs.

An extensive understanding of their internal chemistry is unknown (aka gatekept by their colonizers/"uplifters" who ill get to later) but it seems like they also have a network of bacteria in their body just to manage the more reactive and damaging oxides that form, and to remove/convert the spent manganese into connective tissue and aid in bone maintenance.

They have higher calorie needs from keeping up the body temp and recycling/removing all that stuff, alongside just being big in general. Alongside a lot of sleeping, they also basically just eat all the time (compared to other species) to compensate, though their mammal-like fat retention and other metabolic adaptations for scarcity mean that they can handle long periods without resources(though this causes increasingly compounded problems for them)

Some other downsides include low tolerance of changes in oxygen levels (particularly low) and temperature levels, and poor adaptation to environments outside of their biosphere/without all the microorganisms since these things upset their delicate balance.

(part of why so many tribes were nomadic was/is to chase temperate and ‘warm’ seasons, even though to us that’s still cold. Prectikar living in human dominated areas often just take a lot of supplements with beneficial bacteria in them to cope with thr lack of that in their environent, and any food printers need an 'ink' cartridge containing these things or else theyre basically useless.),

They also experience faster general wear and tear from having constant complex and intensive chemical reactions(sometimes with dangerous chemicals) going on in their bloodstream and tissues.

( I’m not a biochemist, so if there’s any glaring issues with this then just explain it away to yourself with ‘they have a gland for that’ or ‘just don’t think about it actually’ which is what I did. I just wanted the fun color with a metal that can reversibly bond with oxygen :). )

They have one nasal passageway for smell/air and a second, bigger cavity for just vocalization (which they can’t breathe in from as easily).

This second cavity is between their first set of eyes, and has a phonic lip structure inside to produce higher pitched sounds.

The upper nasal opening has muscled nostrils that act as lips to further help control sound. The noise coming from here sounds very high to them, but to us it sounds like a nasally human voice, broken uobhere and there with squeaks, buzzes, and clicks).

They can pitch this nose voice very high, closer to dolphin-like clicking noises but not quite echolocation level.

Their throat vocal cords by their air sac are very long and thick, used for making very deep noises that carry long distances.

However, the vocal control they have through their mouth is very poor due to this and the inarticulate lips and tongue they have, and due to the more limited air they can bring in and out of it, so when speaking only through their mouth they sound a lot like seals or dogs and can only really go in short bursts before having to refill the sac.

Most of their languages are spoken with the nose and mouth sounds in tandem, where the high and low mix to make a more even sounding voice.

It’s fairly easy to understand them, but nearly impossible for us to truly speak any of their native languages, and if they wanted to they could also just start making sounds we cant hear.

They see it as strange that humans and other species speak with a single tone without difficulty.

The red flaps pictured on the drawing of their mouth and nasal passages can be moved to seal off the passage and direct airflow elsewhere.

The big red one in their throat acts as a “diaphragm” to fill and empty the air sac (which is left over from when their digestive and respiratory tracts were more connected like ours, but time in the water heavily shifted it to a more ‘blowhole’ type outline to help them breathe and vocalize from the surface).

The other flap by the air sac and its vocal cords moves upwards to block off the digestive tract whenever the mouth or nose is opened to allow air to be drawn in by this diaphragm.

The two red flaps making a pinched shape can move independently or with the other red flap, but never at the same time with each other. The main airway is always separate from the digestive tract, though the flap to the middle, non vocal nasal passage can be moved so that it’s a part of either the vocal nasal passage to draw in air or the air sac part to act as another resonance chamber.

Air can be drawn in by the diaphragm via open mouth and through the nose via open top red flap at the same time, and can be released at the same time, resulting in their near continuous double speak sound they use for their own language.

Their characteristic large tusks are retractable and housed in a cone-shaped bony socket on the side of their jaw.

A muscle is attached to the bony root of the tooth, and pushes it out. As it slides towards the front of the mouth, the cone socket narrows and wedges a protrusion on the tooth into a hole in the socket, and then the muscle stiffens, locking it in there.

When the tusk retracts, the muscle quickly jimmies the tooth forward then draws it back to get it out of the hole, and then pulls it back into the wider part of the socket.

This is mainly because their tusks are ever growing (but very slowly) but not great at self sharpening, and are their main weapon in self defense and hunting,so it seems this just happened to keep them safe.

If a tusk is broken, as long as it was not cracked at the root, it can be regrown with extensive time in the socket, but otherwise they stay safely stowed in da socket where the majority of its sharp edge can stay protected from chewing and other mouth stuff. Tusks won't start growing in until their teenage years.

They are primarily bipedal/ quadrupedal and switch between the two occasionally.

Knuckle walking helps distribute their top-heavy weight and give them more balance for long and short distance, while walking upright gives them better visibility, less stress on their neck/upper back, and quicker but unsteadier movement.

Their gallop/sprint utilizes both arms and legs to propel them forward in a gait halfway between a bear and a gorilla (since their big mid arms are set like a bears) to overtake prey after an ambush or drive them into the rest of the pack waiting elsewhere. Quad walking also helps them get around in buildings meant for species half their size.

Their hands are some of their only places without hair, but as they age, they loose it on their arms and face too.

Prectikar have different uses for each of their pairs of limbs, and have for all stages of their evolution.

The front ones specialized for grappling prey and grabbing things, and so have a ‘sprawling’ shoulder position like humans and have hands with relatively nimble fingers, the outer two are angled inwards but can also move in a pamprodactyl ish fashion (which acts as their version of a thumb, and lets them switch from big to little grabbing motions) .

Their mid limbs used to be wings with hands, and still have a basically zygodactyl finger position that was helpful for holding onto branches (with the backwards facing finger), but over time they have been converted into terrestrial knuckle-walking limbs, with the one that swings back and forth being brought forwards to walk or swung back to adjust grip on big things they want to move or for balance on unstable terrain like ice . The fingers on this one are big and clumsy, pretty much only useful for digging, walking, or slashing.

Their back limbs also used to be for grasping but were mainly counterbalances, but have now turned into plantigrade walking limbs (and much like humans, that’s pretty much all they use them for). All have nonretractable claws.

Prectikar are viviparous and usually give birth to litters of up to 8.

They have a specific mating season, where their dimorphic traits will become more pronounced.

Males in rut will shed the feathers on their throat sac region and it will become a bright ambery yellow color, and they will also grow in longer feathers on their butt region (in a fan shape for display purposes. The dont have a true post anal tail like humans).

They will also develop some of that pinkish orange/yellow on their chest skin. Females go throguh estrus cycles and will also grow a more prominent butt feather crest, as well as some very long feathers around their neck, shoulders, and abdomen for babies to hold onto.

Their skin patches turn a much brighter shade of yellow to help direct newborns to where they can feed from. Once they give birth, they will start making an oily and thick secretion across the skin patch which is collected into a divot which the infant licks from. Part of why the babies hold onto them is so they can constantly lick the 'milk'so they can grow.

Newborns come out blind and hairless, but quickly grow in a thick down and open their eyes so they can climb on mom.

Once they're weaned, they'll drop off and use the muscles they gained hanging on and climbing to start moving with the adults. They grow very fast, and canes are a common sight in teens to help deal with the rapid bone and muscle growth.

Usually, it is only during this season where chest/skin related nudity standards change to be more conservative, since showing those colors means youre down to fuck and so doing that is usually restricted to in private with their partner or for bachelors.

They have very strict binaries for sex and gender based on this seasonal divide and religion.

Most tribes show gender identity through a piercing on their lower nose for male or chin for female (so dont worry, the main guy up there is showing some male presenting chest outside of the mating season, so hes fine).

Normally, only some cultures pierce their ears, which are like if owls had a little mobile flap of outer ear to swivel I stead of their whole head. Very little of it is actually flesh, and the sound is mainly captured by the feathers around it.

While they have a reputation otherwise, Prectikar are highly social within their tribal/family groups.

They regularly allogroom, greet each other with hugs, and usually travel in sibling groups. Households are multi generational.

They have a reputation as standoffish or irritable because they take things very differently and have other standards/specific body language truggers. also most other species treat them differently/with fear by default.

their upper pair of eyes is larger and focused on long distance vision while their lower pair is for close up vision, creatign a bifocal effect for them when using both at once.

Aaaaaand that oretty much everything, I think. I'll post some other arts related to them soon, but consider this the Master Post on the things you should know about them!!

[pparacxosm]

hunger is ugly

(blue-eyed son 3 !! which, as any third and final installation of a franchise ((back to the future and spiderman withstanding !!!)), is obviously the best one; i’m only half kidding; homeless era!patrick zweig x jaded businesswoman!reader; see parts one and two; tw eggnog; tw coworkers; cw smut but nothing crazy; if you’re seeking closure don’t hold your breath; i’m sick of these two; they clearly don’t know what they want; and i refuse to take blame; tw fitted sheets; tw cocaine talk)

He once told you he couldn’t wear a suit. I couldn’t, he’d said, I’d look ridiculous in a suit. But he cleans up quite nicely, actually.

In fact, he looks good, and you’re not above admitting that. He looks better, actually. Healthier. And he looks handsome in his casual blazer and charcoal linen slacks. Oh God, are you gonna look frumpy beside him?

“I’ve always wanted to go to an office Christmas party,” he says.

You’re on the floor before him, straddling your full length mirror, and all your tumbledown, halfway gutted makeup products are strewn wildly about you.

Your bed, behind you, is a skeleton state, too. When he’d come over, he’d nearly laughed at the fact that you’ve apparently been so busy, your clean bedding is still sitting in a laundry hamper in the corner of the room, and you’ve been sleeping in the inserts on a bare mattress for who knows how long.

Patrick doesn’t pass judgment on the mess in your apartment. He still feels he owes you in some weird, kiss-the-hand-that-fed-you sort of way.

You’re not a slob. You always look put together when you leave the house. You’ve just had to focus on work. You can’t stumble at the finish line. Or… the glass ceiling. Or the penultimate rung on the corporate ladder. Whatever. If you can successfully execute this next product launch, who knows what other doors might open for you. Probably doors in buildings very similar to the one you’re already working in. But that’s nothing to sneeze at. Every morning, you see your reflection in those immaculate windows.

So anyway, it shouldn’t matter. Things just get away from you sometimes.

Patrick’s standing above you pensively reflecting how many undone buttons says Corporate Shindig Eyecandy (Please Give My Date That Promotion) as opposed to Reformed Tennis Heartthrob. His shins are sort of bracketing your hips.

“Well, it’s half an office Christmas party, and half—like—a congratulatory… thing. For Deirdre’s successful proposal,” you murmur, leaning forward, tugging your temple to flatten your eyelid and flick on your liner.

“Aw, what?” he frowns, “Deirdre? We fucking hate Deirdre.”

You laugh. You try not to delude yourself, not to let these moments exist in some flowery vacuum in the eye of your mind, not to ask him to fix your bedding for you. But it’s hard.

Whoever let Sam replace the DJ halfway through the party was either a genius anarchist or too drunk to care.

You know it’s probably the latter. You down the cognacheavy eggnog from your glass and make a disgruntled face. You don’t know what you expected. Shania Twain is belting from the speakers while Sam wiggles his headphones in a dumb, awkward dance.

He’s pretty funny, all things considered, but you’d still like nothing better than to whack him up the head with an ink cartridge.

One of the blousy interns from your department is haplessly flirting with Patrick, pretending he bumped into her and made her plash some eggnog on herself, but she’s trying to be selfaware about it.

“Oh gosh, isn’t this such a cliché: the boss’ plus one wiping a dairybased drink from the subordinate’s—… oh no, I know she’s not technically my boss, but she’s sort of my senior within the company, like on the general corporate ladder, argh, I know, I hate it!”

She could’ve said superior, you think, instead of senior.

You’re feeling too pissy to go and save him from that failed interaction. You turn your back to the crowd and look out of the glossy black windows. That chorus keeps stomping its pointed heels over your fragile nerves.

The best thing about being a woman is the prerogative to have a little fun!

Do you have a little fun? Are you a Good Time? You have to laugh. It’s just a stupid song. But you need the validation.

That’s why Patrick picks the wrong moment to come and talk to you.

“Hey, this chick is chasing me with a napkin around the room.”

You snort. “Not my problem.”

Patrick leans against the buffet, delivering a wry salute when Sam points at him from the DJ booth and winks. “That guy’s something,” Patrick chuckles, “He asked me to sign his dick.”

“Did you?”

Patrick hums like he’s ambivalent and places a large hand on the small of your back. “Would that be good for you, if I did?”

“I’m fun, right?”

You swirl the remains of eggnog in your glass. You ask the question like he’s been holding out some big secret from you.

Patrick blinks. He scoffs in disbelief, but also smirks pointedly at your glass. “You’re asking me?”

You stare at him through the briar lace of your eyelashes. Everyone who’s met him today has had their own lashes drenched in laughter. You hadn’t realised it first. You’d figured those were mutually exclusive things, downandout charm and the breathing room of comfortable success. But no. He’s charming, anyway. It’s just that he’s not haggling for scraps of generosity anymore so much as he’s lapping at the fleeting dregs of likability. And you hate that you notice that, and you hate that you notice him, that you know him, in a sense. Because what are you supposed to do about it?

“Everybody loves you. Just… be objective.”

Patrick still laughs. He rubs his stubble. He should’ve shaved this morning. He thought he was doing something for you, something nice, by coming with you to this thing and wooing everybody’s pants a little tighter, but maybe he’d missed the mark. “You know I can’t be objective.”

“Why not?” You sound petulant, leaning angrily against the buffet. You’re old enough to know what he’s saying, of course. He’s being nice. He’s telling you he thinks you’re fun, that the rest shouldn’t matter, but then he doesn’t need anything. Even when he had nothing. So he wouldn’t get it. He wouldn’t notice.

Patrick tilts his head and narrows his eyes in that way he does when he’s vivisecting you, then clears his throat. “You’re drunk.” He laughs again, a little gratuitous. Then, after a while, “I have fun with you. You’re engaging.”

“Engaging?” you echo, frowning. “Seriously? What am I, an essay?”

“No, I just— Jesus, what do you want me to say?”

You clench your jaw. Okay, you are drunk and you’re at this office party from hell and a hard rain’s a-gonna fall, so goddamn it, he will call you fun.

So you get right into his face. You’re good at that, even if you barely reach his shoulder. “Tell me I’m fun, because I am, and you think I am.”

You try to swat his hand away, but his palm stays put, a hot magnet just above your tailbone, and he doesn’t even look like he’s doing it on purpose. It’s just that he feels an emptiness in his stomach, depressing but also thrilling. Like taking a hit. Like you’re a little bag of white powder. Beyond the dark windows it starts to snow. He used to do a bit of coke, when everything around him dropped dead and started to rot, and he couldn’t stomach the smell. He doesn’t seem like the poster kid for moderation, but the coke was good, and he didn’t let it be any more than that. In fact, at times, the coke was great. The coke was fun. But he couldn’t live with the coke. You understand? He couldn’t settle down in New England and raise a cat with the coke.

“I don’t think I can win with you,” he murmurs, and, for his part, he at least sounds like he needs to change that.

It’s supposed to be a comfort fuck—and you call it fuck in your head dismissively—but it’s too raw and unknown. You’ve spent so much time in this questionable relationship with existence in his life. In and out. You thought you’d learned him, or at least learned the both of you, but his hands on you, his mouth on you—it’s frightening, finite, foreign. Somehow divorced from this man who, for all his egofueled casual mania, doles out intimacy like free samples.

This is what it feels like to watch him unravel, but it’s not just beggar’s desperation. No, he’s making room for someone else beside him in a way he hasn’t in a long time.

He keeps touching every part of you, frantically, trying to feel all of you, sinking his head between your thighs with a groan of relief, immersing himself in another body. But not just any body, because he keeps mouthing your name. As if to remind you that he is here, and you let him in. Because it matters that it’s you, that someone who knows him is letting him in. He’s humming to himself as you come against his fingers and mouth.

... hunger is ugly... souls are forgotten... I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it...

You like his full weight on you, sinking you into your undressed mattress, trapping you, suffocating you under his bottomless gloom. He has one hand on your thigh. He lifts it at an uncomfortable angle, sinking his cock deeper into you, making it ache. How does he know you like that, anyway? He doesn’t. He noticed.

You want to resent what he’s doing here, which is trying to ‘win with you’. Because he’s been on a winning streak, and you’re not about to spoil that.

And these demeaning, mechanical thoughts probably aren’t reflective of his inner monologue at the moment, but it’s easier to believe he doesn’t respect you than to contend with this whole thing.

You want to tell him, you don’t know what I like, but he starts talking about this tournament. There’s a match in Boston, for real this time. You’re having trouble paying attention.

You fall asleep with him still inside you, head on your chest, and you, crushed comfortably by his weight.  

You wake up before him. He must have rolled off you in the middle of the night. He’s sleeping next to you, one hand stretched towards you, head on the pillow at a strange angle.

You turn away quickly.

You sit on the edge of the bed, breathing in and out, staring at the heap of his cocktail wear on the floor. You feel sore and stupefied. You feel cramps in your muscles. You feel weak in the best and worst way possible. You keep breathing in and out, hoping you’re keeping quiet.

But he wakes up anyway.

You can feel his gentle eyes on the slightly hunched line of your back.

“Hey.”

“Morning,” you mumble, throat dry. Why does it have to be morning? Why does it always have to be morning?

“Come back here,” he says, as if it weren’t morning.

You shake your head softly.

His silence is edifying. It goes on for too long.

“You’re not gonna stay, are you?” you ask, serious and formal, gripping the edge of the mattress. You clench your jaw, body taut.

You can hear him swallow, throat working to get the syllables out.

“I’m not, like… leaving you.”

You close your eyes.

“No, I mean—yeah,” you chuckle miserably. “You’re probably doing the right thing. The best thing for you.”

You feel the tears slide out one by one, and your shoulders shake slightly.

“Please don’t cry.” He’s using that soft and primordially tentative voice he uses with your cat. “I’m not worth it.”

You look over your shoulder at him. “Then why is it so fucking hard to watch you go?”

It’s only recently you’ve started getting angry with him. You used to get grudgingly amused, perhaps vaguely reproachful, but now his stupid face just makes you livid.

His eyes tremble pensively. “I don’t know. But that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

You turn your head away, rolling and wiping your eyes at the same time. “I just don’t see how it could work.”

And there’s a door he could open for you. There’s something he could say at this juncture to reassure you, momentarily, that it could. But he can’t bring himself to lie, because he cares about you too much to take a bump of that powder.

He hangs his head and looks at the beautiful line of your back, memorising it.

Then he gets up.

“I’m gonna make coffee, then we can get that fucking fitted sheet on, alright?”

You nod absently. You don’t turn to look at him as he puts on his clothes.

He comes up to you before he leaves. He runs his finger under your chin and lifts it up. There’s a kitten scratch on his cuticle.

You could come watch the match.

But he doesn’t say that. You haven’t seen him play since New Rochelle. “I’ll fill the demon’s bowl. I think she’s starting to like me.”

You laugh, wiping more tears.

Patrick takes that hand, your hand, wet with tears, and brings it to his mouth. He kisses and licks the salt away. He keeps it there for a moment longer than he should. You gently pull away.

You only exhale when he’s gone.

Toby slinks out from behind your mirror, swishing her tail back and forth in contempt.

You narrow your eyes. “Oh, shut up,” you whisper.

[katakaluptastrophy]

John Gaius' commitment to a certain aesthetic for his space empire is...certainly something...

They are using fountain pens on spaceships. Fountain pens. To the extent that every vaguely intellectual character (other than Abigail Pent, who is repeatedly described as "neat" and "immaculate") is constantly described as having ink stains on their hands and even faces, and the smell of ink is referenced repeatedly.

And when they're not writing with fountain pens, they're using necromantically stabilised blood (this isn't just a Harrow quirk - the Sixth have special spikes on their clipboards for signing documents...).

Amongst the Lyctoral traces Abigail finds in the library at Cannan House are "a warped automatic pen with a thin inner cylinder of ink and a plex casing, rather more antiquated than one with an ink cartridge."

It also seems reasonable to assume that the "clockworks" they wear are analogue watches, as Nona scolds Cam for referring to her beeping digital watch as a "clockwork" on New Rho.

And besides the fountain pens, regency navy uniforms, swords, and general 20th century pulp literature culture, a few more things that characters specifically describe as antique or ancient include:

Sunglasses

Metal industrial shelving

Paper books with glossy pages

Black tie formal wear

Automatic doors

LED lights

Chrome kitchen fittings

Guns (to the extent that Abigail specifically says to the Sleeper "you come bearing ancient weapons")

And fine, these are all within the realms of things people are reasonably allowed to have a personal preference against...

But you know what else the Nine Houses don't have?

VACCINES.

What was the thought process by which Dr Science and Humanitarian Empathy decided to bring back routine childhood illnesses from the 1950s?

Speaking of the 1950s, why - in a society that appears to find permanently magically manipulating the bodies of living people trivial - does the standard of eyecare seem to also be from the early 20th century?

As a glasses wearer, I totally appreciate that there may simply be a social preference for glasses despite the existence of flesh magic. But Abigail Pent swapping between two pairs of glasses would seem to suggest that varifocals went the way of the mumps vaccine...

And our perspective on this is entirely from some of the most privileged people in the Dominicus system.

[genderqueerdykes]

Ditch Etsy for Good: A Disabled Etsy Seller's Experience

i started my Etsy store in August of 2022. I was in desperate need of income at the time, as I am disabled, and waiting for my full disability payments to come through. I currently make $245/month off of a general assistance program that's meant to "help" while you're waiting for those payments.

I needed, at the time, $900/month for my studio apartment, because I was on a month-to-month lease, and could not re-new it, as I was the secondary renter, and my abusive ex whom I could not contact was the primary renter. They needed his signature to renew the lease, or else I was on month-to-month status, which meant they could increase my rent to whatever price they saw fit at any point.

I was struggling to stay alive. I had a bunch of kandi supplies I had gathered over the years, pony beads, string, all that kind of stuff. So i accrued some extra supplies to make other types of necklaces and chokers. Keep in mind my level of poverty, and the level of inflation in 2022. I was having to accrue supplies secondhand, from thrift stores. Everything I bought and sold was upcycled, save for the few times I could afford things to fill in the gaps from craft stores.

After I gathered supplies, I went to work. I spent countless hours making all types of jewelry. Not really sleeping. Just countless hours of stringing beads, if I woke up in the middle of the night from a bad dream or stress about homelessness, I would go back to work. I've been homeless before. Several times. Never lived on the street or in a shelter, but I have lived in hotels, cars, crashed on couches and have run from getting kicked out for making little money endless times.

I drank a lot of coffee and ate very little. Eating consumed time, time that I didn't have. Once I was done making things, it was time to photograph every. single. item., then edit them, and upload them to Etsy. I had to create listings for each individual item, all of which cost $0.20 to create, and again to renew when it ran out in 3 months if not purchased. There was already a start-up cost.

Shipping made my life a nightmare. Etsy charged me for each and every single label. I tried free shipping at first, as it's a huge draw for customers, but labels were around $3.69 from my state to the mainland United States at the time, creeping ever closer to $4. For anywhere else it would easily come to $10 or more, international shipping was easily $20 - $40. Even if the customer paid for shipping I still had to go through the process of purchasing a label.

This didn't account for the fact that I had to purchase printer, ink and paper at some point to keep printing these labels. Ink is wildly expensive and your cartridges run out faster than they should. They are rigged to flag as empty when they're not. This also does not account for ink and paper lost when the printer does something in error, which is often. The office at my apartment complex was willing to print labels and packing slips for me for a while, but they cut me off after a few months.

The biggest kick in the teeth was the processing time for my payments. Because I shipped my first few orders without tracking labels. Etsy put a hold on my money for the next 3 months. They would take a random amount of time to process each payment. I could never figure out the schedule. My money would sometimes take days or weeks to arrive when I set Etsy to a "daily" payment schedule. It was torture. I was sweating over not having money constantly, and missing payment deadlines left and right.

I was getting orders at every hour of the day. I didn't "clock out" of this job. I had to change the notification sound of the Etsy Seller app on my phone because when I heard it, I would panic. I wasn't excited, I was filled with dread. It was never ending, and I was constantly stressed about getting orders out on time. I never had time to rest. I didn't get days off. I was on the job 24/7. Unless you completely uninstall the Etsy app and refuse to check it fora while, you can't really clock out of this job.

This isn't even touching the fact that Etsy also takes a cut out of every single sale you make, meaning you have to jack up your prices wildly either to make free shipping reasonable so you're not losing money on each sale, or you have to play a dance of figuring out what the best balance between shipping and item costs are, which is time consuming. It's a lot of math and comparing against your niche's market.

Etsy has an ads feature, which you must again pay for, where they will run ads for your products in random banner ads and whatnot. You are charged if one customer clicks the ad, not purchases something, meaning this is a complete fucking scam. The minimum is $1/day and you are forced to subscribe monthly. You can cancel at any point, but sometimes it takes a full day for this to cancellation to go through. The Etsy Ads feature sucks ass. I received exactly 2 orders through their service and kept it on for a few weeks here and there. It's horrid. You do not receive a significant enough boost in traffic to make the investment worth it. Also consider how many people use adblockers these days. This isn't hard to see.

The amount of time you have to spend promoting and boosting your own shop, buying supplies, creating and photographic products, uploading them to the website, and everything else in between is not worth the amount of money you make. You do not turn a profit unless you are selling very high end products like fine jewelry and antiques. Anyone else in the bottom rungs loses money through one avenue or another, Etsy finds ways to make the entire process draining and expensive for the seller.

The also will not provide you a 1099 document to file your taxes for your earned income unless you have made over $25,000 in one year on Etsy, which is literally impossible unless you make, as I said, fine jewelry. The average Etsy seller does not make this much in one year. We do not make a liveable wage, yet Etsy pretends like we do.

I didn't realize how draining it was to run this store until I put it in vacation mode. I'm shutting it down as soon as I'm able to. I could not handle the pressure of orders coming in in the middle of the night. I could not handle the pressure of not being able to remember which bracelets I could wear, and which ones were up on the store. Or which ones I could give to friends freely without having to issue someone a refund because I made a mistake. The worry of sending the wrong customer the wrong product was constantly on my mind. Every review that came in made me scared I had fucked up or provided an inferior product. I was distraught, broken and scared.

Now I'm much more free. The piddly jackshit amount of income I made was not worth it at all. I don't think I made back the cost of supplies and I definitely was never compensated for the sheer amount of labor I put into my products and orders. Etsy just kept kicking me while I was down and now that they have made it so that you are unable to file a class action lawsuit against them, they are only becoming more tyrannical.

Etsy does not care about their small sellers. They only care about the big cash cows who bring in big views and line Etsy's pockets with the Etsy Ads program. If you're too poor too keep up they'll chew you up and spit you out. Fuck Etsy. Fuck the lack of respect for their sellers. Fuck them for holding my money randomly for 3 months because I didn't know tracking labels were REQUIRED in their eyes. Fuck Etsy for never letting me know when I was getting paid, and for paying me on such an irregular schedule. Fuck Etsy for the fucked up fees and expensive shipping labels.

Fuck Etsy for everything. Let them go. Cut the cord. Navigate to Ko-Fi or somewhere else. Let this horrid site fucking die.

[heysawbones]

Earlier today, I asked Google about removing the ink from a gel pen cartridge. Google thought I meant, “how do you revive a dead gel pen?” No. See. Sometimes, when you’re using gel pens in ways they were never meant to be used, you find the ballpoint inadequate. In my case, it was too big to get into tight spots on the doll shoe I was detailing. Gel ink is water soluble. You should be able to paint with it. Right?

But how do you get it out? Is the coverage okay? Folks,

the coverage is excellent.

You can learn how to free the gel ink from its tiny prison, plus the pros and cons below the cut.

Here’s the tools I used, except the hobby/model drill. That turned out to be unnecessary. A syringe, some kind of needle OR stiff catheter of similar dimensions, and scissors will do the trick.

I cut the pen above the stopper and below the ink/air bubble. If a gel pen is old enough or you have enough patience, sometimes you can wiggle the stopper out of the bottom of a gel pen instead. If that’s an option, I’d recommend it for reasons I’ll touch on later.

The tip of a Sakura Gellyroll has two notches in the plastic where the ballpoint head is seated in the grip. I used the eye end of a fat yarn needle to wedge into that notch and loosen the tip and cartridge until I could remove them from the grip. I think you could get away without removing the tip and cartridge, but I found it easier/neater to do it this way.

This shows where I cut into the cartridge: between the end of the air bubble, and the end of the ink. The more ink your pen has, the smaller - and possibly harder to identify - this area is.

Unfortunately, my syringe was not made to be used with a needle. To compensate, I used sticky-tac to cover any air gaps - vacuum is essential to a syringe. I used artist’s tape on top of that to stabilize the connection. You probably don’t need to do this, but if you do, there you go. I bet heavily chewed bubblegum would work, too. Or clay. Or lots of things.

I really didn’t think this would work, due to bad luck with past attempts. It does work.

Here, I’m using a kolinsky sable to pick up the ink but any pointed brush meant for acrylic, watercolor, or ink should do the trick.

THE OPACITY. THE PIGMENT LOAD. THE ABILITY TO DETAIL TINY AREAS

—

PROS.

-Incredibly opaque for something water-soluble and relatively low viscosity

-high pigment load

-very smooth finish

-accessible

CONS.

-If you bought gel pens with the intent of breaking them open for the beautiful ink inside, it would be expensive - especially for decent ink like Gellyroll

-Coverage is not as even with brush as it is with rollerball. This is easy to get around, but noticeable. Build up the coat until it’s opaque and smooth. Do not allow it to dry between coats. Once you’re done, put the item away to dry for as long as you can stand. DO NOT APPLY TOP COAT BY BRUSH

-Slow-drying on many surfaces if applied heavily enough for a smooth finish, but concerningly fast-drying in the syringe. It’s also unclear if recapping the original pen and sealing the cut end will preserve the ink, or if gel ink harvesting is a one-and-done where you will need to take all you can at one time, then store it in an airtight container. I’ve stuffed the cut end of my cartridge with sticky tac and put the cartridge back in the grip/recapped the pen, but it remains to be seen if this is sufficient for storage.

-Your gel pen will never be the same again: even if the ink can be preserved in the original cartridge, breaking the vacuum causes the ink to blob out of the roller ball. There’s a real possibility that this will just leak everywhere out both ends, which is why I recommend preserving the stopper at the bottom of the grip if plausible.

CONS 2,

continued (of detailing models, etc. with gel ink generally, not specifically the brush application thereof)

- Gel ink requires a porous surface. Do not expect to put pen to plastic without primer or Mr. Super Clear. The ink will consolidate centrally (proximal to heaviest application), gapping away from edges.

-Slow-drying: this takes forever, and it is easy to ruin a finish in the meantime.

—Durability: essentially none. Wait at least a few hours after you think the gel is dry, then apply a clear coat. SPRAY ONLY. Do NOT go back over it with a wet brush, as you risk reactivating the ink and ruining all your hard work. Spray works because it is ruining the finish evenly, and therefore, not at all. Wait and then apply the top coat again. These top coats will be your durability.

[neonthewrite]

The Office Fae

The next prompt was Tangled, and I ended up with a brand new character for this one. He's fun so far. I'm enjoying his very gremlin energy. I hope you all like him too!

~~~

Life in an office building generally worked well for Simon, despite technically being a house fae. The rules could be fuzzy on that front, with so many humans coming and going every day. Sure, there wasn’t a singular family loving the place and cherishing their lives there, but a lot of humans from many families liked the building and their jobs there well enough to make the energy inviting. Something about flexible hours, good wages, and a solid benefits package made for a harmonious office with plenty of memories–some friendly, some dramatic, even some spicy memories.

Plus there was a vending machine. Simon came for the vibes originally, but he absolutely stayed for the vending machine. At a modest five and three quarter inches tall, he had easy access to a good variety of things in portions that lasted him days.

Another house fae rule he bent–it wasn’t precisely a bowl of cream left out for him specifically, but nobody could expect that these days. Keeping the vending machine stocked was close enough, and if the light bulbs and printer cartridges in the building all lasted longer than they should, well, Simon earned his keep. He probably saved them hundreds on the annual operations budget.

Work always slowed down around the end of winter, aside from some buzzing over in the accounting office. All the holiday parties were done and the potluck food all taken home from the break room fridges. Simon planned for it and handled it well, though things could get cold with the shorter hours and heat on less to make up for the emptier office.

To that end, Simon wintered in the ceiling of the server room. The servers, bulkier and taller than a human, stood clustered in a side room and were never turned off. Blinking lights of green and red and blue twinkled on each machine, colors filtering into the ceiling along with the ample warmth those hulking obelisks gave off.

With so much downtime, he found himself perched near an opening in the ceiling, a spot where the tile had broken off long ago, and watched the server lights flicker on the tangled mess of multicolored cables that ran between them. It was a game of his to trace each cable from end to end with his eyes, idly kicking his bare, grey-skinned feet (his skin had shifted to a tasteful, cool grey a few years ago after an office refresh had updated all the paint). Long, slender fingers absently braided silky hair the color of faded ballpoint ink while he scanned the cables with eyes reminiscent of the shocking, dreaded blue of a computer on its way out.

Most house fae took on colors in equal parts camouflage and defense. Simon would be tough to spot if he happened to be out in the open near a human, but if someone did see him, humans never liked seeing that blue. So his eyes would probably protect him.

Not that he ever intended to test that. As much as he liked his many many humans and their water cooler chatter, Simon was realistic. They wouldn’t like him much even if he shared their scale. All his features were a bit elongated, just enough to seem strange and other. He only wore flowing pants made of scrap fabric and he ate bugs sometimes. Humans would call him scary or freaky or any number of words they had for things they didn’t like, and if his eyes couldn’t scare them off he’d be in danger of a rolled up magazine or a dusty phone book.

He’d stayed hidden for a long time, and he anticipated many games of look-at-cables in his future, all without humans being a bother.

Of course, until they were a slight bother anyway. Simon paused his movements and tensed when the door opened abruptly. Light flooded in and he lost track of the cable he was tracing when he looked over, grateful for his higher vantage point and the human tendency to ignore background details.

Two figures stood there, one familiar and one not. One was Tom, a human whose limbs gangled a bit but whose middle had padded out after so many years in a desk job. His bald spot glowed with light from the hallway, and his rumpled t-shirt sported a band name Simon thought he recognized. From what Simon knew, Tom was every bit an IT master and a vital cog in keeping the office running smoothly. He didn’t have to dress any higher than casual.

The other human was a new face. A woman, probably younger than Tom by a couple decades. Her dark skin contrasted with his pale complexion. Her hair, coily and thick, grew longer atop her head though it was tapered close at the sides. She wore a smart blouse and slacks, which Simon immediately recognized as the sort of thing one wore to a job interview, or one’s first day at work.

Tom waved a hand at the servers whirring away in the room. “Servers in here. Probably not gonna need to be in here a ton, but y’know. If something needs a reset…”

The woman nodded and smiled faintly as she scanned the room. “What are the chances I can fix up some of those cables?”

She said it as a joke. Simon didn’t find it funny at all. Tom did. He laughed. “Now that I get someone to pass tasks like that along to, I imagine I can convince the bossman to let me schedule a maintenance day. Now, let’s get you some of your equipment…”

The door closed and the humans walked away, and Simon cared not at all for their conversation or the rest of the onboarding for this new IT interloper. She wanted to organize the cables, which simply would not do. Simon stalked back to his makeshift camp to get his pack.

This new hire was simply not a good fit, and he’d do what he could to stop her horrible plan.

[wolfliving]

Meanwhile, in Brickland

Cory Doctorow:

Analog companies can raise their prices, or worsen next year's model of their products. *Digital* businesses can *travel back in time* and raise the price of something you already own, but need to pay a "subscription" fee for. They can reach back in time and remove features you've already paid for. They can even go back in time and take away things you already own. The omniflexible, omnipresent digital tether between a device and its manufacturer creates *so many* urges that they can't resist:

Are you one of 4,000,000 people who built "smart home" products from Wink into your walls, ceiling and foundation slab at any time since they started shipping in 2014? Surprise! Now you have to pay a "subscription" for all of those gadgets or they'll *brick your fucking house*:

Did you buy a "Mellow Sous Vide" gadget? Surprise, it now costs $48/year to use that gadget!

Did you buy an Exogen ultrasound device to stimulate bone growth after a fracture? Surprise, it bricks itself after you've used it 343 times! Enjoy your e-waste, Hopalong!

Did you *buy a Ferrari performance sports-car*? Surprise, it bricks itself if it detects "tampering" - and the only way to un-brick it is to connect it to the internet, so you'd better hope it doesn't brick itself deep in an underground parking garage. Oops!

Did you buy a Peloton treadmill? Surprise, your $3,000 "smart" treadmill no longer works in standalone mode - unless you pay $480/year, that treadmill is now a clothes-drying rack:

Did you buy an Epson printer? Surprise! It will brick itself after you print a certain number of pages, *for your own good*, because otherwise its ink-sponges might leak:

Did you get - no, wait for it - *did you get a neural implant?* Surprise. The company's new owners don't want to continue supporting your implant, and they won't let anyone else do so either. So now, *part of your brain* has been bricked:

This is like a lifetime money-back guarantee - *for companies*. Any company that experience's seller's remorse can cancel or alter the transaction, retroactively. It's as if Darth Vader opened an MBA program whose only lesson was *I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further":

Darth Vader has the Force. Corporate enshittifiers have something even more powerful: IP law. Companies can cleverly arrange overlapping layers of IP - anticircumvention, trademark, patent, trade secrecy, terms of service, cybersecurity law, contracts - to criminalize otherwise legal activity, like reverse-engineering, jailbreaking, creating alternative clients or third-party parts:

That means that companies know that they can enshittify to their heart's content without fearing a competitor's disenshittification products. Raise the price of ink all you want, because you've figured out how to criminalize generic ink cartridges:

That's a lesson Spotify took to heart. Aaaallll the way back in 2022, Spotify started selling $90 "Car Thing" tablets - little car-vent-mounted gadgets that made it slightly easier to connect your car stereo to your Spotify account. Now that a suitable interval has gone by, Spotify has decided to remotely brick every one of these solid-state devices, no later than December of 2024:

Now, this may seem like a loss to all those Car Thing owners, who are out $90. But consider this: our descendants are *gaining* thousands of pieces of immortal, infinitely toxic e-waste.

So there's that.

Then there's this: Jason Koebler just published a breakdown of a leaked sSamsung repair contract on 404 Media, revealing how Samsung requires its "independent" repair partners to trick you, abuse you, spy on you, and literally destroy your phone:

First: every time you bring a phone to an independent Samsung repair shop, the company has 24 hours to notify Samsung, providing your name, email, phone number, address, the IMEI of your phone, your warranty status and complaint.

Then, the technician is required to inspect your device for any evidence that you have had it serviced by unauthorized technicians or fixed with third-party replacement parts. If they believe you have failed to act in accord with Samsung's shareholders' interests, the technician is required to *immediately destroy your phone* and notify Samsung.

(This is radioactively illegal, and has been since 1975, when Congress passed the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which protects your right to use third-party parts:)

Why does Samsung do this? They can't help themselves. It's in their nature.

[alex-fictus]

Not a suggestion, more a question - how do you make your stickers? Your art inspired me to make stickers but I don’t know where to start!!

Ooh Tutorial Time! I have a small rundown of my process here. (I’ve got a video here, but I’ve had an update in my materials. Also this got a little away from me, I hope this helps and lemme know if there’s anything I need to elaborate on!)

---  Materials:  Printer - Epson Ecotank 8500 Cutters - Silhouette Cameo 4s (I’ve got 2 at the moment) Paper - Zicoto Glossy Vinyl Laminates - Glossy and Holo Star Laminate (Both Self Adhesive) Misc    Off Brand Sticker Cutter mats     Ruler Squeegee with extra microfiber wrap    Sports glove tack spray or sewing basting spray

Printer - Aim for a photographic printer at the minimum. General print quality, color variety, and paper handling will make sure your prints are the highest possible quality. They’re a little more expensive, but my last printer lasted 4 years with frequent weekly printing. The ecotank is nice, it’s more visual that the ink is actually disappearing than the pre-filled cartridges lol.  Cutter - I’ve only used Silhouette, but I’ve heard to stay clear of Cricut due to general cut unreliability and lack of customer service assistance. I’ve also heard great things about the Siser Juliet cutter from mutuals. In order to use 2 machines at the same time, I had to purchase the Business license ( p sure it was a one time $50 purchase, but I can work twice as fast). If you want to cut by hand, check out what kind of ergonomic scissors you can find. Classic scissors over time can really screw up your hands, especially when you’re making fine cuts. 

Printing and Sizing - The Silhouette Studio resizes your stickers without many issues with quality changes. This does kinda depend on the base size of your files. I always make my stickers on a canvas 3000x2000 pixels and 300 dpi. I wouldn’t go any lower than 100 dpi for print, and no larger than 500 dpi, but you can always test this out.

Paper - I enjoy the luster of the paper I linked above, there’s almost a pearlescent quality to it. If you’d like a different quality, I recommend still sticking with glossy vinyl for your paper. Laminates on matte sticker paper have had a lot of trapped air underneath for me and it tended to be more likely to bleed in contact with water despite being laminated.

Laminate - If you’re just doing paper finish stickers, you can skip this step :)

Laminate them to make them more water and scratch resistant. The laminates I’ve listed are all self adhesive. There are also heat adhesive laminates, which require a heat laminator. I haven’t experimented much with heated laminates. Mine are best rated for hand wash, though they can go through the dishwasher a few times.  When laminating your sticker sheet, be sure to not cover your registration marks. When your cutter tries to read over them and the surface is really reflective, it can cause the machine to read improperly (and it’s worse with the holographics lol). Either precut your laminates like I do in the video I linked above, or you can use matte tape over your laminate to dull the sheen. If you accidentally cover your registration marks, the matte tape is a lifesaver.  Self laminating takes some muscle memory to not get bubbles trapped under the laminate, but a wide squeegee and firm pressure helps make sure you get as few bubbles as possible.  Mats - Your cutter will come with a few, but I find that my off-brand ones are just as good and less expensive. I prefer low-tack, but there comes a time when the tack is absolutely gone, and I have 10+ mats just sitting around. That’s where the Sports Glove spray or Sewing basting spray comes in! After washing them (soap and water, then dry for a few hours), I hit them with a few coats of spray. Right now I’m using Pow’r Tac Grip Spray. It’s just ok, but this leaves less residue on the back of my stickers than the Basting Spray I used to use. I retack every month or so, but that’s more bc I’d prefer the mats to be less sticky than risk ripping my backing sheets. 

----

If there’s anything you’d still like to know, please let me know!! 

[tabletopmonsteroftheweek]

Discord Community Create-A-Threat: Symbiotic Tattoo Gun

The Discord community create-a-threat was held back in April. Due to a lot of things happening to me (the main admin), I hadn't had time to clean it up some... until yesterday, that is!

-----------------

Phenomenon: Symbiotic Tattoo Gun This tattoo gun appears to be a standard one, save for a small glowing sigil on the grip of it. If one were to look in the ink cartridge, the liquid within would be writhing within itself, like a disturbed cadre of worms in oil.

Type: Artifact (motive: to grant someone more power than they can handle)

Power:

Self-actualization: the tattoo impresses itself in the host, changing them to match the tattoo. This can be physical or mental changes, and can even grant supernatural abilities.

Power Trip: Based on the content, location, size, color, etc. of the tattoo, the symbiote woven into the flesh grants the flesh of the being certain powers. After a short period of fever and disorientation, the afflicted being's power(s) manifest and they are driven into a rampage suitable for their new abilities. The symbiote gains and thus grants more power the more damage is done by the afflicted. The afflicted being is slowly consumed by the symbiote, and upon their death, the tattoo "ink" crawls back to the gun to be used again.

Weakness:

Laser removal: High energy concentrated light can 'kill' the living tattoo. This removes the powers granted to the host, and frees them from the rampage, but you have to actually hit the tattoo.

Another weakness is the hunters must discover the ancient, alien origins of the ink, and ask the deep space survivors of this very substance for the cure.

Custom Moves:

Hunters can be affected by the branding ink should it be placed unto their skin. When a hunter is inked and the parasite attempts to control them, have them roll +weird.

On a success, they resist the control and changes to their body and do not have to roll again.

On a mix, they resist for now, but the keeper will have them roll again in the mystery.

On a miss, they are infected. They gain +2 ongoing to tough and weird, but -2 ongoing to charm and sharp. They will fall into random rages where they cannot tell friend from foe- when they roll to Kick Some Ass, even if they say they are going to attack a monster/minion, the keeper will say if its a friend (fellow hunter, helpful npc, etc.) instead after the roll.

If they want to try to resist again while raging or come down from the rage effects, they must roll +cool.

On a success, they are freed and will no longer go into a rage.

On a mix, they free themselves but will have to resist its effects again.

On a miss, they go into a deeper rage and cannot break out of it until the Keeper tells them. They temporarily become one of the Keeper's threats. Hunters can only get the graft removed by following its weakness.

Minion: The Branded

Type: Brute (motivation: to intimidate and attack)

Powers: Attributes dependent on how the tattoo looks and/or location

Attacks: Attacks are varied, and thus the Keeper must do a little bit of extra legwork to decide if the attacks are magical, elemental, etc. Follow weapon tags for idea. These are the general attacks The Branded will inflict-

Heavy Swing (2 harm hand forceful)

Telekinesis (1 harm far forceful)

Harm: 4 harm (add +1 whenever a Grafted goes into a deeper rage)

Weakness: Laser removal: High energy concentrated light can 'kill' the living tattoo. This removes the powers granted to the host, and frees them from the rampage, but you have to actually hit the tattoo.

[daftpatience]

how would one get into fountain pens and inks ?? i’ve never liked using those 50 pens for a dollar types and only used fountain pens at school . honestly i’d love if you infodump at me about your favs pens, inks and how the tiktoks only show those glass pens with the swirls that slowly drip off ink and not any love for pens that hold ink themself

yaa sure!! and firstly i wanna say the reason you see a lotta glass dip pens on tiktok is simply because they are pretty and people think they are cool. dip pens have a lot of neat benefits of their own! dont let the bad app make u bitter abt em! (for example dip pens let you use a muuch wider range of inks made out of pigments that a fountain pen couldn't handle!)

but i digress. getting into fountain pens usually starts with an affordable one! (or a fancy hand me down if you're lucky!) jetpens & gouletpens are good shops to find fountain pens, and you may be lucky enough to live near a stationery shop that carries them, who knows!

generally good pens to start with are cheap enough that you won't feel too bad if it doesn't turn out to be your favourite but still a smooth writer. they should feel good in the hand and be refillable (since we are talking about avoiding disposable pens! but disposable fountain pens do exist.) generally these pens are in the $10-$30 range, but some cheaper pens like the platinum preppy and jinhao shark will surprise you!

especially worth taking into account with starting to get into pens is the nib size and filling mechanism!

nib size:

fountain pens generally come in Extra Fine, Fine, Medium, Broad, and Double Broad nib sizes, although there are other fancy ones like stub, flex, cursive, and left handed ones. (i am left handed and don't use them, so don't worry too much about that if you are.)

generally western nibs run a little broader than Japanese nib sizes, so keep that in mind when choosing a pen!

personally i find that finer nibs are more useful for me drawing-wise, and i enjoy broader nibs for writing (especially since i tend to draw in black and write in pretty colours i want to see more of!) this just applies to me of course ^u^

filling mechanisms:

fountain pens can come with ink cartridges (sometimes universal and sometimes proprietary) which tend to be a good choice for folks that like mess-free easy ways to reink a pen even when you're out and about. they do limit your selection of inks, though!

cartridge pens can usually be converted to piston fill/squeeze fill pens with a compatible converter, and some even come with one by default (like the jinhao shark!) some fountain pens (like TWSBIs) have a piston fill mechanism integrated into the entire barrel. (they have a very big ink capacity!) these converters/pens allow you to use any fountain pen ink you like, and also help make pen cleaning easier as you can take up and flush out water with it.

another type of fountain pen is eyedropper fill - where the entire barrel is watertight and you simply fill it with ink via eyedropper (or god forbid just pouring the ink from the bottle into it lol) these kinds of filling mechanisms are a lot messier and are generally done at home since you might not wanna bring ink bottles and paper towels along wherever you go, especially if they're big. some pens can be converted to eyedropper fill by making the barrels watertight with silicone grease on the threads & plugging any breather holes.

fun fact! ink cartridges are much more popular in europe, and bottled inks are more popular in america. idk why!

in terms of my favourite fountain pens, i very much like the TWSBI ECO/ECO T, LAMY safari, platinum preppy/plaisir, kaweco sport, and jinhao shark! they're all great and come in lots of fun colours and i want more twsbis so bad aaa

ok this is getting long but lets talk about inks!! im dying to talk about inks can we talk about inks

i already went over the difference between pigment and dye based inks here, so let's talk about what to think of when choosing an ink and also some of my favs!!

picking out an ink for your pen should consist of at least 3 factors!

make sure you are looking for fountain pen ink! (drawing inks & dip pen inks will clog a fountain pen!)

what colour do you want!!! (as a tip, light colours look even lighter when reduced to the fine line of a pen, and can sometimes be rather disappointing or hard to see. stick to broader nibs for those!)

do you need it to be water and/or highlighter proof?

most online shops let you filter to find what you're looking for, and most irl shops have sample cards for you to look through (while they may not show you about the waterproof part, generally the people working there should be able to tell you about it! most of the shops ive been to are staffed by fellow enthusiasts!)

aside from that you really can go nuts! there are inks with shimmer, inks that are suuuper bold and solid, some that vary in shade (and hue!) and some that develop a metallic sheen around the edge!

as for my favourite inks, i really like these and heres why!

pilot iroshizuku: they have some REALLY pretty colours. plus the bottles are big and very pretty!

Diamine: these inks come in some absolutely luscious colours (and TONS of sparkly shimmery options) and are known for being very consistently good performers across all their colours.

sailor: these inks are fancy and preddy and smell good to me wehehe

j. herbin: they make a green i really like >:) and also are popular for being good inks im pretty sure!

special extra shoutout to ferris wheel press: i havent actually gotten an ink from them i truly love yet (ive only ever tried a sample set of pastels and i like my inks darker) but their bottles are truly to die for.

ANYWAYS THANK YOU FOR COMING!! TO MY TED TALK!!! im fully info dumped out!!!! whee!

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Eye Contact. Auto-generated captions.

Summary: John Green explains how the med tech company Danaher and its subsidiary, Cepheid, have come up with a machine and test cartridges that can accurately diagnose T.B., and figure out which drugs will cure that person's specific strain, within an hour.

But --

Danaher is making an obscene profit by using the printer ink (and disposable razor blade) model, by charging $10 and $15 per test cartridge. So the hospitals in countries most effected by TB can't afford to use the technology.

Activists from many different organizations have been calling for Danaher to lower the price of their cartridges to $5, and gotten no response. So this video is a call to action for a public pressure campaign against Danaher (202-828-0850) and Cepheid (888.838.3222).

Email and phone templates, here: