it's january! @its-january - Tumblr Blog

Hey there.

It isn't my name, but you can call me January. I use she/her pronouns.

I probably won't post often, if at all - I'm a lurker at heart.

All the best, and I hope you have a nice day.

When you get really fucked up on that hobby lifestyle, you'll soon find yourself in a strange new place. Industrial auctions can give you all the oddball professional-grade tools that you've always dreamed of, often at a fraction of the price. Are you an accomplished hobby welder? Probably you have always wanted a UV-reactive radio cranfondulator with which to inspect your wire for sharkbite oxides, but it just isn't justified because all you do is fix the exhaust on your shitty Celica once a year. At an industrial auction, maybe you can get one for five dollars. And that's when the fun begins.

As we all know, good tools are big tools. Even big-brain stuff like electron microscopes are large enough that they need a forklift and a buddy with an intact lower back to move. Getting all that shit out of the filthy warehouse or partially-collapsed office building is a task on its own. Sometimes you need to buy new tools just to move it: good thing you're at an auction that sells stuff like cranes, forklifts, and low-mileage/high-hour pickup trucks with an inexplicable thick layer of coal dust on every surface. Make sure to check the return policy.

So you got it home, and now everything's easy, right? Not so. You see, when a big business buys a new piece of industrial equipment, it usually comes with some assistance. Technicians, or at least a single-page badly-photocopied manual telling you where to plug it in. As such, your first project quickly becomes: how in the seven divine hells of AliExpress do I get this thing to work?

Resurrecting this ancient beast of commerce is not quite as simple as a consumer product. Consumer products are, by definition, popular. Really good tools? They may have made like ten of them. There, one quick web search can rapidly locate thousands of arguing morons who have strong opinions on how to set it up. No: if the company that made it even still exists, the best you can hope for is an email from the current engineers asking you to take a bunch of pictures of it because they've forgotten how to make one run. Then you have to bribe an electrician to do something that is "not advised for houses" to your house, just so you can power it.

Now you can have infinite hobby joy. This massive, overcomplicated, insanely expensive machine is at your fingertips, and you can finally check off that annoying task you've been putting off for the last couple of years. You know, this whole thing was so easy, why don't we go back to the auction next weekend and see if we can get a meta-masticating crombopulator to install right next to it?

thedickcavettshow

hurdy gurdying or gurdly hurdying? 🤨

seat-safety-switch

Sometimes, me and my buddies get on our bikes and ride out to the old office park. Something about all those huge, abandoned buildings really stirs the imagination. Even though all the copper was stolen long before we were even born, it feels like it's just one light switch away from all coming back to life again.

My favourite is the old banking ziggurat. Nobody knows why they designed it so weird and lumpen, and all the glass that used to make up the top couple of floors is long gone, but Zenethor found a little scale model of the place up in the attic storage. They showed it to us. We had never seen anything like it before. It used to be so beautiful. I especially liked the tall pointy green things around the base of it, and the big boxy things that people were inside, all laid out in the big grey field in front. The elders called them "cars."

We decided then that this relic of the old world had to be protected. It was a piece of another life. Couldn't just leave the model around, for the raiders to get. To smash. Even though there's obviously no food up there, they might try to drink some of the rainwater puddles through the shattered glass and come across it. Took us the better part of two days to carry it back down the stairs, pausing every time we thought we heard an approaching BMX gang.

Back home, the elders surrounded it with awe. They were just children themselves when the great machine stopped. Even so, they knew what all the things were. Excited chatter of "heat exchangers," and "office chairs." One little plastic person was wearing a millimeters-tall green jumper. It reminded Elder Moira of her mother, and she began to cry.

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

characters whose sexuality is "i'm under way too much stress to figure that shit out rn"

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

character whose gender is "im probably nonbinary but im on a quest so idrc about that rn"

thebeautifulcomics

Here (1989) by Richard mcguire (raw magazine)

cad-comic

noosferik

could this be the next big app?

noosferik

man not now

hometoursandotherstuff

57r4745658u

New pc setup folks what do you think of it

ratguzzler

Its good

slimetony

My doctor insists i cant eat clown food and that its bad for me

dezposts

What even is clown food?

slimetony

The food that they feed clowns to keep them docile and colorful

play-now-my-lord

new evidence shows dogs have "intuitive mastery of the bessemer steelmaking process", backing up centuries of anecdotes by blacksmiths in which a dog would whine and bark in distress when pig iron was heated without sufficient access to air in their presence. "It's possible Bessemer or others who claimed to have invented the process were inspired by the behavior of dogs, or that dogs communicated the details of this vital industrial process to them by unknown means", paper concludes

techav

On Sharing Appreciation for Good Design

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole this week. It started when @commodorez shared the image above.

I'm a sucker for good design (having studied it for my bachelor's degree) and this is a beautiful bit of illustration. It looks like it's from a catalog or something of the sort, but the actual source was unknown. I would love to know where it came from and hopefully find a higher resolution copy of it.

Reverse image search led me to a Ukrainian language page talking about color using IBM as an example. But the machine translation had some issues and I failed to see the connection to the old computers shown nor I could not determine the image source from the page. The only other relevant result was an article about "Silicon City", an exhibit by the New York Historical Society ten years ago. The page did not actually seem to have the image in question, but it did give me something to go off of. Searching for the exhibition, I was able to find this image that showed it included a reproduction, but I could not read the info card.

Eventually I found a blog post from Adafruit recounting a visit to the exhibition which had a much higher resolution photo of the exhibit — enough that I could just make out the text; something about IBM and "Color in the Workplace". Which is indeed the title of the document, so finding the source was easy from there. It was a marketing publication for IBM designed by none other than Paul Rand.

It is absolutely lovely. The styling, the clean illustration, the colors. And the rest of the document is no less beautiful.

The name Paul Rand seemed familiar, but I couldn't immediately recall why. I never have had much memory for names & history. It didn't take long scrolling though his website to remember though. There are few designers so prolific, whose work is so iconic and recognizable to the general public.

But among retrocomputing enthusiasts, such as myself, there is perhaps one favorite piece of artwork Paul Rand created for IBM:

That was a fun rabbit hole to go down. Paul Rand's career spanned more than six decades and his work managed to capture (or perhaps even define) the look and feel of each one. I'll definitely be spending more time reviewing his vast body of work as I start in on branding and theming design for VCF Southwest 2027.

mathematikerin-freyja

I think it would be really wonderful if seagulls were constructed more like bottles with a mystery inside. What I'm imagining is that were you to catch one, you could then unscrew its face and there would be a glowing gem nestled in some sort of socket. The Core of the Gull so to speak. Then you could swap that around with other seagulls, and after screwing the faces back on they would fly off as if nothing happened. Hm... Is this too esoteric, or do some of you see what I am getting at?

riverlinden

"kung pow penis," a phrase commonly used in reblogs to indicate utter disdain for OP, has twelve letters, each of which (traditionally) must be supplied by a different user. the unanimity of disdain indicated by these twelve unrelated users has strong parallels to the requirement of unanimity for a jury—also traditionally of twelve—to arrive at a verdict. in this essay i will