a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Smart Typewriter Is a Thing and I’m in Love With It

When I was in school, my district was forward thinking enough to get all the 5-7th graders to learn to type. We even had classes on typewriter repair. These were the models we used back when Sears was the WalMart of its day. To graduate 8th grade I had to demonstrate that I could fix a broken type writer. In 9th grade all reports, essays, and other homework that was not math had to be typed.

I'm not going to be a elegant as kleinbl00 when I say this. If you feel nostalgic over mechanical keyboard, go fuck off you hipster asshole. Typewriters suck. Everything about then is awful. Typewriters exist because they were the best at the time given the limitations of the human technology advancement. The key layout is designed to slow you down YES REALLY STOP ARGUING THIS POINT QWERTY maximizes the separation between the common character pairs to minimize the frustration of the limits of the mechanical strike heads.

Typewriter ribbons are evil, vile, foul monsters that hate humanity. Only someone who did not grow up with them will have a nostalgia about changing typewriter ribbons. The next thing you will demand is dot-matrix printers. NO.

I use a Dvorak at home and work. My fingers fucking fly. When you see a post here on Hubski full of weird typos is it because I am on my laptop and I have not converted it to a DVORAK yet. For those of you with the desire to be different, but in a good way, get a DVORAK keyboard. Here is one used as an example. You can also get mechanical keyboards, which I recommend as well. Typing will suck for about a month, then you will never go back to QWERTY unless you absolutely have to. I type 100 WPM most days, but can never get over 50 on QWERTY.

If this hipster trash fake nostalgia is allowed to keep getting more and more absurd, the next thing you know we will be using Cuneiform on baked clay tablets. I was going to end this post with a shitting on the desire for Papyrus, but it looks like there are multiple outlets selling A4 and US Letter Papyrus sheets. Get off my lawn.





veen  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

What do you think of regular keyboards with mechanical switches? I have one with Cherry MX Blue switches and I love it.

user-inactivated  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Fucking love em. I like the Cherry Browns, myself but as they get more and more popular, as they should, they are getting more expensive to buy. Like typing on clouds and I get zero fatigue when typing on the home machine. They have ruined me for all other keyboards.

kleinbl00  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

fistbump

Although you ragging on papyrus, and me thinking you meant the font (I have a soft spot for papyrus even though I shouldn't, does raise another point:

When you use "type-writery" things to communicate, you are abdicating layout, whitespace and everything else people who actually like to communicate with words hold dear.

Hey, kids - know how we used to insert graphics back in the typewriter days? Well first you found a black'n'white newspaper picture. Then you traced it onto a piece of paper where you thought it should go. Then you typed your shit being careful not to type past the lines. Then you taped your newspaper picture down. Then you went to the library and ran off some fucking copies because it's the goddamn dark ages and all that left-center-right-justified crap you click through like it ain't no thing? Yeah, you get to be mindful of that shit every goddamn word.

Oh, and fonts. You get one. It's the font. The fuck do you mean, what font? THE font. Unless you have a Selectric, but you don't, because you're a filthy hipster and while you adore the fuck out of this janky ass thing

somehow this is beyond the pale corporate bullshit

(notice how it's a "type style" not a "font" because what the fuck is a font)

and that only makes me hate you more.

Bitch, that's the tedious, pointless soundtrack of Mad Men and you know it. That circlejerk paean of an era you never really understood? "Office" is eight layers of Selectrics typing the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog as recorded in 1985. Got the samples.

I ain't gonna say shit about Dvorak, I just know that I like being able to type on other people's computers.

And I like being able to pick font, size, spacing, justification, word wrap, and all that other impossibly modern shit that used to be relegated to print shops. No, not the program, the actual thing, which for some reason you aren't hipstery about at all.

If fucking hipsters had any appreciation of art at all they'd all be off restoring pen plotters.

user-inactivated  ·  3081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I ain't gonna say shit about Dvorak, I just know that I like being able to type on other people's computers.

This is THE major drawback. Personally, I think we should start teaching DVORAK in school and move away from QWERTY. Easier on the wrists, faster, less prone to errors. It takes about 2-3 weeks to un-train your fingers, then another two-three weeks to git gud and start typing faster than you did before. then you go to a QWERTY machine and fail all over yourself.

user-inactivated  ·  3082 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Print shops are awesome. You can do all sorts of cool stuff when you get to use a variety of inks and papers, and unlike every desktop publishing app ever the good ones won't balk at Type 3 fonts.