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N O T I C E : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ l o c a t e d
I D : : P o s t e r s
T Y P E: : E X P E R I E N T I A L
A L E R T : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ c o n t a i n s _ m u l t i p l e _ p a r t s
Raqi glanced up at the bare patches of wall remaining within her room. From where her chair stood, roughly the entirety of the wall to her right was covered already in a variety of posters, but the back and left walls remained displeasingly empty. As she stared, her lips shifted into a pout, and she let out a pensive 'hrm.'
It's been a while since I put anything new up. I wonder if I've got enough to do a new batch now?
Shifting her focus down to her computer, she pressed a specific shortcut on her keyboard. A moment later, a charcoal grey user interface covered her screen, sporting a variety of buttons and lists of tags. The program was dominated by a grid of thumbnails that took up 4/5ths of the screen's space, displaying previews of images in a tiled 9x7 view. A scroll bar at the far right of the UI suggested that the view continued for many, many times the height of Raqi's screen. This was compounded by the sorting option for "everything", which listed a present total of 5,223 images stored within the program.
She spent the next several minutes inputting a series of tags, eyes scanning quickly over the images present. While every one had been pleasing enough to save, not all were good enough to deserve a place upon her wall. Very few, in fact, were those which met her lofty criteria for being printed; and that was why it had been almost half a year since the last batch had been created. It took a great deal of time for Raqi to stumble upon enough pictures that she liked enough to justify the effort of performing the laborious process of upscaling them, switching operating system so as to actually be able to run the program her printer used, ensuring that the printer's colour profile was working correctly, and then actually printing the damn things.
I fucking hate printers, she repeated in an almost mantra-like tone, as her eyes continued to skim over the images.
Inos take all printers.
After several minutes of deliberation, Raqi concluded that she did indeed have enough new images of a sufficient quality to do a new batch of prints.
Hmm... Yeah, sure. I don't have anything else to do today; I can do this. With her mind made up, she started the first step of the process: creating copies of the files in her downloads folder. It wasn't possible to find the files' location within her booru - the actual file structure of that thing was a literal maze, entirely impenetrable to any attempts to navigate it - but the program allowed her to copy them quite easily, so she duplicated each one and placed them somewhere easy to navigate to.
Once she had finished the duplication, which only took a few minutes, the next step was to check how large each image was. Images needed to be large enough to print at 300 DPI without the need to up-scale them during printing; which would otherwise cause blurring that she could not tolerate. The exact size varied depending on whether the picture was landscape or portrait - being about three-to-four thousand pixels in the longest dimension by two thirds of that - or some unclear amount if it was a square.
Very few illustrations were drawn in this large of a canvas size by their creators, and so this introduced the need for a way to upscale them without causing blurriness. This was where in Raqi's opinion the only good usage of so-called AI came in: that of AI image upscalers. Quite possibly the most mundane application of the culture-eradicating technology, it provided a function that Raqi had much desired ever since the age of having to shittily upscale pictures just by clicking and dragging.
She lacked a program that would do it for her, though, so the first step was to upload the pictures to a fleetnet site with the capability. She already had one that she preferred for this task, and so slapped the first couple of images into the queue - which for some reason always read as her being around 40th in it, no matter what time of day she used the site at - and promptly pulled up a game to distract herself. From experience, she knew that the site usually took around five minutes per image, so this was the first major roadblock of the process.
An undefined amount of time later, much of which was spent getting too immersed in her game and forgetting she had images upscaling in the background, Raqi had scaled all of her chosen images to roughly the right size. The site she used only allowed her to scale images by either 2x or 4x, and wouldn't accept images over a certain size in pixels unless you bought a paid membership- which was ridiculous because like,
who the fuck is going to pay for an image upscaler, what- so this meant some of the images weren't quite the right size and were probably only going to print at 220-260~ DPI.
It's fine, I probably won't be able to tell the difference. ...Probably. One of her eyes twitched.
The next step was to move the freshly upscaled images to her other harddrive. The non-proprietary open-source operating system she was running, Antisuyu, didn't have support for a rather large amount of things; one of which was printing software. This meant that whenever she wanted to print something, she needed to switch over to the terrible, awful, no-good, closed-source proprietary Fleetist operating system: Apertures. The mere thought of having to launch that accursed piece of bloatware made her skin crawl; but it was unavoidable. Before that though, she had to move the images to the harddrive that she was running Apertures on, because Apertures couldn't access any of her other harddrives due to not being able to read drives formatted for Antisuyu. Antisuyu, of course, had no trouble reading drives formatted for Apertures.
This part fortunately only took about twenty seconds, and once she was done, Raqi pulled open her Intersidera client in order to message her friends. If she was about to spend the next half of a day printing posters, she might as well do it with some company.
Refuge - #general | Intersidera
Raqi Marr
HELLO CHAT
it is motherfucking poster time
Vasco
YES YES YES YES YES YES
it is time to suffer in horrible agony for attempting to interface with the electrical demons known as printers
Emhyl
..Wa
Poster time...
Raqi Marr
it is time to experience excruciating pain indeed
come vc and you can all listen to me screaming in anger for entertainment
Locke
Sounds good ~w~ Just give me a few and I'll be there
Vasco
yed! ill need to go upstairs but i can join
Emhyl
Wawawawa
Bird suffering..
Raqi Marr
yes
high quality avian agony:tm:
Emhyl
Delicious..
It can join in a couple of minutes it thinks..
Excellent. Raqi's lips turned upwards. With company acquired, she decided to switch operating systems while everyone else was still heading into voice chat. Hitting the restart button on her PC's physical case, she waited for the PC to boot to its BIOS, then selected the option to launch in Apertures. She then endured an uncomfortable minute or so of understimulation while waiting for the computer to finish booting. She was granted relief when the familiarly ugly modern Apertures sign-in screen appeared in front of her, and she set to the ever-challenging task of remembering what she had set as her password on this OS.
Several minutes worth of tries later, she got in. She was immediately blasted with neon-blue light, as the eye-searing Apertures background lit up her screen. She winced instinctually, immediately beginning to miss the familiar dark mode of Antisuyu. She would not be blinded for long, however; as the moment she opened the Apertures version of Intersidera, the light was vanquished and she was able to see properly again. Even after opening it, the program took nearly a full minute to become functional - another minute spent tapping her foot and wriggling about impatiently on her chair - after which she could finally navigate to her personal server and join the voice chat.
After a few seconds, a beep told her that she had successfully connected, and a moment later, she was greeted by a chorus of voices.
Vasco was the first to speak, the low quality of his voice transmitted through his decade-old headset microphone and out of the headphones upon Raqi's head. "
HELLO BIRD"
Locke came second, his voice much more subdued, but still enthusiastic. "
Hewwoooooo birder!"
Last to speak was Emhyl, who spoke in a tone and cadence that seemed to embody the auditory manifestation of sleep deprivation. "
Wa... Flort has arrived..."
"
Greetings bepsimbka, greetings lettuce-" Raqi paused to point at her webcam. "
Flort."
"
No u."
"
No you."
"
Nuh."
"
Yuh."
"
Nuh."
"
It is you who is the flort."
"
Noh." Emhyl shook her head vigorously on camera.
Raqi smirked at the sight. "
You are indeed the flort. Anyway- okay so chat, chat, chat. Today- today we are going to be engaging in a modicum of printing."
"
it is time to place further adornments upon your walls!"
"
YES exactly. I just got done upscaling the images and-" Raqi paused in order to pull open the folder where they were located, as well as to start up the image editing program that she used for printing. "
-it should now be printing time."
"
What pictures are you putting up this time?"
"
I've got quite a few to print this time. I hadn't actually realised but I've saved up a whole bunch. Most of them are uh-" Raqi tried and failed to stifle a chuckle. "
"-LDG related, which feels a little bit weird to be putting on my wall; but they're not openly lewd so it's not like anyone would even realise."
She heard Locke snicker loudly. He then proceeded to fully enunciate the acronym: "
Lmao. Oh gods. Yeah, I guess going by appearance, they don't actually look all that suspicious, huh."
"
Wall plommies..."
"
True..."
"
they are going to sprout runners and grow over all the rest of your posters, in true plant style"
"
That would be both extremely inconvenient and kind of cool, plus alarming. I don't know if I'd rather they do that or not."
"
Plommies spreading their roots across your hab..."
"
emi of course has no complicated feelings about this whatsoever"
Emhyl giggled, a knowingly vacuous smile forming on her face.
Inos, she is so cute when she smiles. "
What's there to be complicated about?"
Mirth filled Locke's voice. "
As expected of our flort."
The conversation continued in a similar tone for several more minutes, before Raqi pulled herself briefly away to start work on printing the first poster. The first thing she needed to do was open the file in her image editor; which was accomplished by the simple click of a few buttons and then selecting the file. Once she had done so, she opened up the printing dialogue in order to check the default settings. She was pleased to see that, at the very least, the printer was actually connected: her father had sorted that out for her when she had built her computer, and she did not have the faintest idea how she would have gone about doing it herself, so she was glad there was no troubleshooting required there.
Beyond that, just about everything else was wrong. The picture she had selected was in landscape orientation, but the printing settings defaulted to portrait and - for whatever reason - didn't automatically detect that the canvas was not oriented that way. With a muttered "shit design", Raqi made the first correction. Next was the matter of the image's dimensions: for whatever reason, it also defaulted to printing the picture at a tiny size taking up only about a quarter of the image. When she set it to print at 300 DPI, it then expanded so much that half of it vanished off of the canvasas; so she had to scale it down until it fit properly, because the option to do so automatically of course did not work.
Once
that was done, she then had to go into advanced options and confirm that she wanted to print on large paper, rather than small. She had taken all of the regular size paper out of the printer, but the one time she forgot to change this setting, it had printed on large paper as if it were regular size and ended up wasting both the paper and the ink; both of which were inordinately expensive. Raqi was unpleasantly aware of the fact that every print ended up costing a little over 1
kmat; which meant that any mistakes were the equivalent of throwing away a tangible amount of money.
Why are printer supplies so bloody overpriced, anyway? Tsk.
The last step was to change the type of paper to matte and the quality to 'High' - she had no idea what, if anything at all, the quality option did; but always put it on high just to be safe - and then, finally, it was time to go. She was about to hit print when-
Wait, shit; I didn't actually put any paper in yet. "
Okay hold on, gotta go put some paper in the printer." Raqi stood up without bothering to take her headphones off and headed out of her room, making her way down a flight of stairs to the ground floor of her hab, then turning into the dining room and making her way to where the printer was located at one side of the room. She spent a minute rifling around on top of a filing cabinet, wondering where she had stashed her printer paper, before locating the large cardboard box it was stored in and extricating a sheet. She then slid it into a special port in the back of the printer, checked to make sure the printer had registered it, and walked back upstairs to her computer.
"
A'ight. Here goes." She pressed print. The window closed, and another one popped up at the bottom right of her screen, displaying a green bar that represented printing progress. Raqi breathed a small sigh of relief; this meant it was working.
"
Wawa."
"
Ababa."
"
Wabababwa..."
"
Doll noises."
"
This one is very good at making those..."
"
You certainly are."
Raqi then stood up and started making her way downstairs once again. Each picture took a few minutes to print, but she was eager to see if everything was working this time around, so she decided to stand and wait for the print to finish. Once she had arrived, she peered into the printer opening, trying to see if she could make anything out; but it was too dark to see for the moment. She straightened back up and waited. She waited for all of three seconds before getting bored and starting pacing around.
A minute later, she saw the edge of the paper was finally visible on the output side of the printer, and so made her way back over to it. She strained her eyes to see through the darkness cast by the top of the unit, intent on seeing whether the colouring was right or not. She wasn't sure, but as the print slowly moved closer and closer, she wasn't feeling confident.
Oh, come on... Please tell me it didn't. Just as she thought that, the first part of the print entered proper light, and she could see immediately that the colours were not right. What should have been green was now a pale blue; the entire picture looking like it had been slightly colour shifted to different tones. "Oh for fucksakes, not again."
When the picture was done another minute later, Raqi pulled it from the printer and lay it down face-up on a nearby table. She stared in frustration at the sight before her. All of the green on the image had been rendered blue, and certain complex parts of the pictures with subtle shading had been smoothed over and made uniform.
Santraz akk aqchko... Okay, I'm going to have to try this one again. Her eyes narrowed in frustration, and she stormed back upstairs without delay.
Before she made it back to her chair, but as soon as she had come within range of her microphone, she spoke in a sullen tone: "
Didn't work. The colours came out wrong."
"
oh dear"
"
Wa..."
Raqi plopped down onto her chair. "
Yeah, I forgot to change the colour profile before printing. Or, well- not forgot so much as, there's no way to know which of the two a given image needs until you try first." Irritation seeped from her voice with every word, derived from both the waste of time and materials. "
Gonna try it with the other profile, see if it works then."
"
Sounds good."
It had already been around twenty minutes since she started, and this was how the next three~ odd hours would proceed for Raqi. After heading back downstairs, the image did indeed print correctly this time; and so she then stored it carefully on the table to let the ink set. Next, she would head back upstairs and load up the next image, gambling again on which of the two colour profiles to use, getting it right more often than not; but sometimes needing to reprint a poster here and there. Twice, she would come across images that, despite being upscaled, were still not large enough to print at 300 DPI. One of these she was forced to upscale again, and another, she had no choice but to live with; affirming once again that she probably would not be able to tell the difference. But finally-
"
I'm fucking done!" Raqi exclaimed, as she collapsed into her chair. "
Got the last one printed! Holy shit!" Her voice was breathless, and her demeanour radiated exhaustion. One hand moved behind her to rub the aching muscles in her back, which had not taken kindly to the two dozen-odd trips up and down the stairs she had performed in the last hours.
"
Yoooooo, let's gooo!"
"
Yaaaayyyyy...!"
"
Uuuggghhhh..." Raqi slumped further into her chair, her eyes falling lidded. She always underestimated just how tiring it was to do printing. The walking up and down stairs was only part of the problem: the standing about to wait for the printer, and the large amount of bending required to put in paper, take prints out and lay them on the table all did not help either. Her back would be sore for the rest of the day now, she knew.
Why's it gotta be so arbitrary with what sets it off and what doesn't? I can do some motions just fine, but other things, I hold a position for like one minute and I'm screwed for the rest of the day. Her chest rose and fell slowly.
Neither of them would have any trouble with this. Emhyl has to do way worse at the pharmacy, for eight hours a day instead of just four. For just a minute, she found herself resenting her condition. Then she shook her head, pulling herself up and opening a video to distract herself with.
An hour and a half later, Raqi was still feeling deeply lethargic; though no longer such that she could barely move. The simulated sun had begun to set outside of her window, and it would be getting dark soon. Not that it mattered in any material way, but if she didn't get on and put the posters up soon, she was probably going to be too tired to do it at all that day. With a weary exhalation, Raqi once again dragged herself to her feet and made her way to the small box in which she stored her whitetac. "
Gonna have a go at actually putting some of the posters up now."
By this point, Vasco had left to attend to family matters, and Locke had gone for dinner; leaving only Emhyl in the call. "
Wawa... Hard-working flort..."
For all that the printing had been exhausting, the act of putting the posters up was arguably worse. Before she could do anything, Raqi needed to apply six pieces of tac to each poster: one on each corner, then two in the middle on the long side. Once she had done that, she then had to align the poster and put it into place, which invariably involved even more stretching that was not going to be easy on her back. Still, she had no other choice, and so she set to it.
Every poster that Raqi put up felt more difficult than the last. By the time she was half way through the pile, she was absolutely exhausted. The good news was that the act of putting the posters up was deeply satisfying: deciding where each ought to go represented a sort of puzzle, which involved both fitting them in, and deciding which posters would look best where. Raqi tried to spread colours out evenly where possible, but invariably, certain colours - mostly red, which had a strange tendency to be present in most of the character designs she liked - ended up dominating certain parts of the wall.
At some point, Raqi finished with a poster and made her way back to her chair, intent on taking a brief break. She reached for her water glass and took hold of it, but without realising it, was unable to apply enough force to her grip; and the glass slipped from her hand mid-motion. A jolt ran through her and her eyes widened in horror as half a glass worth of water was spilled all over her keyboard.
"
Oh, fuck!" She exclaimed. Acting on instinct, she immediately took the keyboard and flipped it upside-down; the first and only action she took before shock started to set in.
"
Wah?"
"
I- I just fucking spilled water all over my keyboard! Inos take me-" Without another word, she darted off to the bathroom to grab a towel with which she could mop up the mess.
Ten minutes of rather sullen wiping later, the worst of the spillage was dried up. The rest would evaporate over time, and Raqi had neither the mental capacity nor the energy to deal with it any further. She glanced nervously at her beloved keyboard. It seemed fine for the time being: the water hadn't gotten anywhere important, she thought? It was still working, so it must be fine, she figured.
If it was gonna break, it would've fried itself by now, right? So it must be fine. She pushed the thought from her mind and returned to putting up posters.
"
Damn, is your keyboard alright?" Locke, who had now returned from eating, spoke to her; his voice filled with concern.
"
Yeah, I think so. It still works, anyway." It was far from the first time Raqi had spilled water on her keyboard; they seemed to be more resilient than she had been brought up to believe. "
I guess the water didn't get anywhere important."
"
You should probably unplug it and leave it to dry, in order to be safe."
"
Mmm... Nah." Raqi shook her head. She could not be arsed with that right now. If the keyboard decided to die, so be it; at this point, she was too tired to care. "
It'll be fine. Anyway-" She leaned forwards, and pressed down on the last corner of a poster. "
More importantly, I am fucking done! Finally!"
With what energy she had left, she staggered over to her screen and lifted the webcam from the top of it, turning and pointing it towards the wall. "
Behold!"
