this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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tattoo printer (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Why does this not exist yet?

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

There are some, but there are several reasons that you haven't seen them about.

  1. The people who spend the most on tattoos are doing so because they are art made by an artist. I'm not sure if you know many people in the scene, but these aren't the people getting flash tattoos at a random shop. They plan their tattoos, they pick their artists, and they spend many hours trusting another human to permanently alter their body.
  2. The most common type of printers in the world print on a 2D plane, even most 3D printers are printing on a nearly flat 2D plane one layer at a time. The human body is largely not a 2D plane.
  3. Human skin varies, ask any tattoo artist. You can't use the same pressure or the same type of needle on every person. And it takes people with experience to identify this. People who pay the most for their tattoos expect this expertise.

Those last two reasons are not impossible solves in any sense, but they do greatly increase the cost and complexity of a machine that can automatically tattoo a person without injuring them.

I'll also throw a number 4 in here. Speaking for the US, unless you've made a name for yourself tattoo artists are largely exploited here. They are mostly misclassified as independent contractors but then treated as employees. They are under valued and under paid.

So, how inexpensive can you make a machine to both purchase and maintain, while also being easy enough to undercut the already exploited labor in your average tattoo shop?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I'll throw in another point, people are fucking terrible st staying still

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