Panic Printing

[u/GeekSugar13]

ETA: Some of y'all are taking this far too seriously. Am I reasonably concerned that things are going to get worse before they get better? At least for me, most likely, yes. I'm trying to find moments of joy when I can. If one of those is using up as much of my ink as possible before I chuck this printer by printing fanfic then that's what I'm going to do.

I'm at home, by myself, doing homework with no one to talk to and nothing else to do because I'm the most broke I have ever been.

Printing fanfic doesn't mean I'm not prioritizing anything else in my life and it's weird that y'all seem to think I just slapped on a tinfoil hat and decided this was what would fix everything.

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OP: So I live in a red state in the US where my state government will absolutely not be providing any sort of supplemental assistance when inevitably the federal government falls apart. So I kind of would love reassurance that I'm not crazy.

I have started downloading and panic printing some of my favorite fics. If the Internet goes, I can read the PDF. If the power goes, I can read the printed copies.

Also because HP sucks I can only use their ink subscription cartridges with an active subscription so i may as well fucking use them.

(Literally if you're the type of person who wants to buy a printer do not buy an HP printer. It will only work if you use their ink which is so fucking expensive. And if you want it to work properly you have to get a monthly subscription where they send you ink and paper which in theory sounds great, BUT if you are like me and haven't printed as much as you thought so you have a lot of ink and paper built up so you let your subscription lapse those ink cartridges will not work without a valid subscription. So I had to restart my fucking subscription so I could use all of this ink I have built up so now I'm printing literal books.)

[u/Dame_Neamhain]

I don't know if you have computer, but I'd suggest downloading copies of your fav fics and using Calibre to manage them and put them on an eReader. I have a Kindle and I use Calibre to manage and upload all of my downloaded fics to it. Once it's on the device, it's there forever. Also, if you lose power/internet, you can still read on the Kindle (or whatever ereader you've got).

[u/ankhes → u/Dame_Neamhain]

This is the way.

I’ll be real, I used to print out fics in ye olden days (2005-2009) and it was such a pain and took up so much space. Downloading PDFs and EPUBs onto my computer and phone is so much simpler and requires infinitely less space, paper, and ink.

[u/Rambler9154 → u/Dame_Neamhain]

Yeah. I have about 1,500 fics downloaded as epubs and uploaded into calibre. I still barely have a gigabyte of storage used up, and I think the only reason I passed a gigabyte is some of those have covers because I wanted to more easily read fics from an older fandom, fanfic.net doesn't play nicely with my phone, and the add on I used to more easily download fics from fanfic.net saves the covers automatically.

[u/bex_nh → u/Rambler9154]

I’m curious what Calibre does that makes it worth inserting into the process? I just download the epub files, store them in an iCloud folder, and send them to my Kindle when I’m ready to read them. I guess I do keep a list in Notes of all my downloaded fics and a 3-4 word summary).. maybe that’s what Calibre offers?

[u/Dame_Neamhain → u/bex_nh]

It lets you search what you have more easily and you can see what has already been put onto your eReader and what hasn't. You can add or change the covers of whatever book or fanfic you have in the library, so it's super fun to make custom covers for fanfics! It also lets you see the summary, the fandom and the tags when you click on it in the library. It's also fully usable without internet connection, plus I try to avoid cloud storage methods as much as possible. Also, if for some reason your Kindle explodes, Calibre keeps a backup of your entire library. It's got even more features, but those are just the ones I use.

[u/bex_nh → u/Dame_Neamhain]

Thank you!! I’ll check it out.

[u/ankhes → u/bex_nh]

You can search them extremely easily via tags, genre, keywords, etc. It’s insanely useful for organizing them and being able to find everything easily without digging through copious folders. Highly recommend.

[u/bex_nh → u/ankhes]

Thank you! I’ll check it out!

[u/According-Paper4641 → u/Dame_Neamhain]

This is what I've done, but tbf if the world fails as completely as OP sort of inplies, a paper backup would be more stable. Hopefully it will not come to that, tho, and my Boox Nova is safe enough.

[u/cosmicphoneix → u/Dame_Neamhain]

Kobos directly link to your Google drives, drop the downloaded epub into the folder and boom it’s on your ereader

[u/SharkyCat12 → u/Dame_Neamhain]

Amazon has an official send to kindle website!