Random idea: Label maker/portable lofi photo printer silent protest tool

wfl

wfl

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Jul 12, 2025
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#1
So, random stream of consciousness here.. I'm in the middle of working on something else and had the idea of a lofi protest sticker printer that you can print stickers quickly to apply to various things with pre-loaded designs.. Now, rather than defacing things, I thought - why not use one of those cheap low-budget portable photo printers so you can produce random leave-behinds in public (think Chic Tracts, but not demonizing LGBTQ+ or D&D)?

I'll do some digging into it later and will share what I find here, but the idea is to have a bunch of pre-loaded designs (personally I'm leaning towards glitch/intentional lo-fi meme-style stuff) that you can just rattle off quickly.

What'd also be fun is a mini portable dot-matrix printer, too.. And if we could get it to do sticker paper (will look into that for the other), why not?
 
#2
Ok, as much as Amazon sucks, this is just a quick note that this is the sorta thing I had in mind (once I get everything fleshed out in my head I'll try to find something cheap not on Amazon):


Can do both prints & stickers.

I keep ruminating on the idea, and I'm not fully sold on it, though.

One thought I had is printing little inserts for random right-winger books.. For instance, a Trump biography could contain random bits inserted of quotes of him, photos of him with Epstein, etc. Non destructive; just inserting little paper surprises.

Another idea I had was to see if I could find a way to cheaply produce a bunch of magnets (or attach magnets to things printed with the above), which would be non-destructive as well.

Leaving little notes with your receipt after signing at dinner. Wrapping one up in your cash tip to your barista. Those are both HORRIBLE ideas, of course, and I definitely (not even in a winking-face way) don't suggest or want anybody to do that (service industry folks don't need the bull****), but.. Maybe that'll help provide some prompts to y'all.

This then lead into the idea of the classic stock ticker, and made me think of a potential installation piece.. I build out an enclosed device connected to a raspberry pi or something else that can print out little ticker-tape notes from my DJTSays project. I've already built the API for the data, so it's just a matter of building something to spit out the notes. This could be a literal gallery piece, or even a fun way to mod a fortune teller device to look like Trump and spit out his quotes.

Ok, I really like that last idea; If anybody sees this and wants to collab on building a fortune teller Trump quote box that we can set up somewhere, let me know. I can open up the API for it and we can get it done. Just need someone who's more into the physical engineering side of things

(I'm going to ruminate on this one a bit and then start a new thread over on Looking for an Expert.)
 
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