Now that's a self-explanatory title. A few weeks ago, we did a live stream of comment printing and shredding. This is how we did it. MATT: / mattgrayyes TOM: / tomscottgo We Shred Your Comments, Live! • We Shred Your Comments...
And if Matt ever loses his job he could spend his time building a machine that automatically melts the old chat structure into new filament which gets fed back into the printer...
It always amuses me that he holds himself to essentially the BBC standards, despite no one forcing him to and absolutely no one who would care otherwise.
I think Tom's blinking rapidly after saying bodging makes things work "reasonably well" was the souls of a thousand engineers flashing before his eyes.
You never notice the thousands of doors that work perfectly, you only notice the one that squeaks. Matt quietly makes these videos work.. until Tom tries to swallow the mic to demonstrate something.
I found people walking into the scene to fix the shredder was a lot like the Christmas fireplace program.... everyone always wants to see the guy add wood to the fire or stoke the fire.
They could do something for a holiday stream where they print out song lyrics and shred them. Perhaps have the playlist controlled by the public with priority given by a poll.
Especially when you know that they asked youtube for an empty broom closet and they went, "Nah, take Studio 1, it's fine". Not just any studio, frikking Studio 1.
So you are saying that Matt's Javascript print spooler that he wrote for a joke was more reliable than Microsoft's that was written by several people that code for a living? ;P
Considering how a dot matrix printer works, quite possible. The print spooler in windows is far more complicated just to handle multiple jobs and postscript let alone all the other stuff it does now.
I have been expecting this video for a while. The joke seems funnier knowing that it was planned and hardware was purchased. I expected the thought process to be "We have two reams of paper and a dot matrix printer." "I have an idea."
Vivienne Gucwa nah, it was a statement on how doomed humanity is. Seriously, there was nothing you could comment about and even without them telling now, the viewers should have realised, that commenting was the only thing keeping the printer working and therefore something to livestream. I would like to know how many pages were used or if we look at it from an arts perspective, how many books could have been written by us viewers commenting on a livestream.
Yep - it was a decent piece of performance art. You don't even have to dig deep (or, at all) to find meaning in it. Sure, it may have been meant as a joke - but that's what why we have "death of the author" (not literally, of course). :D It's not for the artist to decide what the public sees in the artwork.
i actually have a lot more respect for this as genuine art than pretty much anything else that's referred to as performance art, because zero pretensions on your part. you guys just thought it'd be fun/funny. if anyone wants to read some deeper meaning into it, that's fine. but when it comes down to it, this was basically just art for art's sake.
David L. art is form of communication. if anyone see anything deeper in that installationthats WRONG and that mean tom and matt failed because they did not pass their information properly and people do not understeand what they tried to communicate which is plain "o its funny" and I dont know whats wrong with artists puting deeper meaning and build around this meaning? art is form of comunication so technically the more you want to communicate and the more of it is going across without distortion the better art piece is.
What if the thing you're communicating happens to be a joke? Just because you have a sense of humour about it doesn't make what you say trivial. I still see it as art, but my definition of art might be different; I see comedy as an art. The whole thing is dripping with irony; a horde of people obsessively trying to be heard through the internet, by having a physical printout of their comment go out live; only for it all to be immediately destroyed and nothing of substance left at the end.
@@tams805 to be fair, everyone is a casual art consumer. Logos, branding and all that lot is art. The more hardcore art stuff for arty people isn't designed to have mass appeal. It's like if you said you were fed up of music just because of 20th Century art music.
@@HidekiShinichi I know I'm two years late, but your assertion that art is only what the artist makes of it is just flat out wrong. The artist of a work can have *an* interpretation on it, but art is solely what the viewer makes of it given the information they have. If you were to read, say, Harry Potter and you came away thinking it was all a metaphor for poverty or war based on the information the book has provided, then regardless of what the author intended that is a correct view to have. As soon as a piece of art is published, the artist's view holds as much weight as the audience's, and any information that was not published in or alongside the piece might as well not exist for how little influence it has.
At university in the late 70s we discovered that you could allocate the 1000 line a minute line printer to your keyboard, so this machine that lived in a soundproofed glass enclosure that chucked out paper at many sheets per second would suddenly stop and go chunk a chunk a chunk as you typed on your terminal. The technicians did not like that. Then there was the great big led display of cpu stuff above the main computer in the big room with the glass walls, some devious student wrote a program that cause it to display big scrolling messages like the times square news feed. Unfortunately to get it to display some letters required the mainframe to do really weird stuff so the technicians didn't like that either.
I think I donated like 5$ through super chat with the comment something along the lines of “idk what you mad lads are doing, but this should help with the cost. Keep up the good work!
Did you know that there is a similar piece of art in the ars electronica in Linz (Austria)? You can send a text message to a specific number that then gets printed and shredded.
Different location- I think the previous time they ran up against the issue of a privately owned but publicly usable park (and those can ban whatever they fancy)
I watched for over an hour. Most of my comments were about the fact that people should stop commenting in order for the livestream to end. I realised the irony and gave up on humanity and just watched the comments shred. I remember that matt commented once, but I never saw tom’s comment in the livestream. Did I miss Tom’s comment or why did he not participate in it?
I'm going to guess that, because it was written to be run once for about 4 hours and then get thrown away, it's probably not the highest quality code out there. Because why would you bother writing maintainable code for that.
OMG i cant believe you watch matt and tom! also, yeah, it would be cool to have the sourcce code, but, you know, its not exactly going to be the best, if "the king of bodge" wrote it. (did you see his emoji keyboard? that thing was hilariously bodged togerhter)
It doesn't actually surprise me that a dot matrix printer is decently easy to find. It's an arbitrarily long format printer, so it has that going for it.
Extremely common in certain fields still. Firestones across the nation still use them in an admittedly steadily decreasing number of stores. Seen them in discount tire as well.
I think it's just down to the fact that they were everywhere a few decades ago and now almost no one wants them anymore. High supply, low demand. No reason they'd be hard to find.
@@poudink5791 That and they're commonly used in large infrastructure where individual lines (think events / operations that need to be documented) need to be printed 24/7, 365. Also airports, printing long lists of passenger names and fuel requirements works so much better when you don't have to keep putting ink into the thing, and it's much nicer to have one long piece of paper than having to cross things off spread over multiple sheets
I guess this, along with Emojli, shows us what your particular (joint) shenanigans spend limit is like. Under £500, and often under £200, but still enough to stretch to a dot matrix printer, two boxes of fanfold paper, and a high end shredder...
As a former accountant, yeah, matrix printers are still pretty much ubiquitous. Make three or four carbon copies in one go, guaranteed to be identical - conservative accountants still wholly dig that. And while they are slowly falling out of favour, the second hand market is still awash with them, all cheap because they're old enough to've been fully depreciated. As an electronics enthusiast, I'm particularly fond of the stepper motors that you can harvest by hunting these things down for cheap or for free. And as a Tom Scott subscriber: I WOULD HAVE WATCHED THAT VIDEO FOR A WEEK. Hell, I would probably have created a sort of active desktop wallpaper showing that channel and have it there until the day I die (or my pc does, anyway). Now off to Wikipedia to see if the page "Tom Scott (entertainer)" still calls it 'art'. 'Cause that pissed me off earlier.
Unfortunately as of November 30th 2017 it no longer mentions the shredding at all. The editor who removed it cited the lack of third party coverage as why they did.
Like many people (I think) I spent my time watching and trying to figure out what the delay would be before I saw my comment being printed. I never saw it being printed, and now I'm a bit sad to hear that some comments were just tossed. I still thought it was a brilliant bit of an internet artwork though. The starkly lit stage added to the affect.
I was on vacation when you did the livestream. I woke up, stumbled out to my laptop, saw there was a new Matt & Tom video, realized you were doing this live, and participated. What a wonderful vacation surprise activity for me! Thanks so much, you 2! This was almost as memorable as the solar eclipse & Hurricane Irma! (Which I experienced both of them as part of my vacation. The latter certainly wasn't planned.)
I was waiting for this video for an explanation of it all. The fact that it was nothing more than "we thought it would be funny" is perfect. I must admit, at one point I had been watching for nearly 45 minutes on the day, and after that I had it on in the background through my headphones. Now you have a dot matrix printer and a LOT of paper sitting around...what will you do with it all?
Oh yeah, dot matrix printers are definitely still used. One of the uses is with carbon paper with 2 or more layers where you need to have an exact copy for filing purposes. Also they are actually very easy to print to (in Windows), just send the characters and it will print. I probably could have made an easier program for you guys than your setup through a dos box and network share :D Too bad escape codes didn't work, cause you can do all sorts of stuff (double strike, double height, double width) even graphics :) But it was a very fun project, it was art :)
I came home from work at about 6pm, turned it on, started watching, went "what's this?" and then watched it right to the end, not really knowing why. It was great.
So, for future reference, not that you guys will do this again but someone else might, there's no need to use the Windows print spooler, or any print spooler for that matter, for a dot matrix printer. Dot matrix you can send text directly to the serial connection (including USB) bypassing the spooler entirely.
I agree on the assessment of this being performance art, and not even a bad one anyways, considering how long-lived posts on social media are, and all the other things that you could interpret into this piece. I'm actually a bit disappointed that you didn't think of it like that. Anyhow, I really hope you find some great use of the printer and the almost two boxes of paper you've still got there, and preferrably really soon!!
you might think dot matrix printers would be hard to find, except the massive amount of use they see in commercial use (for picking slips and receipts and such)
It's actually a very interesting question whether this is art. I think it definitely qualifies as a piece of art, maybe if there's a call for internet themed art you should submit it :D
I've seen this video at least five times and have only now realized that the top half of the livestream footage is a split screen. I genuinely thought it was a long chain setup with very interesting lighting.
