MakerBot Industries

"Time is the fire in which we burn" - Delmore Schwartz

The future, according to William Gibson, has arrived – it’s just not evenly distributed yet. ¹  That’s why you, gentle reader, may already have a MakerBot Cupcake CNC while your envious neighbor does not.  So, it’s going to be a few years before you’re able to knock on your neighbor’s door and ask to borrow a cup of ABS.

27% of MakerBot’s entire stock of glow-in-the-dark ABS sold in the first 24 hours after it was put in the store.  I don’t know this for a fact, but I strongly suspect that this plastic is not going to be a regular item in the store.  If you think there’s any way for you to use glowing ABS in the next year, you should definitely pull the trigger now and justify it later.²

1. Photo courtesy of Leoo [↩]
2. Besides, the day before Halloween I’m going to knock on your door and say, “Hey man, do you have any spare glow-in-the-dark ABS?  I’m fresh out and I’m halfway through this print when I totally realized I forgot to buy the glow ABS I needed to finish this Jack-O’-Lantern for the kids at the children”s hospital who were all really excited about seeing some toys made by an open source robot, because if there’s one thing sick kids like it’s open source robots – not like those closed source robots we see every Christmas, so in a way you’d really be helping fight commercialism and expand the minds of youngsters who are going to be the ones who continue to develop our open source robots with their new ideas and build our open source robots with their tiny fingers, fingers, by the way, that are really useful for finding all those fiddly bits that you drop, but they shouldn’t be playing with the bits that heat up or use dangerous amounts of electricity, because that’s just not safe for kids, what kind of a monster are you wanting to put kids to work building robots???  So… Can I borrow some glow-in-the-dark ABS, or what?  I’ll only need a pound or so.  I promise to buy you another roll as soon as they’re back in stock.” [↩]