UH 323 Altered

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-title: "Template"
-excerpt: "Not Yet Present"
-sidebar:
-  - title: "A wild ?????? has appeared!"
-    image: https://placekittens.com/450/250
-    image_alt: "placeholder image"
-    text: "This image used to be a kitten, and the text used to say \"Meow\", but then the kitten-generator broke. The image still might be a kitten, but it's no longer a guarantee."
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-Nothing to see here!

_uh323/2025-04-16-altered.md

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+---
+title: "What $80 Can Buy"
+excerpt: "Not Yet Present"
+sidebar:
+  - title: "A wild ?????? has appeared!"
+    image: https://placekittens.com/450/250
+    image_alt: "placeholder image"
+    text: "This image used to be a kitten, and the text used to say \"Meow\", but then the kitten-generator broke. The image still might be a kitten, but it's no longer a guarantee."
+
+gallery_altered:
+- image_path: /assets/uh323/altered/front.jpg
+  url: /assets/uh323/altered/front.jpg
+- image_path: /assets/uh323/altered/1.jpg
+  url: /assets/uh323/altered/1.jpg
+- image_path: /assets/uh323/altered/2.jpg
+  url: /assets/uh323/altered/2.jpg
+---
+
+One plus one equals two, there are no magnetic monopoles, and college textbook publishers are scam artists.
+
+Three statements, each (mostly) universally accepted.
+
+For this assignment, I didn't have a book, so I wound up using an old 300-some page textbook found in a cabinet somewhere. This book costs $80 new on some websites at present, so out of protest of the college textbook racket, I decided to rebrand this book by exploring the opportunity cost. That is, what else could you have spent that $80 on?
+
+However, this comes with some restrictions. In the theme of this project, I am cheap, and don't want to spend more than $3 on this book. Other people can, that's their prerogative, but that won't be me. This is also "crunch time" for my major. I have no more than two to three hours for this, sprinkled across two weeks in increments of half an hour or so every few days - in other words, I am spending as much time on this book as most people (outside of physics) spend on their college textbooks.
+
+In other words, in industry terms, there's a tight deadline for a proof-of-concept, but the deadline's not too important compared to every other deadline on the calendar. The design of this book reflects that. The original idea was to skip inking pages by hand by using transfer paper and either a heated press or a clothing iron. Sadly, transfer paper is out of my budget, and an iron would set off a smoke alarm in the dorms. A heated press is a pipe dream, in that I'm not going to buy expensive equipment that's banned in the dorms (it's a fire hazard) for a single project. This lead me to my next solution: print the pages on regular paper and just tape them in.
+
+This has the advantage of being able to design a word doc and print it while waiting between classes while only having my laptop rather than my backpack and art kit (netting extra time), being able to print while printing my homework, leaving only tape as the final part, which took five minutes at most. Sadly, gluing pages together that I didn't get to would require a glue bottle, which depending on the location, would put me over budget.
+
+As a nod to my budget, I will note that printing more than a select few pages would put me over-budget, as the library charges $0.15 per page (single sided) for a color copy. That meant I could print 20 pages (including all reprints), limiting my attempts available to one (as I had 13 pages designed). Sadly, when I went to cut out pages, I used scissors and cut them all at once. Murphy's law struck, and the pages were not cut square, despite me stapling them together in multiple places to avoid exactly that problem.
+
+{% include gallery id="gallery_altered" caption="In the theme of this project, please pay $325.21 for a one-year subscription to the rest of this book." %}
+
+A student in-class noted the theme of daily necessities in all the pages. Though initially a coincidence, if I ever expand on this project, I will be using that theme.
+
+While I would upload the document that corresponds with the rest of the pages, copyright is a thing, and I'd rather not spend half a year looking up regulations.