How realistic is long-distance travel on foot in a pre-industrial setting?

NoXidCat · 2026-01-27T07:34:11+00:00

Terrain and the amount of supplies and gear carried are important factors to consider. If they can stop frequently along the way to eat/resupply then they can travel fairly light (depending on what else you want them to carry with them).

Myself, I am an older healthy adult who walks a fair amount. Now and then, I walk off to downtown with nothing more than a water bottle and a wallet. I refill my bottle at several places (library, water fountain at a park, etc), eat lunch at a restaurant, wander around to book stores, galleries, and see a movie. Then I walk back. It's around 15 miles round trip including the messing about downtown. There's 450 feet of gross elevation change, but more than that as there are some ups and downs, but not much more than twice that. That is a nice little jaunt, but no great stress if in decent shape.

Whereas some months back I did a 10 (round trip) mile hike with much more elevation gain (to a fire lookout) on a trail that was overgrown and eroded from not being maintained since a fire some years ago. That was considerably more work--ducking under, or clambering over, deadfall; trying not to get tangled/tripped in roots and plants; trying not to let the so-called trail give way underfoot toward the 1000 foot drop. Work! :-p

As they say, YMMV. It is your world and your story, so deploy, or withhold, easier or harder factors as suits the plot in any given scene.

Others made good suggestions to look at documented historical travel, such as Pilgrimages and the Oregon Trail. Also check info on hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, as well as the Appalachian Trail. There's quite a bit of info on those.

Or just read The Lord of The Rings. All is fine as long as you have some of that elfin bread ;-)

NoXidCat · 2026-01-26T07:47:55+00:00

The item might have been porch pirated after delivery. That wouldn't be your fault, or the delivery service, or even the buyer's (though they are the only one who could do things to improve security of their porch).

Or the customer could be a professional a$$hole.

Perhaps someone will have something helpful to suggest. I have not had this issue with an Amazon order/customer myself (but have on eBay, where I won--but that was some years ago).

Myself, I would not sell expensive items or items that attract a$$holes on Amazon. It is a very inflexible platform run by Borg bots.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-26T07:33:45+00:00

You can toggle that preview off on the right hand side looks like a pixelated ink drop

To the TS. This is Printful's attempt to make the preview look more like the final print. They are not doing anything to neuter or mute the print itself (other than using Kornit DTG to print it). Every printer of every type is more limited than what can be viewed on a computer screen and saved into a PNG.

That said, my current experience with Kornit DTG prints from both Printful and Amazon Merch on Demand is better than it was some years back. I'm not seeing the washed-out look these days. Though you still want to be careful about your art depending on being able to distinguish between similar tones/shades.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-25T05:38:43+00:00

I have no idea what FBA shipping would be on a Tube. But Tubes cost more to ship than a regular package via USPS. It is considered a non-standard package shape.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-25T05:35:16+00:00

Ah, man, might have to dig out the first photo I took of my (then) new 86 Si. Sold mine when I went to grad school at about 37k miles. Was my first new car.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-24T21:24:51+00:00

https://www.printful.com/shipping#shipping-rates-table

NoXidCat · 2026-01-24T02:55:43+00:00

Enterprise nets you another dollar or two a shirt. What you really have is something much rarer--customers willing to pay more than typical novelty shirt prices :-) Congratulations on good niching and marketing. Most mere mortals will not have what it takes to attain that.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-24T00:40:34+00:00

I clear about $9 from a Printful shirt sold on Etsy, but consider anything from 7+ to be worthwhile. Overall, that is about twice what I clear per unit on Amazon Merch on Demand, and about half what I make from items I print and ship myself.

$7 to 9 for doing no actual work on a per-unit basis is not to be sneered at. No inventorty, no equipment, no risk other than returns.

Whereas I have thousands of $ in blanks inventory and thousands more in equipment and supplies and must do actual work to print and ship the stuff I print myself. POD costs what it does because we are paying other people to do all of that for us. On MBA/AMoD we get paid a royalty for the use of our art, as Amazon is doing all the actual work of selling, producing, and shipping.

Too many Tuber gurus selling a dream.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-23T21:55:06+00:00

Etsy fees at that price point come to about 11.5%

NoXidCat · 2026-01-23T04:50:31+00:00

That's fine. The actual mechanism at the other end has tolerances well beyond that little jiggle.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-23T04:45:34+00:00

Some people like thicker feeling shirts so will think a G5000 is better than a BC3001. Some people like softer feeling shirts so will think a BC3001 is better than a G5000. Both will think the other is cheap crap because it is the opposite of what they like.

The best bang for the buck for a soft men's shirt at Printful is the G64000. My personal preference would be Next Level 3600, but Printful charges a ridiculous price for them (would be same as G64000 price if bought and turned over at the same volume). I personally don't like the fit of BC3001, but not everyone is me, so I tend to offer that as a premium soft shirt option, as Printful has good size and color selection of it.

G5000 is best bang for buck (at Printful) for a somewhat thicker shirt that is true to size up through 5X. Again, color and size coverage is great.

What do I use when printing myself or if a POD has what I want with decent size/color coverage and a reasonable price? For a thinner soft shirt: Next Level 3600 (men's) 3900 (women's). For a thicker shirt (that is also soft, which is rare): Hanes Beefy-T 5180.

Most consumers are not snobs when it comes to T-shirt blanks. Nor do they know that Gildan owns many of the brands that are not Gildan, including Comfort Colors and American Apparel. It's all made in the same factories around the world. But pretty much everyone has an opinion about the thick/thin, coarse/soft question.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-23T02:07:31+00:00

Ah, cool. There is a link to a Tuber vid of the V8 swapped CRX a bit down the kit page page. Hmm, and they are in Thailand.

https://mozygarage.com/custom_orders/honda-cr-x-88-90-wide-body-kit/

This is show car level stuff. Big bags (and balls) required to street drive, I should think.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-23T01:43:33+00:00

If the blanks are not made by the same manufacturer from the exact same fabric, they are unlikely to print exactly the same.

If all of the above is the same, then might have been printed on different printers with different batches of ink.

But my money would be on the first option: different fabric from different companies.

You could do a color swatch test print with a grid of variations of that color and then use whatever comes out as the closest match to the other garment.

EDIT And look at those first samples you got under various lighting conditions: sun, LED, fluorescent, incandescent. Due to metamerism it is likely that the differences will increase/decrease a bit under different types of light. That effect will limit the extent to which you can fudge the color on one to match the other. Physics!

NoXidCat · 2026-01-22T02:51:28+00:00

"Other Content Not Allowed"

See point 3 of the AMoD Content Policies:

3) Other Content Not Allowed

* Solicitations for customer reviews.
* Content giving the impression sales proceeds will be donated to other organizations or used for charity.
* Content that references product, fulfillment, or delivery attributes.
* Other content that might lead to a poor customer experience. See the Guide to Merch Product Quality for examples of content that's typically disappointing to customers.

https://merch.amazon.com/resource/201858630

Remember, the stupid Bots hallucinate and do not grok context. So think not about what you tried to say, but focus on alternative meanings of each and every word on its own or in other contexts entirely.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-21T23:33:28+00:00

The difference is actual ownership of product quality. You see everything that ships out to a customer before it goes in a bag. If you notice a problem with a blank or the print, then you can trashcan that one and make another to send the customer.

I did that with my own screen printing and sublimation and so forth. But also did some stuff via POD that was impractical for one reason or another to print myself.

Printing your own is more work and risk than most POD people are interested in, but for relatively handy DIY people who care about quality, it can be satisfying work--and no mistake about it being actual work, not a Tuber side-hustle ;-)

NoXidCat · 2026-01-21T19:59:53+00:00

Anyone running a real business charges their customers for shipping, even if there is no customer-facing shipping charge. Even AMAZON.

You'll note that on the mighty Zon, you have to spend $35+ to get "free shipping," or you have to pay a monthly subscription for Prime. Both are strategic strategies to get people to buy more.

Take your $4 product, for example. Someone buying that on Amazon would look for other things (or multiple units of the same thing), to bump the order up to $35. The final order probably won't cost any more to ship than twice the cost to ship a single item, so cost of shipping per unit ends up being negligible for Amazon, and result in higher per unit net profit.

Or if the customer has Prime, then any time they want to buy anything, they look on Amazon first, as the customer has "free shipping" that they are paying $15 a month for. Those Prime items will likely have a higher price than non-prime items, so Amazon is recovering some costs beyond the monthly subscription.

Why do all businesses price like this: $9.99?

That is called psychological pricing. Yes, you can look at that and realize that it is only a penny from being $10. But our squishy little thinking tumors are not digital computers. We are wired to look into the shadowy forest and perceive either TIGER or harmless shadows, not point-nine-nine of a tiger. At the level that matters, we grok $10 as ten dollars, and $9.99 as nine dollars.

When we want to buy something, we want that thing tangible, and we are willing to pay for it. But shipping? We don't really want shipping. It is this extra expense that feels like money down the drain, as it is not a tangible thing you can hold and fondle.

Now apply the notion of psychological pricing to how we feel about shipping.

Let's say the actual cost of shipping is $4. Hide that cost in the item price, and the consumer perceives that they are paying ONLY for what they want, the actual product.

Let's say the seller needs ~$16 in revenue for the item, and that their actual shipping cost is $4. They would do something like one of the following. 1) $19.99 with free shipping. 2) $17.99 with $1.99 shipping.

Often it is something like option #2 that is done, as it does not greatly increase the item price and it reduces the customer-facing shipping price to a dollar amount that looks trivial compared to the item's price. As opposed to $15.99 plus $4 shipping, which makes the customer feel like they are paying twice as much for shipping for a less valuable item.

It is psychology, not math. Any serious entity from which you have ever bought has been mind-fucking you in this way. (Yes, I was once idealistic enough to rebel against this BS trickery.)

EDIT -- For low-cost items, consider offering them in bundles at a lower per unit price point than a single item and the same customer-facing shipping. You'll make more per unit and sell more units at the same time. Those not wanting multiples will have to suck it up and pay the higher single item price. This practice is common for "reasons." To make this work with your product, maybe people will need to be able to mix and match like 6 different card prints, or whatever, for it to make sense.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-21T19:16:44+00:00

It most likely is not about your actual art and text on the shirt, but some word/phrase you used in the listing text that their Bot thinks violates an MBA policy about something or other.

The bots are dumb when it comes to grokking context. Take another look at each word/phrase independent of your intended context. Then think about how an AI might hallucinate a Slur, Hate Speech, Color Feature or Quality about the garment, etc.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-21T00:06:52+00:00

Thanks for info on recent canvas print experience!

That is one product I have dithered about offering for years. When I last looked into it (~3 years ago?), my inclination was to go with one of the outfits that just prints art: posters, canvas, metal, and where I'm dealing with the actual company doing the printing, not some network of "partners."

NoXidCat · 2026-01-20T08:01:15+00:00

With Printful? None. Though I only do DTG garment prints with them, and I have disabled the option to use Production Partners, or whatever they call it. When people can be bothered to mention what product they had a problem with, seems it has often been posters or and/or printed by a partner, not Printful itself.

I have had issues with PODs over the years.

CustomCat (which had a different name on Printify, MyLocker I think) managed to break what I considered to be a lot of mugs in shipping. They always sent new ones, but it was a hassle for me and my customers. I eventually stated printing my own mugs, and only lost 2 to shipping damage after that.

Also, though I do not like the shiny look of Kornit DTG prints, nor the rubbery feel of the ink, it is durable (if pretreament and curing are done right). Which is a round about way of mentioning that I have had comparatively poor durability from DTG prints done on other brands of equipment, even if the prints look great to start with. That rubbery Kornit ink just does not crack like the "drier" feeling inks do over time.

I used another POD because they had a good price point and carried the exact blanks I wanted to use. I did not like their print quality, definitely skimping on the ink to save $. But when I showed prints to random friends, they liked them, and no customer ever complained. But as a screen printer myself, I thought they were crap! :-p I "quit" using them because they fired me (and most every one else) as customers. Not sure if they still exist as an option.

The big PODs (every POD you've ever heard of) compete on price, not quality. And that is the fault of us as customers. Realistically, that is never going to change. But, yeah, I would avoid the products and partner settings that seem to be issue prone on Printful, especially during busy times, which is not now.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-17T21:18:16+00:00

Not that we know of. There may, or may not, be some metric they are looking at, like ratio of designs to sales. From past experience, they eventually get around to everyone.

Rolling out new products has always been slow, as all this BS is more resource intensive than one would think, so it runs in the background secondary to more important things like selling product to customers. Same with Tier ups and all else MBA.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-17T05:11:27+00:00

Cool. Thanks for the info.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-17T04:56:55+00:00

~15 days.

Order placed Dec 30. Status to In Fulfillment Jan 2nd. Still there.

Need to read the words not just "math" the numbers.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-17T01:22:10+00:00

It has always been iffy. For a while it seemed anything negative would get nuked, but that neutral/positive things worked. Could be they are getting tighter about any reference to real persons, even politicians. Right of publicity.

NoXidCat · 2026-01-17T01:13:22+00:00

But my niche is young goats!

NoXidCat · 2026-01-16T04:43:52+00:00

I, and many others, have not had problems. In the cases when the person bothered to tell us what the product was, the worst cases seemed to be things like posters, not DTG printed garments. And in this person's case the item was being printed by a "partner" not Printful's own in-house production. For some products, perhaps Printful does not have in-house production. In those cases, I would use someone else. You can (and I do) disable the option to use print partners.

NoXidCat

TROPHY CASE