Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?

They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.

Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?

So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.

And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.

And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.

If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.

I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.

here's a random word generator--whatever word it gives you is now the thing you are the deity of

"quota"

am i in the fucking sales department

im deity of accessible

Top surgery’s on me boys!!

I got "disorder" first which was fucking hilarious but I accidentally clicked off before I could screenshot it. Went back and got this instead

I am the queen of the universe

EXCUSE ME

now what exactly does this mean..

Mine came up with "gems" which - for someone named Jules is just funny

"Crisis."

Yeah, that's... yeah.

"Try" - I quite like that, actually.

Girl what the fuck is going on in tumblr offices right now to let the decisions they just dropped be made

To the executive who made the decision and the RND staff that told said exec to make that decision: the only reason you’re winning the race right now is because you’re the tortoise. Don’t be the fucking hare.

“Valley what the fuck are you talking about”

Today, tumblr staff posted a very long announcement on their blog, which you can find here.

It’s a long post that’s pretty hard to read, mostly because the entire thing reads like the writer was held at gunpoint by the zuck himself. (To the poor staff member who had to write this shitshow, I’m so sorry, may you get a raise for your efforts) Here are some of the main points:

TL;DR: Tumblr is attempting to catch up with other social medias by becoming more like Twitter, even though the whole reason they had a massive influx of users recently was because of their lack of invasive, intrusive and vile business practices to sell themself.

Needless to say, people are fucking pissed. A lot of this is the exact opposite of what tumblr users want, and feels like the thing that’ll make this site finally crash and burn alongside the others. Which is terrifying!

So if staff are reading this, I’m gonna repeat my statement: the singular reason your site ended up being refuge in this time of dying socials is because the bar is in hell, and you barely jumped it by not having the bells and whistles that everyone’s tired of. Don’t trip while you’re still ahead.

This is not at all what they're doing and spreading this panicked information is not helping.

Tumblr is making their dashboard controls open source so that the community has full control over how their dash is curated and can develop tools to customize it how they want. This was announced DAYS ago, but has been getting zero attention compared to people who only want to read everything as bad faith as possible.

Twitter would *never* make a move like this in a million years because keeping their model proprietary is too important to them to the point that they're suing Meta over Threads.

Tumblr are also extremely against data mining and their stance against it has cost them money they could have been making in order to make up for the deficit this site costs Automattic annually. Tumblr Live doesn't even "data mine" like the popular rumor states, because if you check what they collect it's username, age, and IP. The only identifying bit of this is IP, and if you use a VPN it will render that part moot.

I have a longer post about all this that includes my sources if you check the Tumblr Live tag on my blog. Look, I want Tumblr to improve too but the misinformation needs to be dealt with or we are never ever going to be able to give a scrap of useful feedback. Because asking them to stop doing something they're already not doing is flooding out all the actually useful critique.

further points:

“tldr”ing this as “tumblr is trying to become like twitter!” is ragebait nonsense. nothing about these changes make it “more like twitter” and i don’t know where you got half the stuff in this post except by willful misreading. i get that the language isn’t familiar to you and that you don’t understand it, which yeah is not great messaging on tumblr’s part and i wondered at them posting it (though super appreciate the EXTREMELY TRANSPARENCY which no other social media site is doing). but please don’t try and speak authoritatively on something you don’t understand, and especially don’t put a tldr that is a completely inaccurate summary of what’s going on.

It is not my fault that I must bite. My loving spouse. Every day.

It is not my fault

that I must bite. My loving

spouse. Every day.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

(*"bad" in quotes because I am refraining from judgement, I've just heard people hating on them.)

“Nimona is still Nimona,” he says. “She could be a whale or a dragon or shark or a cat, and she’s still Nimona. Just as she could be a girl or a boy or a woman or a man or anything else. All of these other parts are all factions of her. None of them are the end-all be-all of who she is. So that is kind of how I think of my own gender now. There is still some of that monster girl that I still hold very close to my heart.”

ND Stevenson

while I’m here

If you watched the NIMONA movie, enjoyed it, and want to support it and other (gay) media like it, consider slamming that double-thumbs-up button on Netflix. I know what you’re thinking: Netflix has a double-thumbs-up button?! That’s what I said too. But I have it on good authority that this is a metric with serious weight for Netflix and it’s something they take into account when deciding whether to invest in other similar (gay) properties. So send Netflix a message and give that sucker the ol’

If we don’t microdose delusion we won’t make it through this reality babe….

So I remember reading about this study in grad school where they have a bunch of clinically depressed people and a bunch of non-clinically-depressed people a game that was partially chance and partially skill, and asked them to estimate how much control they had over the outcome.

The depressed people were far more accurate in estimating how much influence their actions had on the outcome of the game compared to their nondepressed counterparts, who consistently overestimated the effects of their own choices on their chances of winning.

Then I remember this other study (CW animal testing) where they put rats in a bucket of water that they couldn’t get out of, so they’d have to swim. There was a fairly consistent point at which the swimming rat would falter, and stop swimming, fated to drown.

Except that that’s when the researchers would pull the rat out of the bucket, give it a nice rest warmth and a meal.

When those SAME rats who had been rescued before were put in the same situation again, they swam much LONGER than they had before.

Why? The risk was the same either way- drowning. You’d have thought that the fear of drowning would keep them swimming to their maximum length no matter what.

The researchers conclusion was that the rescued rats had something they hadn’t had the first time- they had more hope. A miraculous rescue could come, and that let them swim for longer, just in case.

I think we do microdose delusion because sometimes that little overestimation of our chances, of our luck, keeps us swimming that little bit longer, just in case something good happens. And sometimes, that little margin really does make the difference. 

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

-Terry Pratchett, Hogfather.

hey, don't just leave the quote there! the last line is what MAKES it!

"YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE.  HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?"

“YOU NEED TO BELIEVE

IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW

ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?”

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

I generally consider myself a fairly grounded person, but when I manage to biff a dice roll with an 85% chance of success seven times in a row, I can't help but start to wonder.

Like, rationally I know it's just because I'm making a huge number of rolls, and the questions "what are the odds of flipping a coin five times and getting five heads?" and "given a thousand sequential coin flips, what are the odds that a run of five consecutive heads appears somewhere in the resulting sequence?" have very different answers, but in the moment the second one feels a whole lot like the first!

OP are you making a million dice rolls? This is super unlucky. I’m blanking on how many rolls you’d need to have even odds of that happening - back in a day or so -

Funnily enough, owing to the tracking features of the dice-rolling software I'm using I can actually give you an exact answer to that: at the time of this posting, I have made that specific 85%-chance-of-success roll 14 987 times.

(I could probably come up with the formula for the odds of a run of seven consecutive failures appearing in 14 987 rolls, but ultimately I'm not sufficiently invested in the answer to feel like working for it.)

I don't know if there's a simple formula. Having thought for a few hours on this, all I can come up with is to do it recursively.

I'm going to model it as a coin that's 85% heads and 15% tails, and you've flipped tails 7 times in a row. Say H=0.85 and T=0.15. The chance of just straight flipping 7 tails in a row is T^7, and out of 15000 flips it could be flips 1 through 7, or 2 through 8, etc. . . but you can't just add up T^7 a bunch of times. That's overcounting - it's possible that you get it on flips 1 through 7 and 2 through 8, and adding separately counts that outcome twice. Or, for that matter, you could get a 10-streak of 1 through 10, or you might get five separate streaks of 7. . . .

(You probably already know all this - this wordy background is for anyone who finds it helpful!)

I think it's easier to calculate the chance of doing 15000 flips and not getting 7 tails in a row. And this is. . . still not straightforward, but I think it can be done recursively.

Math notation ahoy! P(n) will be the chance of not getting 7 tails in a row in n flips.

Ok! Now we're going to figure out P(n+1) based on P(n) and below. In other words, let's say we've recorded 100 coin flips, and got no streaks of 7 tails in a row. Can we use this to figure out P(101)?

This part is a bit fuzzy - I may have some errors in here (please correct me if you find some!) I think that there are two cases that are important:

In case 2, the last flips actually need to be HTTTTTT (1 head followed by 6 tails), or it would not be part of P(100) which represents getting to 100 without getting 7 tails in a row. So the probability of case 2 coming up is P(93)*H*T^6. Since the 94th flip is H, I believe the first 93 flips can be anything (so long as they don't have 7 tails in a row).

In case 1. . . that's the rest of P(100). It's all the ways of getting to 100 flips that aren't in case 2, so the probability of case 1 coming up is P(100) - P(93)*H*T^6.

Time to put the full answer together. All we're missing is the last flip. In case 1, the last flip can be anything, and in case 2, the last flip has to be H. So, all together!

P(101) = (case1 * 1) + (case2 * H) = [ P(100) - P(93)*H*T^6 ] + [ P(93)*H*T^6 * H] = P(100) - (1-H)*P(93)*H*T^6.

One last step. This is the probability of never having 7 tails, so the probability of getting a streak of 7 tails in 101 flips is 1 - P(101).

I believe the general step is the same as the 101st step, so P(n+1) = P(n) - (1-H)*P(n-7)*H*T^6.

---

I messily wrote up this formula in https://www.online-python.com/:

You can just barely see me calling the function with a value of 15000, representing 15000 coin flips. And it came out as:

If my math is right, your chance of getting 7 tails in a row within 15000 flips is a bit over 2%. Fairly unlucky still, but not vanishingly unlikely!

How many flips would it take to have a 50-50 chance of getting 7 tails in a row at some point? I plugged in random values until the output was about 0.5, and 480000 flips is close.

Reblogging this one for being the only attempt that shows its work and doesn't fall into the naïve solution's overcounting trap. Congrats!

What a lovely example of proof by induction - this is the best website.

Bad: Spending hundreds of pages carefully explaining your meticulously planned worldbuilding.

Also bad: Doing no worldbuilding at all.

Good: Putting in the work of doing the worldbuilding, then refusing to explain or justify any of it, simply mentioning pertinent details briefly and in passing, allowing the reader to glimpse the outline of something vast gliding beneath their narrative point of view's tiny boat.

If one pixel-art precision puzzle platformer starring a red-haired woman who can air-dash wasn't enough, might I suggest.

@minor-locrian replied:

Part of it is that this isn't really anything new to the metroidvanias as a genre. Metroidvanias have always had a great deal of precision puzzle platformer in their DNA; Super Metroid, often cited as as one of the prototypes of the genre, explicitly uses movement tech which is only tutorialised long after it's initially acquired as part of its progression schema, which is why it's so open to sequence breaking – using advanced movement tech before the game actually teaches it to you on subsequent runs is part of the intended experience.

It's less that this sort of thing has historically been absent from the genre, and more that it's been downplayed in recent years due to the popularity of more combat-heavy "soulsvania" subgenre. The present shift in emphasis toward the precision puzzle platformer side of the equation in current and forthcoming titles is largely a return to form – though it will be interesting to see how far the pendulum swings. We may well end up with a generation of metroidvanias with an even stonger puzzle-platforming focus than the classics.

(The other part of it, of course, is that every indie game designer wants to do a metroidvania as their first major project. It's one of the classic blunders. Maddy Thorson got her inaugural metroidvania out of her system fifteen years ago with An Untitled Story, so Celeste was free to explore other genres!)

Crowdfunded tabletop RPG: *has whimsical visual direction*

Me: Okay, you have my attention.

Crowdfunded tabletop RPG: *is clearly a very slightly modified version of Dungeons & Dragons with a sales pitch talking up tiny changes as revolutionary developments in tabletop gaming*

Me: Well, maybe some of those tiny changes will be legitimately novel – I've been surprised before.

Crowdfunded tabletop RPG: *uses the word 'dice' in the singular*

Me: No sale.

You call it "a gross violation of OSHA standard 1915.56(b)(4)", I call it "environmental storytelling".

#I feel like this post itself could be classified as ''environmental storytelling'' (via @llsilvertail)

The real environmental storytelling is all the folks in the notes who just looked up the text of the relevant standard and didn't notice which part of the OSHA regulations it comes from.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

Ah, forever and ever one of the greatest bits ever put to film.

Needs the first part!  It was where I, as a wee lad of 16,  first heard the words “Anarchosyndicalist Commune”

Not even queueing this, making SURE it’s posted for coronation day.

Not even queueing this,

making SURE it’s posted for

coronation day.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.