:watching:

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.

A clear, specific objective for the public to fight for - criminalizing wage theft via WorkReform

this is my spidersona, s-tired-man. its inspired by when im tired and in bed

people are so annoying about strikes like they’ll say they support the workers and then complain about how it’s inconveniencing them. please explain to me, in your own words, what you think a strike is and how it’s effective, I’d love to know

If anyone wants to know where the UK is currently at, disability campaigners have lost a battle over making it a legal requirement for high-rise flats to have an evacuation plan for disabled residents.

This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:

"Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?"

Yeah, I remember. And I'm sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.

No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that's a very good thing.

see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles

International cooperation is actually so effective that most people don’t even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it can’t solve anything.

Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.

We don't talk about acid rain because there isn't any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.

We don't talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.

On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there's nothing to notice. But don't be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.

Now it's time to do that thing again and make sure that we don't kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.

i’ve been having terrible back ache for a week now, but i just did this and i heard a loud POP!!!… back ache is gone folks

i have this on my office wall and gave a copy to the front desk staff who also put it on their wall.

I recently discovered laundry stripping and y’all, no matter how much of a crock of shit you think fast fashion is, you’re underestimating.

[image ID: a screenshot of the notes on this post, featuring several people indicating they want to know more. End ID.]

OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself “necessary” is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?

Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.

Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (I’ve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, there’s a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. I’ve been going for 12-24.

What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.

Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.

You will notice I didn’t suggest any further pretreatment, and that’s because 1) you don’t want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.

When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatment…to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to “well, it’s old” dinginess. I was planning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. “I need to reshape it” is nothing.

Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but we’ve been trained to believe it’s all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is “normal wear and tear” and can’t be fixed.

It’s utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from “I keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasons” to “I could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectable”! The pajama bottoms I’m wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!

I do not know how often you’re supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention it’s way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I don’t wear white, so I can’t test the “it will make whites look almost-new as well” claim, but I’ve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.

Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.

Go forth. Rejuvenate your clothing. Strip your laundry.

The Ring: If I had a quarter for every time a hobbit picked me up, I’d have two quarters.  The Ring: Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Of all the bearers of Sauron’s ring, 4 of them were hobbits.

I was wrong. It’s 5. Not 4

The lineage of ring bearers is as follows.

I love how Deagol counts as a ring bearer even though he had it in his possession for all of like five seconds

He held it for the rest of of his life!

[Image description: Tweet by @banalplay saying “but something happened then that the ring did not intend. it was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable: a hobbit, the same fuckin thing that just had it for like 500 years.” End Image Description.] Link to original here. Otherwise reblogging for the final rb there, which made me cackle.

From the ring’s perspective:

1. Home, the finger of my creator and other self.

2. Well, I don’t like it but I can work with this. Cause some trouble, get some revenge, find my way home, this is fine.

3. What the fuck is you?

4. Right personality, wrong species, I don’t know what you are but I hate you and I don’t know why you’re so resistant to my powers.

5. NO NO NO there are goblins everywhere how did I find another one of THESE horrible things. This one’s even more resistant than the last one and also disgustingly nice. I suffer.

6. Listen, I’ll cooperate, just get me the fuck out of this hellhole full of small cheerful people my power doesn’t work on properly. No, not like that. I hate you. Please stop. 

7. FUCK

8. (Frodo again) I still hate you with every molecule of my mortal form but at least you’re not number seven. Think I’m starting to get through finally. 

9. (Smeagol again) YES it’s you I actually missed you now get me back to the Master and NO FUCK NO I HATE YOOOOUUUUU…. *fzt* 

you CHAIN The One Ring?! you chain it like the prisoner?! oh! OH! trauma! deep psychological trauma for hobbits for One Thousand Years!

Heh. :)

Me: *scrolls past this post*

Me: Oh my god it's a FORK lift.

Me: *begrudgingly scrolls back up to reblog*

happy 12th to the single greatest video of our generation

Happy 13 years to a video that never fails to cheer me up.

Haters be like

“It’s totally possible to make a path that goes through every door exactly once”

Idk if I did it right

sorry!

it’s true you can’t draw one continuous line that would do the trick. but if the kitty and bunny set out by going through the doors they’re marked beside and each walked the certain way their colored arrows show at the same time their “collective path” as a team would go through each door only once. The moral of the story is actually about friendship , and cooperation, because in this world there are tasks you can’t do on your own.

im just fucking with you i’m pretty sure this has no right answer

i concocted a solution with a 100% mortality rate

Stop being so incredibly funny on my impossible puzzle post

You can switch the tracks so the trolley will kill one person, or you can allow it to attempt the fruitless crusade of running over each person in the maze only once.

all in a days work! *passes out*

My indecisive butt, walking in and being faced with having to make a decision, immediately leaving

oOoOoooo I’m a ghost!

Fire

dude my house

What I love about tumblr is when we see a logic problem meant to be frustrating and/or unsolvable, we almost reflexively try to destroy it.

This website’s userbase is a chimp chewing through a Chinese finger trap

of course lgbt people like horror. what did you think lgbt stands for? lycanthropy gore blood terror

anyone remember that book by the curious george authors abt the transgender kangaroo

:)

There's a phase that small kids go through, when they've just learned how to talk enough to have something sembling an intelligent, intellectual argument. They like to practice this by wanting to disagree about anything - mainly general statements that were not 100% perfectly waterproof. If you tell a 4-year-old that bananas are green when they're raw, and they turn yellow when they're ripe, there's a good chance that they'll give you that "well that can't be right" frown, and start to argue. Surely not all bananas that are yellow are always ripe.

Unfortunately humouring them about these arguments is very important for their development and a great opportunity to teach them more about how the world works, so you'll sometimes end up arguing about things like these, and every single time when you explain that's not how something works, they'll come up with another argument starting with "but what if-", until you are forced to admit that yes, if someone did for some reason take one single green banana, spray-paint it yellow and then expertly textured it to look just like a ripe banana, and then break into a grocery store in the middle of the night to slip that one painted banana into the display of ripe, edible bananas, then that one specific yellow banana would not be ripe and ready to eat.

As far as the child is concerned, this means that your entire initial statement was false, and you were wrong and they were right. Their need to be correct about something has been satisfied. Fortunately, most children grow out of this phase eventually.

The ones that manage to survive into adulthood without growing out of it end up on Twitter.

A lot of trans spaces hate masculinity soo bad it’s unreal. I knew an AMAB nonbinary person who, to those who had never done the gender rodeo before, looked strikingly like a cis man. They were big, broad, with a thick scruffy beard. They dressed masculinely. It was clear by talking to them for even a second that their masculinity was incredibly queer, but to most people they wouldn’t read that way, even with pronoun pins displayed proudly on their chest.

They described themself as “soft masc” and their gender felt very similar to me to so many butches I had met. They toyed with the label themself. Their attraction to women fell under a pretty sapphic umbrella and in plenty of cases were welcomed by queer women, trans and cis alike.

But often they felt more comfortable in transmasc spaces because, as was apparently a cardinal sin in many transfemme spaces, they liked their masculinity.

They got accused of faking being trans. They were implied to be stealing space from trans women. And then accused by wlws of being a predatory cis man invading space to get to women. They constantly had to walk a narrow path to not be seen as something sinister because they weren’t feminine.

Because masculine is seen as equivalent to “man” and “man” is bad. It’s predatory and violent only ever and always.

And over and over and over and over again anti-masculinity folks claim that this stance protects women and transfemmes. But you are never ever ever going to be normal about “women and nonbinary folx” if you hate masculinity so bad! You will never be normal about butches. You will never be normal about transmascs. And you will never be normal about ANYONE who is AMAB. Even the feminine ones.

A trans woman who is a masc lesbian is going to be a predator to you. A trans woman who doesn’t pass well enough for you is going to be a predator to you. A trans woman who LIKES her masculinity or masculine features is always gonna be a faker trying to evilly sneak into your sacred spaces.

Cis women for sure push this shitty narrative, as do trans men and transmascs who think they’re falling on their sword for Women™️ to atone for the sin of being masculine or worse, men; but oof so do trans women and transfemmes who think policing binary gender conformity will protect them.

You love to see it. (Not the destruction of trees, obvs, but shitheads meeting their oncoming comeuppance at the hands of trees.)