Part 1 of Nimona as quotes from my friend group’s “no-context-quotes” discord server channel & other assorted nonsensical conversations i’ve had (both featuring @duolingocaticon <33)
everyone's saying it but yeah the new tumblr desktop layout is complete garbage lmao
yknow what i really can't fucking stand. how every social media now feels like it's designed for mobile first but then subsequently there is NO design for desktop and they just kinda slap a mobile interface onto a widescreen canvas and fill it with a solid color. like why is what feels like 60% of my dashboard just negative space on a 16:9 monitor. the entire thing is so fucking claustrophobic and just bunched together. use the space!!!! why are the timeline switcher tabs at the top of the screen getting cut off!!! you could fit all of them!!!
imagine explaining to a sweet old lady with butterscotch in her purse all the context behind what’s going on in this screenshot
This is deliberate. Greg Abbot killed these people.
for those that didn't see this bit of news: abbot and his cronies squashed city mandates that outdoor workers have water and shade breaks right before the summer heat waves rolled in.
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.
