deadsprout:

At first Netflix said, come write for us. We’ll save your cancelled shows and write about whatever niche story you want. Our algorithm says people will watch it!

Then a few years later they said, regardless of our promises or contract obligations we are cancelling shows after two seasons without telling anyone. Turns out no matter how loved a show is, we get less subscriptions after the second season.

How many subscriptions did we bring you? Netflix won’t say.

So writers started writing two season shows. Just give us two seasons, Netflix. Like you promised.

Then Netflix said, oops sorry! Turns out your show didn’t premiere at #1 and the views in the first day weren’t what we wanted so we’re cancelling your second season.

What were the numbers? How many people watched our show? Netflix doesn’t say.

Then, they did something extra special. They started taking shows and splitting their first season into two halves. Inside Job was not two seasons. It was one season split in half.

Oops! Sorry! The second half of your first season didn’t do as well as the first half, so now your show is cancelled!

Why? How many people? How much money? These companies are making cash hand over fist and they refuse to tell people the truth: people loved your show. Loved it. But some corpo exec wanted an infinite money making machine. Do you know how long shows are in production for before you watch them? Years. Like, 5+, even 10+ years. And Netflix gives it less than a week before they decide whether you’re getting cancelled.

Support #WGA Support #SAGAFTRA

sentimental-apathy:

secondbeatsongs:

somehow instead of saying “as a treat”, I’ve started using the phrase “for morale”, as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.

and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.

I’m not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me

I will eat this five guys burger and Cajun fries, for morale.

gracierry:

we need to find a way to shutup tiktok skincare girlies

foone:

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.

anais-ninja-bitch:

anais-ninja-bitch:

majortomwaits:

fuck it, Toshiro Mifune fancam set to Kate Bush

hey op, what’s it like being a goddamned genius?

every so often, someone reblogs this from me and not OP (hi @majortomwaits!) and i get to look through the notes before i go cry bc mifune was So Handsome. highlights include:

• young folk who have never beheld him discovering his beauty
• lesbians and straight men saying “if i had to pick a dude”
• wailing and gnashing of teeth, generally
• “this was BEFORE stranger things, the vibes are that strong”
• (My New Favorite) HE IS SO GENDER (y'all are so right, the man Performed Masculinity like no other, but then The Vulnerability)
• agreeing with me that OP has the biggest, juiciest brain ever
• Lucas wanted him for Obi-Wan Kenobi *rolling in the deep plays in the background*

corvidjuice:

Job applications: I am very passionate (true!) about normal and useful things (lie.)

beggars-opera:

beggars-opera:

beggars-opera:

roomba-with-knives-taped-to-it:

Guys we gotta up our game the Georgians said fuck more than us

Having looked through historic googlebooks many a time and been frustrated by how difficult it is to search in this time period, this chart is most certainly due to the algorithm not properly picking up the “Long S” which was an f-like character used in place of an s especially in 17th and 18th century printing.

The rules of when the short and long s’s are used are somewhat complicated to modern people, but they are almost always at the beginning of words, never at the end, and if there is a double s sometimes they are combined and sometimes not:

99% of the time the word actually being used is “suck” or “sucking.” It actually shows up a lot as a word used to describe babies who were still nursing. In texts from this period the word “suck” will almost always read as “fuck.” This makes some of these auto-transcriptions absolutely brilliant in hindsight:

If you search for the word “fuck” in googlebooks within this time frame, you get hundreds of pages of entries like this. For example, this Shakespeare anthology:

This is not to say that people in the 18th century didn’t find this hilarious, I’m sure they did, but f-bombs were not being dropped in classic literature at the time. If they do show up, like in this 1785 slang dictionary: it is almost always bleeped out:

The other 1% of the fucks in 18th century books are, of course, not bleeped out because they are in Ye Olde Porn, of which there is a surprising amount on googlebooks.

#labor solidarity with the duck fucker

I should also note if it wasn’t clear that the immense dropoff just after 1800 is when the long s stopped being used in print, and the reemergence was in the mid-late 20th century when people DID start dropping f-bombs in literature

kushblazer666:

despazito:

despazito:

despazito:

theres something that feels very colonial/imperialist about superfood fads

the idea that a rare and exotic grain or berry from some pristine Ecuadorian mountain or a salt slab from “the himalayas”(those are all mined in Pakistan) will suddenly cure you with their magical benefits is all pseudoscience. eating more fresh produce is definitely good but the “magical nutrients” of those superfoods are no different than common produce, and there’s no food that makes you slimmer that’s not how calories work, its snake oil. and it causes damage from overfarming and making a once staple food in a community inaccessible when its value soars, leaving them open to predation from food giant.

anyways i’m just tired of Bethany from facebook bragging about “discovering” the health magic of some new plant from cambodia or whatever, but in reality it’s advertisers making this shit tantalising to justify an insane price markup of a superfood and playing to that colonial mindset that things from a foreign far away land used traditionally by its natives is instantly mystical and cool so you want it. frankly it reminds of the victorian’s egyptomania craze when people believed in the health properties of mummies

bethany should try pegging instead

a-queer-seminarian:

lunasong365:

plurdledgabbleblotchits:

silent-mindfulness:

They forget to mention that the industrialist also eventually caught all the fish severely depleting and eventually destroying the balanced ecosystem.

and that the industrialist had to create a market for the fish by advertising.

ID: An excerpt from “Timeless Simplicity” by John Lane that reads,
The industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe.
“Why aren’t you fishing?” asked the industrialist.
“Because I’ve caught enough fish for the day.”
“Why don’t you catch some more?”
“What would I do with them?”
“Earn more money. Then you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. That would bring you money to buy nylon nets, so more fish, more money. Soon you would have enough to buy two boats, even a fleet of boats, then you could be rich like me.”
“What would I do then?”
“Then you could sit back and enjoy life.”
“What do you think I’m doing now?” / end ID

This reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s descriptions of Indigenous harvesting & fishing practices that looked like laziness to colonizers (extra paragraph breaks added by me for accessibility):

‘ Early colonists on Turtle Island were stunned by the plenitude they found here, attributing the richness to the bounty of nature.

Settlers in the Great Lakes wrote in their journals about the extraordinary abundance of wild rice harvested by Native peoples; in just a few days, they could fill their canoes with enough rice to last all year.

But the settlers were puzzled by the fact that, as one of them wrote, “the savages stopped gathering long before all the rice was harvested.” She observed that “the rice harvest starts with a ceremony of thanksgiving and prayers for good weather for the next four days. They will harvest dawn till dusk for the prescribed four days and then stop, often leaving much rice to stand unreaped. This rice, they say, is not for them but for the Thunders. Nothing will compel them to continue, therefore much goes to waste.”

The settlers took this as certain evidence of laziness and lack of industry on the part of the heathens. They did not understand how indigenous land-care practices might contribute to the wealth they encountered.

I once met an engineering student visiting from Europe who told me excitedly about going ricing in Minnesota with his friend’s Ojibwe family. He was eager to experience a bit of Native American culture. They were on the lake by dawn and all day long they poled through the rice beds, knocking the ripe seed into the canoe. “It didn’t take long to collect quite a bit,” he reported, “but it’s not very efficient. At least half of the rice just falls in the water and they didn’t seem to care. It’s wasted.”

As a gesture of thanks to his hosts, a traditional ricing family, he offered to design a grain capture system that could be attached to the gunwales of their canoes. He sketched it out for them, showing how his technique could get 85 percent more rice. His hosts listened respectfully, then said, “Yes, we could get more that way. But it’s got to seed itself for next year. And what we leave behind is not wasted. You know, we’re not the only ones who like rice. Do you think the ducks would stop here if we took it all?” Our teachings tell us to never take more than half. ’