they’re driving around a fucking cardboard cutout now
Here is a better shot for those saying that the photo was edited.
THAT ONE LOOKS MORE PHOTOSHOPPED??
That’s because it definitely is? It’s a flipped version of this photo taken at the Grenfell Tower Memorial, which I found after googling “Queen Elizabeth Green dress” and following related links until I found this exact outfit and what it was worn to. I don’t even go here, but I also thought it was real weird that she’s lit up like a sunny day in a dark car, so I had to look to satisfy my own curiosity.
No guys, look, see, it’s the same hat and everything. It’s gotta be her.
I told her that you think she’s fake and now she’s pissed.
in retrospect, video rental stores *would* probably still exist today in some capacity had it not been for blockbuster. the nostalgia for the blockbuster browsing experience undermines the reality of how aggressively the chain snuffed out smaller video rental stores and would eventually become notorious for its abusive late fee collection policy once there were no significant competitors standing. the rise of streaming is often attributed to blockbusters demise, but what’s not often recognized is how netflix’ earliest (and most successful) marketing tactics were in fact advertising the absence of the aforementioned terrible late fees as opposed to the convenience of not having to go to the store. I was actually surprised to find out how much of blockbuster’s demise can be attributed to spiraling out of control as it attempted to manage viacom’s ever increasing debts than to the fact that people just naturally gravitated towards streaming (which is not to say that it wouldn’t have happened eventually, but).
see also: borders / barnes & noble with bookstores. amazon’s original pitch was probably more “look how convenient!” than it was “look, you can avoid the awful sterility of the inside of a barnes & noble!” but it’s interesting that with its aggressive tracking and tailoring of recommendations amazon is having machines do (in an impersonal and invasive way) what the staff at a local, non-chain bookstore would do, which is match their selection to your preferences
Barnes & nobles and Borders raced against each other, across the country, to oversaturate the bookstore market. This isn’t paranoia or conspiracy — it’s the same fucking model Starbucks used. Oh, your community supports three bookstores? We’re going to open five, until the little indies go under. Then we’ll close four of our own (sorry not sorry staff, enjoy competing with each other for a handful of positions!) and now you have no other choice. Movie rental chains did the same thing.
And then all these huge chain retailers have the fucking gall to weep and whine as amazon proceeds to wipe them out, and now I live in a small city where you just… can’t get stuff. If you don’t want to use amazon, if you don’t have a car to drive out to the big box on the highway, you literally can’t buy a pair of socks or an ice pack. No more pharmacies, no more bookstores, no more video or music stores… if this was plants and not retailers you’d call it monoculture, and you’d raise an alarm about how prone to catastrophic collapse monocultures are.
Ohhh that last line.
So, uh, fun fact – where I live a few years back a regional grocery chain bought 90% of the local grocery stores in the region. If you were in Northwestern Wisconsin, slowly but surely everything became a Gordy’s. There were places where you’d have to drive an hour to get to a town where the grocery store WASN’T one. Even the towns like mine (Eau Claire) which were big enough to have variety had Target, Walmart, a Festival Foods, one Woodmans, and FIVE Gordy’s.
And then one day Gordy’s went out of business.
Like Almost. Every. Single. One. Closed.
They had over expanded and overspent, and the whole company collapsed, and suddenly there just weren’t any grocery stores AT ALL. It was nuts. Folks had to drive twenty miles to buy food. My town literally lost half the stores for a population of 60,000 – and we had the only open stores for a lot of local towns too. Lines were nuts some times of the day especially at the ones near the highway.
Now things have come back – new companies opened stores back up in places – but not everywhere. Like my neighborhood still doesn’t have a grocery store years later where our’s closed.
It’s very, very bad when one company takes over everything
It’s very, very
bad when one company takes
over everything
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
i understand the whole “it’s offensive to ask a woman if she’s on her period just because she’s nervous” thing but i also think we should start saying more that yes, periods can in fact make you tired and nervous (and you’d be nervous too if you were going on about your daily activities while bleeding and battling with cramps) and maybe instead of making an unfunny joke about it you should try to be more sympathetic towards someone who’s clearly having a difficult day for reasons outside their control. like idk i think i should be able to say “yeah today i’m super tired because my period just started” the same way i’d say “yeah i’m super off today because i slept badly / have a headache / whatever” and have guys just go “okay fair” instead of acting either like i said the most icky and disgusting thing ever or like it’s okay to make an unfunny sexist joke about it
Fun fact. The short pants nandor was wearing to the gym in s3e2 of What We Do in the Shadows was what iranian athletes used to wear in a ‘zoorkhaneh’, where they practiced a ritualistic form of martial arts. You could say a zoorkhaneh is a very old, very traditional gym for iranians and seeing those pants on nandor in this episode was fucking hilarious.
shared this on twitter (because i LOVED this fact) and the costume designer for the show replied this:
Most corporate social media accounts use memes to try and appear hip with the kids so they’ll buy their product but the Sparknotes twitter account is clearly just run by a literature geek who was told they could make memes about old books and is having the time of their life doing just that
