They make sense for musicians who play live frequently and need to be able to create their sound on stage in real time. Ironically, those people more likely to make their setup as small and efficient as possible because 25 marginally different pedals are a huge pain in the arse to haul around and set up every night.
Free is the cheapest price of all, but several hobbies are pretty cheap if you can get integrated into the community.
As a Lego autist, (I refuse to call myself an AFOL I've always thought that was fucking gay) this is the main reason why I have very little interest in buying new sets. There's also an even more autistic reason as to why I don't that has to do with them retiring colors around 20 years ago but I won't torture you with a sped rant about Lego colors that you don't care about. Lego knows that it's main consumer base is adult collectors, it's why piece counts are inflated and why there are virtually zero original Lego themes and most everything released now is from a licensed property like something from the Disney umbrella. I collect vintage Lego because I like the simplicity and creativity of the sets and for le heckin' childhood nostalgia. Yes it's gay to do as an adult, but I enjoy it and try to have some self-awareness about it. Lego consoomers do not, and only care about the newest Rick & Morty overpriced set.
I, for one, am interested in the LEGO sperg. What went wrong? And why did they put Bionicle down?
Lego's portfolio is over 50% licensed themes from the likes of Disney, Harry Potter, capeshit, and random movies. Bionicle had a reboot in 2015 known as G2 but it didn't meet sales expectations or something so that was the final nail for that theme.
The less pedals someone has in their rig the better. I have used a mix of cheap and expensive pedals and price isn't correlated to a pedal's value at all. The $5K+ pricetag on a Klon comes from speculation and hype from Boomers with no personality. Josh from That Pedal Show made a shitty Digitech pedal called the Bad Monkey skyrocket in price when he demonstrated it can sound just like a klon. Easy access to too many tools and equipment kills creativity and makes the magic run dry.
The sales expectations was a"theory" parroted as fact by "lego influencers" but those things were sold out everywhere by me and anyone else I knew constantly, as well as scalped like hell online. I remember hearing talks it might've been Disney tightening the vice they had on Lego to keep the star wars/marvel licenses since they started putting out star wars sets with the same building system and a higher price than the Bionicle g2 sets. I'm betting it's probably the latter because the star wars ones shelf warmed and the Rogue One Jyn Erso sets are still rotting in some discount stores 7 or 8 years later after the cancellation of Bionicle. They aren't making the star wars ones anymore, But they have Marvel ones now the last few years that are like a weird mix of system and Technic/Bionicle parts.
That sounds more reasonable if the G2 sets were always sold out in that manner. I don't remember how shelves looked back then but all I remember was seeing Hero Factory more than G2 sets. Disney bribing Lego sounds more plausible knowing how shady Disney really is.
Every time I take my embroidery project out my husband harasses me about it. After years of working on it he's done the math: our first kid will be in college by the time I finish. Haw haw haw. I tell him, it's better this way. I've done production art. We'd be up to our assholes in "art" if I worked at my peak pace.
I would consider physical sports an outlet for creative expression. When I say creative, I don't just mean art. I do keep thinking about getting a side hustle besides landlording but my first is 24/7 on call and I have to prioritize that.
What you're describing is a flow state.
They also do it with smaller one time production run shit from independent artists or small companies made of said artists which never stops pissing me off whenever I find out some new thing got put out by someone I heard about and developed kind of an interest in.
It's also like 2000 dollars or some insane price like that to fly international for civilians last time I checked post corona world which fucking means only the most cancerous of "influencers" and Californians can afford it half the time, but they also usually get given it for free by some company or organization. I wanted to go to japan as well as a bunch of other countries before a certain age hit and it's now past that timeframe thanks to corona hell and price spike nightmares. I've seen recent travel company ads that do consoomer-ish "qUIrKY" shit acting like Shibuya, one of the most popular places to visit in Japan is some obscure weird place nobody knows about. The recent trend of "influencers" moving to japan and stirring shit up in a way that gets normal tourists without citizenship banned from visiting places and the constant demonization of Japanese culture by said people that move there makes the conspiracy theorist in me think there's big money behind the consoomer-ification of international travel and it's specifically being done in a means to spread the eternal current year california corpo mindset shit globally.
Not to PL too hard as I'm sure this is a global phenomenon but where I live all the super obscure boomer nature spots keep having some bastard show them off on instaberg and then everyone comes and shits them up.
Everyone that lives within a several state wide radius of bughive cities like NYC have to deal with leafers every year for countless decades now I have no doubt it's gotten worse with the rise of instagram and tiktok shit. The "joker stairs" shitshow from a few years back comes to mind where they found the specific random sidewalk alley staircase in NYC and proceeded to just irritate the shit out of the locals.
This is happening to me now and I'm about to delete the app, it's every other video to what basically amounts to an ad for a place I'm already well aware of. I just yesterday saw one for a place that's already crowded enough that I was hoping would settle down over time, so much for that. At least people in the comments felt the same as I do. Tourists are a plague.
I live near a "used to be obscure" spot and I'm constantly photo bombing because fuck these people. I know there's an app now that will crop my frumpy ass out within two seconds, but can't say I didn't try.
Except Japanese tourists who are almost always so polite and respectful of the locals you'd think they were actual diplomats.
Only met one Japanese tourist and you're absolutely right. Another tourist was Korean and he was fascinated with the local history, which is extremely rare. It's refreshing compared to tourists that are disrespectful and throw trash everywhere.
