SlimeyJade

It's me, your favorite slimecat!

Slimey catgirl VTuber!


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

the single chinese factory making "cat fishing rods" changed their product so it is now impossible to get the ones that existed for 30 years that were just a simple fiberglass or plastic rod with a string. the new ones are all the same retractable design and according to the amazon reviews they break within minutes. 4.5-5 stars on all listings


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

Also! remember The Laser Pointer, the one that was obviously made in a single factory in about three styles and then sold under 50,000 brands for the last 30 years? yeah they changed products too.

now the only ones you can buy (in 50,000 brands and 40 shades of anodized aluminum) are almost certainly too powerful to be safe as toys, and they also run off a nonreplaceable lithium pack that will self-discharge about 500 times faster than the AAA or button cell that would sit in your old laser pointer for 5 years without a problem.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

it's cool how, for the last year, about every three weeks I think "oh man my laser pointer and feather toy are so busted, that's why the cats won't play with them, i just need to spend ten bucks and buy new ones" so i go to the store and the entire cat toys section is empty except for a catnip ball; they're out of stock on everything, somehow. then i go to amazon and every single option is visibly unsafe and/or fraudulent. and then i close the window and my cats don't get new toys, and three more weeks go by and i do it again.

do you ever feel like maybe we're at the end, and everything is just a reflection of that fact



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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

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as leftist as i am, as much as i hate Consumer Sludge to begin with, i think the fact that you could walk into a store about 10 years ago and purchase a laser pointer for $5 that would last 20 years and only eat about three alkalines in the process, and now you cannot do that, should be a doomsday klaxon to everyone and i do not fucking understand how people just act like it's normal that literally every single retail store, everywhere, has had half their shelves empty since about 2016

do you think it might be a frog-boiling-pot type situation? like it's just been such a gradual change of little bits here and there getting swapped out and made worse that it's hard to notice it if you aren't made aware?

i think the generation before ours doesn't ENTIRELY realize it because the ones of them that had vaguely sustainable incomes before all this started have some of the last round of goods that actually worked so they've just.... completely missed that this happened

my 15 year old kettle kicked the bucket recently and the new ones seem to last about 2 years before they start acting up. even a garbage microwave from a decade ago was Perfectly Fine. cheap washing machine/dryer? used to be practically invincible.

my dad now has a second place and they've realized everything sucks but still think nothing of it other than "fuckin democrats" so :|

I personally feel its more like, "all this industry was situated in one company that very blatantly kept saying, 'we hate you and will nationalize the stuff you bring here if we feel like it,' and then we had a president saying, 'lets uhhhh leave them,' so they got mad, and then after those 4 years we had plague years that actually wiped things up.

its less like an apocalypse thing and more like... The Consequences Are Roosting, but that's more of a phase than an End.

i wanted some led light strips and ordered a set with a vast majority of 5 star reviews. I plug them in and it starts making a horrible, loud, high pitched whine. I contacted their customer support, they sent me a replacement and apologized for the defect. I plugged in the replacement and it made the exact same sound. So they're just selling a blatantly defective item! and i guess no one cares somehow????

I think this was all inevitable when Walmart hit. The business model of, move into town, outcompete small vendors with prices and quality possible only at scale, when the small vendors fall, even if it takes decades sometimes, then raise prices again, and eventually lower quality because where else are they gonna go... it's fractal. It's happening even to the vendors within Walmart. It will not rest, though it take a century, until everyone is paying as much as they can bear for products that no one would have sneezed at a century ago.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Da Bird is always at the pet store and has attachments you can buy separately when they wear out. I don't even think I've seen a retractable design. (I have seen the ones with a split in the middle which break like nothing, but you can still use half of one okay. Da Bird is one long stick, for the record.)

My cat is in love with Cat Dancers. Who knew cardboard on a wire would be so much fun?

I guess the lesson here is sometimes, brand names really are better.

I'm guessing you're familiar with Mud Bay, and I dunno what the selection is like at their Seattle locations, but their Bellevue location always seems really well stocked and we've gotten a number of good cat toys from them. Of particular note are the real peacock feathers they sell for like, a buck fifty, which both of our cats love and go crazy for. They do get destroyed pretty quick, but hey, they're meant to, and priced accordingly