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I am one of these people who recently created an account to give it a look. My entire feed was dominated by anime drawings and people eulogising how good Bluesky is because ???. I could not find anything I was actually interested in. I have not been back.


So how much time did you spend looking for feeds and people who match your interests?

There are curated/automated feeds on many topics:

https://bsky.app/feeds


Even those do no justice.

I have been using BlueSky since private invites and with the recent influx it has taken away anything coherent within.


Someone did it - October 1st 12:36AM


https://x.com/fulligin/status/1841022534848036949/photo/1

> As of 12:30am PST I have located the Box and successfully executed a Rickroll Injection Attack on the target system. Out of respect for the artist I will not be revealing the Box's location, but for any veteran Mission resident only a couple obvious locations exist.


Living the meme


I think UK and US department stores are actually very very different. UK department stores generally only stock super high end designer gear, and sales / coupons are very very rare.


Agreed.

These negative comments seem way off base to me. I wonder if they have ever been to John Lewis or Debenhams?

I really miss department stores and I'm sad that they're disappearing. I have positive experiences using them.


The flag ship stores, the Harrods, the Harvey Nichols might fit the high-end description but the ones that have gone, the Debenhams, C&A, BHS etc. did not.

A lot of the "branded" goods were more like the first OP said - just a print or a label with some credibility like Levis, Diesel, Calvin Klein, Armani but on indifferent quality stuff you would never see in a high-end store from the same brand - likely from the same factories filling up super-market own brands but at 1/5 the price.

The sales were also a very big thing, especially the big dates like Boxing Day, New Years or Easter - it was a common habit to only buy clothes once a year. All those sales got gamed though, they would ship-in special tat to put on rails at 70% off for Dec 26th rather than actually discount their products and then they started before Christmas, and then from "Black Friday" and then from before "Black Friday"...

Yet I still miss them too. I hate fashion/shopping but clothes are sensual, they rest against the skin for years and the difference between good and bad is materials, craftsmanship and fit whereas an online jpg of a black t-shirt and a review of "my husband says it's ok" really tells me nothing at all. I find online browsing, deliveries and returns more time-consuming and stressful than a rare shopping trip.


I think that what you're describing is more like the "failure mode" of these stores - nowadays they are basically selling crap with labels, but in the 80s and 90s I don't think that was the case. It'd never be the same quality as a top end boutique of course, but it wasn't tat either.

Or maybe that's just nostalgia!


Tat? Tattoo?


When I think of heyday US department stores I think of Macy’s, Sears, Carson Pirie Scott, Montgomery Ward, Nordstrom, and I’m sure offers I’m forgetting.

Of course those are all either shells of their former selves or gone entirely.

Macy’s might have been the last high end department store in the US (that I’m aware of), but even 10 years ago going into their flagship Chicago location felt like walking into a K-Mart. I don’t know if I’d consider stores like Saks to truly be department stores.


These are gone from many markets due to the race to the bottom. They cut the quality out of clothes so they could make more per item without paying attention to the simple fact that quality is what brought people into the store.

At the end, they all sold the same junk sourced from the same places, but with different labels sewn into them. Consumers saw no value in paying a lot extra for something they could get for a lot less somewhere else. Thus, department stores outside of big cities vanished.

The same thing happened to malls. They used to be full of locally owned businesses that offered a variety of goods. Now, they are all the same handful of stores selling the same things you can get for a lot less online. Even worse, nearly all of them offer a low rent experience because there are only a handful of stores left operating in each one. Seeing a building full of dark and closed stores screams economic decay. Who wants that experience?


> At the end, they all sold the same junk sourced from the same places, but with different labels sewn into them

There has got to be a way to get good fabrics some other way even if they cost more. Merely going to a fancier store doesn't seem to work, because as you say they tend to use lower common denominator material suppliers.


You go to specialty stores depending on what you're looking for. They may not be really high-end but I don't have a real argument with brands like Patagonia for the most part for things like outdoor clothing. For dress clothing, something like Joseph Banks really isn't bad and you get tailoring as needed.

And I'm sure there are plenty of even higher-end stores at least in big cities. I'm not into "fashion" as such so can't really speak to boutiques along Fifth Avenue or wherever.


You have to be able to determine the quality yourself.

Find these things at actual boutique retail locations which are rather hard to find, or individual manufacturers direct to consumer website, and to find those... I don't know, it's not easy.


I think I somewhat know how to do this, i.e. feel a fabric and gauge its thickness and weave. What I don't know is how to search for it. What do you filter to get the thicker, densely woven cotton like polo shirts used to be made of in the 80s, instead of thin see-through half synthetic stuff so common today?

Wondering if there are technical specs for this like there are e.g. for paper with their "24 lb paper" etc.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staple_(textiles)

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-a-long-...

You probably won't find it unless you do a lot of work to reach out to industry contacts and are willing to cough up a lot of money.

The market just doesn't exist, most people are satisfied with Costco/Uniqlo/H&M/Old Navy clothing for 95% of their needs, and maybe Lulu/Nordstroms for something a little more fancy.


I was born in the late 90s and I only remember malls with big brand stores.

Maybe there was like 1 independently owned store at my local mall even I was a kid.

It’s a ghost town now.


I think the 80s was a big period of change from what malls were to what malls are now. My beard is only half grey, I wasn’t there for that.

I was born 10 years before you and I remember in the 90s smaller malls still having one-off and quirkier shops, but many of the bigger ones were already full of the same chain stores. Eventually the smaller ones closed or followed suit, until now even the bigger ones have met the same fate, it just took longer.


I’m curious why you don’t consider Saks a department store.

Do you feel the same about similar stores generally considered upmarket of Macys? Bloomingdales, Nordstroms (which you did mention), Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, to name a few.

YMMV but I wouldn’t consider Macys to be a “high end” store.


As a kid I loved getting the Sears catalog before Christmas. I would pour over that thing looking for something I might be able to convince my mom to get me for Christmas. Thank you for the pleasant memory :)


The Macy's at 34th street in NYC is the flagship and it's still going strong. I went last week, lots of nice stuff.


That’s good to hear. The impression I get is that Macy’s outside of NYC is basically gone, in spirit if not physically.

It’s a shame because they took over the Marshall Field building in Chicago (another department store I forgot to mention) which is a gorgeous historic building, so it was kind of nice when Macy’s moved in and fixed it up. Last time I was there it felt like a last-mile warehouse for their online delivery business. Same thing happened to the State St. Sears store just a block away.


Does Primark count as a "department store"? TK Maxx? Or, since the closure of Debenhams and BHS, are we down to John Lewis (true archetype of the department store that sells everything), M&S, and the occasional Harvey Nicks?


I'd class Primark etc as fast fashion stores really - in my mind department stores are Harvey Nicks and Harrods etc


Harrods is kind of an exception as it's a single store that's always positioned itself at the very highest end of retail. It will probably outlast most other retailers so long as it retains that cachet.


In major US cities, there is sometimes one department store that meets this qualification, like San Francisco, Chicago, or New York, but even those are in decline.

>super high end designer gear

In theory this is what they're trying to project, but what it actually is around here is designers who were high end decades ago who have since dumped their quality and started selling to K-Mart. First you start selling to the rich, then you start selling to teenagers, then you put your label on anything hoping the symbol has some small value left.


"only stock super high end designer gear"

I don't think that applied to BHS or Debenhams - both long gone though....


I have a feeling that 123 Healthy Street, Health City, USA is not actually a real place


As a UK user I find Kagi returns results from Australia far too often which is a super weird issue DDG used to have as well


We're coming to take over mate. It's the start of the reverse colony


I'm a UK Kagi user and do not have this issue.

Perhaps it is your IP range? Do you have the same problem on mobile and broadband?


It happened at both work and home - my region was always set to United Kingdom and it would still decide I want localised Australian results sometimes.

It may have been fixed since I last used it of course - I just didn't find the results provided by Kagi any better than DDG to keep paying.


You very much can delete the app separately to Instagram, what a weird headline


But not your account



I mean I'd like to find a way to discover other people's websites who also just do it for fun rather than websites that seem to solely exist to scrape pennies and/or data from people.


Some possibilities:

https://search.marginalia.nu/

HN profiles, Gemini, and Web rings too.

Mailing lists for projects you may follow¹ could have people's signatures for their personal website.

I can't remember the name, but there was also the idea of having an /about endpoint as a kind of social network.

¹Prerequisite: my own mail server :)


Being from the Uk this headline had a completely different connotation. I’m very disappointed it’s not actually about car boot sales.


Indeed; this article is about what we might refer to in Britain as 'car clamping'.


As an ordinary American, naturally I speak zero languages fluently.

But I have always thought it was quite sensible to have the boot at the opposite end from the bonnet.


Strangely, Americans kept the head part with “hood”, but not the foot part.


I kept putting off making a blog because I thought the market must be saturated by now, who will even care?

It turns out the only one who needs to care is yourself!

I recently bought a random domain and my very first post went up towards the end of April. I kinda knew I wanted to write about gaming, and I feel it’s slowly developing and a core concept is forming every day that goes by.

I don’t really care about up to date gaming news and reviews, it turned out I’m interested looking back on my own history of gaming and talking about anything gaming adjacent I love so I write about those things, and hope other people can relate! I have dabbled in an attempt at an SEO post as well but it was for a game I am actively playing so doesn’t seem too disingenuous!

People shouldn’t get bogged down about what to write, you’ll eventually discover what you want to do the more you actually do it. It’s like a muscle!

And a link if anyone is interested: https://chronodrift.com


please be good... edit: its a turnip


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