how's it going?
54week 1 how’s it going
week 2 say hello to inlo
week 3 strategery and defiance
week 4 a breakfast octopus prequel
week 5 brainstorming with bezos
Hey nice, my account still works. It’s been a few years.
I’ve enjoyed a nice extended career break. Time with with the family has been great. Pandemic not so great of course but it did slow down the clock (or maybe that was all the pasta). 2 years has seemed like 5.
This new work from home productivity is amazing and has me energized. Ecommerce scene is a bit boring but maybe there’s still room to explore things. Web3 looks like a joke but at least has people thinking fresh about the open web (and wordle wow!) Community has always been a magical underutilized element and I love seeing it spark to life organically.
How are you all doing over here at Meh?
- 24 comments, 58 replies
- Comment
Turns out folks work happier when they’re not
spendingwasting hours on the road commuting.Retail brick-and-mortar is where it’s at, right?!?
Mediocritee offers catshirts on a regular enough basis, so I haven’t had to complain to you in years.
@narfcake all you had to do was ask a few times
Hey, Snapster! Nice to see ya’!
I am on the precipice of abandoning VMP. Any reason to keep it? Will the loss of my payment force you back into the workforce?
(and wordle wow!)
@kdemo You know I’m never one to outright defend the VMP (or even the broader membership) program. I’m appreciative and honored by the loyalty but I also respect frugality.
I’m making some moves here to gather a team. We’ll brainstorm for how to freshen up the place and membership is definitely a valuable resource. You and others at the precipice of quitting will certainly be our motivation!
@snapster
/giphy reeled back in
@kdemo @snapster
@snapster
My skies were black, but you made them gray again!
I didn’t realize it’s been two years. Time flies when you are having fun, I guess.
For a re-animation of Meh, I suggest you need a theme song, and I recommend the Jeffrey Bland classic: http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/DP/2007/11/324_1_Jeffrey_Bland_-_My_Skies_Were_Black_But_You_Made_Them_Grey.mp3
This song is not exactly on anyone’s top forty, so I imagine the rights could be acquired cheaply (maybe for a freight-paid IRK or two??)
I think the tone of the song perfectly matches the expectations we’ve all learned to have for items from meh.com and the whole Mediocre shtick.
The lyrics are printed on the back cover:
[I’d think a minuscule commission on any increased sales, attributable to implementation of this suggestion, would be warranted. That’s right, a slice of the pie. :>) I’m from Texas, so I like pecan.]
@phendrick but there already is a theme song.
@Ignorant That video was from before my time here. And, apparently, they haven’t though very much of that “theme”, since it has not been
thrown in our facesreplayed daily since then.And, what was the theme of that theme? They try harder? Doesn’t pretty much every business tell you that? Meh.
Well hello there!
I agree that WFH is amazing, no commute, limited expenses for gas, eating out, work clothes, etc. My new office attire of yoga pants and a tshirt are much more comfy and I have the added benefit of a fun and furry office mate who enjoys a good scratch behind the ears!
The forum remains a place of solace, especially after the last two years. It was about the only constant in my life. A place we could all go to gripe, moan or give thanks for personal wins. The commarade is fantastic. Thanks for creating this special space!
And thanks for the Pasta Drop, you have no idea how much fun many of us had with your experiment. So many laughs and donations!
Personally, I miss the silly videos. I don’t think there has been a new one in a while. Are there plans to publish new ones in the future.
Anyway, be well!
@tinamarie1974 thank you it’s really great to hear that the community was enjoyed. I figure it’s a pretty tight knit group these days and have often felt guilty for not following along. I guess having a 2 year old daughter I can give myself a bit of a pass. Anyways, glad to be back.
Very pleased you liked Pasta Drop. It was a great distraction during those first few months of scary times but I also felt conflicted about having a fun silly project with that pandemic backdrop. Was glad to get those truckloads shipped out and over with!
Noted on the videos. Matthew is a great contributor. I have a ton of nostalgia for all his Woot & Meh content!
@snapster a two year old is a more than valid reason! They are exhausting.
One positive side effect from the Pasta Drop I would love to share. I have a now 10 y/o niece who is Autistic. Like a bunch of kiddos on the spectrum she is very specific about what she is willing to eat, spaghetti was never one of those items. Coming from a Sicilian family my mom was always frustrated that enjoying spaghetti dinner was never possible.
I am not sure why, but something about the entire experience, so many boxes, all the laughter and fun, etc she actually ASKED TO TRY THE PASTA one day. Mom whipped up a batch of butter noodles and SHE LOVED it. At that point she wanted spaghetti every day for a while. I ended up ordering her own PD and she was so excited to have the boxes delivered to her house. I wanna say she got something like 80 lbs
Anyway after that we have gotten her to try a few things here and there. We have added chocolate, ice cream (I know, not health but a win) bacon, sausage and even raw spinich. Seems your PD had more positive results than you may have know, so thanks
@tinamarie1974
Wait. Wut? We’re supposed to wear pants too? Jeez. I gotta pay attention to those memos.
@mike808 I think it is optional actually
@mike808 @tinamarie1974
@snapster @tinamarie1974 Awesome story about your niece…I love how something innocuous can lead to such great results.
OWLS! TOWELS! JOWLS! AWESOME!
What is a breakfast octopus? Hello.
@LJeAYsy4LoqxEC The origins goes back to when Amazon bought Woot.
https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2014/july/matt-rutledge-woot-has-a-new-deal-mediocre-corporation/
@narfcake beat me to it!
@LJeAYsy4LoqxEC - Short version: when Matt was in negotiations with Jeff Bezos to sell Woot, Bezos ordered octopus for breakfast. When Matt asked why he wanted Woot, Bezos compared it to the octopus, something he had not tried yet.
Matt has been breakfast octopus ever since.
iirc
Thanks guys, yep that’s it. Technically it was the first meeting after the deal had closed, fall of 2010. Never thought it would be a memorable story for others besides myself!
@narfcake @kdemo @extraMedium @snapster
Thanks for the info! Fun approach to life. Octopus is something I’ve cooked once but did it no justice. The times I’ve had it made me want it more though. I’ll have to watch that youtube and think about doing it myself sometime.
I got a tattoo.
@sammydog01 I climbed a tree once.
@ExtraMedium Was the view nice?
@sammydog01 Mostly leaves, but it was fall so, yeah.
@sammydog01 What’s the tattoo?
@snapster Do you have any tattoos?
@ExtraMedium @sammydog01
@sammydog01
What did you get? Is it picture worthy?
@ExtraMedium @sammydog01 I do not. I have silent generation parents and I’m genX; maybe we hopscotched the skin ink trends. I’ll have to live through my kids.
I miss your quips on twitter but I get it. The privacy is nice sometimes. I bought a Tesla, but didn’t fall for the FSD scam. Best car I’ve ever drove and it’s fun to bury the accelerator to give yourself a sore neck.
@show_the_maw
You’ll regret passing on the FSD. When it gets approved for commercial use, Tesla will stop selling cars, and only prior FSD owners will be able to be a part of and revenue share from Tesla’s autonomous ride share fleet.
Your FSD Model 3 could be out and about making you money putting Uber and Lyft out of business while you hit refresh waiting for the next Mehrathon to launch (and you still won’t get an IRK).
@mike808 @show_the_maw
The FSD will get approved about a decade after any existing Tesla’s battery pack has gone south. That tech is not even close to real-world random-location ready.
@snapster
Missed your philosophical meanderings.
Sometimes I missed your “biz-speak”.
: )
But a 2-year-old … wow!
Perhaps, only time for practicalities and emergencies; at least until Kindergarten?
Congrats on the time w family. Hope all of you are well.
There has been enough bad news over the past 2 years. You hiring for remote positions???
@somf69 Meracatlyst remote jobs.
Welcome back to the monkey house, or is It Octopu’s house? Who really knows does irk?
Work from home sucks for some of us we just don’t work well there it just doesn’t work I know I’m rambling. I think it’s a great thing for some people and I think for other people it harms their mental physical and Emotional health. We don’t seem to be able to find a way in most places people work for a compromise of any sort… I never had to it for very much and I’m thankful for that that I always had a place to go into work that made a difference.
But it is good for those of you who had a place that it worked for I know I have a friend and they actually closed their office space and hes ecstatic. I’d have been drooling in the mental institution. But then again he wasn’t a fan of the pasta
I did find the time to move all the way up here to Monterey in California … 300 mile move… it’s pretty it’s not so hot as where I used to live and is near the ocean if you care for that.
I miss the occasional randomness of irks and fks for what used to be a few moments of chaos but I don’t really miss mehrathons. I’m going to go back and spell check this stupid ramble that I said into my phone and hope I don’t leave too many serious blunders
You need to set your calendar for like every 3 months and come in and say what’s up peoples.
@Cerridwyn I’m an ADHD hyper focuser so WFH is often a binary great/sucks outcome for me. I’m at risk of continuous distraction but when I am all in on a project, I love it. I hear what you’re saying on the social aspect but it takes me a bit longer before I feel the toll and usually a weekly friends event will do.
@Cerridwyn @snapster someone said ADHD hyper focuser
I was gonna do some fake cheery thing, then some silly thing, then some serious thing about how I’ve been looking for work here in NJ for a year and a half, living off credit cards and running out of things to sell on ebay, then deleted it all because it would be silly and pointless to share with a bunch of strangers, fine taste in retail discount sites that you all have.
@rpglimitbreak
Well, I hope you find work that pays decently and doesn’t suck.
Even tho I’m just a random stranger.
@rpglimitbreak if you are in tech or IT I may help you.
wait… who is @snapster again? i recall the name, and some association with tentacles, but that’s all.
@carl669
You ask that fuckwit question? You do?
/giphy fuckwit tentacles
Just wanted to give a shout out and thank you for checking back on your other “baby”.
Through the years of my association with both woot and now meh I have thoroughly enjoyed the communities. I find it particularly interesting/refreshing that the creative mind behind it is this accessible.
As for the octopus, I totally get that. I’m also one that will look at a menu and order oddball or “one off” things that I haven’t tried before. (Of course JB has WAY more zeros behind his net worth than I do…)
@chienfou thank you for being here through it!
glad to be considered creative (now at 50
)
Yes, I’ll convert my VMP Membership to mehcoin, if that’s what you’re asking.
we’re off!
@snapster This may have been post departure, but one time, Woot sold some dime bags at a decidedly non-dime bag price. $20 + $5 shipping for 100 dimes.
It sold out.
https://www.woot.com/offers/woot-dime-bag
@snapster Wait - is this shitcoin going to have a toothbrush on it? If yes, then the value of what some already own has just gone
updownsideways?@narfcake @snapster OMG How many dime bags were sold?
When I had a shop, I put a dollar bill in the showcase with a price tag of 25¢. It was ages before anyone bought it.
@callow Doing some math:
The only way to have such a spread is that the total would have to be divisible by 10.
Looking at the map, 15 states are lit, with 4 being darker – so possibly more than one sale. 15+4=19, but since 19 isn’t divisible by 10, the likely answer is 20 sales.
@narfcake I looked at the sales but didn’t think to use the map info. Excellent sleuthing!
@callow For over a year, I was tracking shirt sales on a daily basis, so I’ve learned to read the sales stats for numbers. I even figured out how many sales a shirt had (up to 90) after a 24 hour period.
Overall, life’s not too bad.
No one ever told me I HAD to work from home, so I’ve continued to work in my own little corner of cubeville. Things got nice and very quiet for a while. Then all the WFH people started coming back in a few days a week and it’s all loud and people want to like talk to me and stuff. Go back home. I liked it better when I could ignore your emails and IMs for a bit, at least until I could prepare myself for interacting with people again. (I’m kidding…mostly).
The original youth STEM/robotics team I coach was a victim of pandemic related drama (so much drama) but one family wanted to continue and we found a few others so we completely this season and I received an outstanding coach/mentor award at this season’s tournament. That was weird and awesome in a variety of ways. I just want to hang out with other people’s kids and build cool stuff with Lego.
I’ve learned more stuff about church audio and video production than I ever wanted to know but it’s cool and I appreciate that we’re live streaming the weekly service and some of the church meetings (which tend to take place when I’m hanging out with the fifth and sixth graders).
I traveled a bunch if 2020 and 2021…which sounds weird but opportunities came up for both work and personal travel and, being relatively low risk and being around mostly other low risk people I figured it was worth it.
Now I’m trying to declutter my house, convince my cats that the weather will at some point stabilize (they don’t do well with the wild temperature swings we’ve been having here in North Texas) and figure out what I’m going to do for vacation this year.
POPSOCKETS! SPA KITS! POLLY POCKETS! AWESOME!
@gt0163c One of my sons is on a solar car STEM team and it’s my first experience with that sort of thing. It takes a great deal of effort even without pandemic drama! Thank you for doing this in your community and congrats on the coach/mentor award!
@gt0163c Been back at the office since Sep 2020. Now all the new returnees are hogging up the fridge space and taking up valuable bathroom stalls after the morning huddle!
@snapster Thanks for the kind words. Coaching the team is something I really enjoy. We’re the group which toured the warehouse last fall. At competition in late January the team mentioned the tour and how what they learned there helped in the development of their research project. The judges made some positive comments about them having done the field trip. Thanks again to @Koolhandjoe and the rest of the team who made that happen!
@gt0163c @Koolhandjoe @snapster
Warehouse tour! Glad that happened!
I know this isn’t an AMA, but I’m curious. Is Meh.com today what you pictured in your head as the end goal, or is there still some growth/change possible to make it even more meh than ever?
@ExtraMedium Meh is how I pictured it but the internet is not. Overall Meh is smaller than I would have conservatively predicted. While I could see the walled-gardens forming, I figured the open web would thrive simply due to the massive influx of people online. I was wrong (at least in some interim years here). Independent publishers/blogs/cool sites are decidedly lower in number and news of them doesn’t spread as well. Word of mouth was monetized a lot more than I figured we’d let happen.
It might be a catch-22 where scale matters to make it better and you can’t get scale without being better. I’m still not done with ideas that might move the needle.
@ExtraMedium @snapster
intrigued … yes …
in the meantime …
please consider selling meh bags.
please consider occasionally opening up the back catalog at mediocritee to digital-reprint orders (maybe on anniversaries or something). I really want both Flight Path shirts.
please consider selling some official meh plushie octopi, or some plushie irks, or a perhaps plushie versions of an “octopi/irk crossbreeding experimental result”.
@f00l @snapster Kinda like these but Meh branded?
@ExtraMedium @snapster
Actually I was looking for something a bit more unexpected/not-seen-everywhere, and possibly even with a version that’s a bit grotesque
(an alt version where @koolhandjoe has some design input would be a cool varation).
Anyway … isn’t that particular knock-off octopi design (now for sale at every truck stop, it seems) original to TeeTurtle (who is getting ripped off all over the place)?
@narfcake? any comments?
@ExtraMedium @f00l @Koolhandjoe @narfcake @snapster
There’s a fan-convention vendor who’s been selling a really cute kittypus at larger events for a while, and although that precise product isn’t what I’d like to see for this item, an Irk torso with tentacles like Ursula the Sea Witch would be evocative if the Breakfast Octopus icon became more widely associated with Meh. But an Irk plush puppet or an Irk plushie in general would be a good start for a “Meh Inconvenience Store” of Stuff.
Sadly, it’s hard to intentionally stage a noteworthy debacle like the great Schrodinger’s Toothbrush mess, and even harder to get nerdmedia attention drawn to it. (I know what can happen when you get BoingBoinged; it happened to me once about 20 years ago, and my website did a year’s business in three days - which given that it was not usually generating enough to require a daily run to the Post Office, didn’t kill me, but still…)
@ExtraMedium @f00l @Koolhandjoe @snapster Yeah, it’s a TT knockoff.
I do wonder if how active their legal team has been because of all the knockoffs.
https://patents.justia.com/assignee/tee-turtle-llc
For some backstory on TT, read the writeup here from about 5 years ago:
Incidentally, I stopped buying shirts from there because of they changed the blanks. Also I couldn’t find Ramy’s number to congratulate him for 10 years.
I know everybody is focused on the brick and mortar store but are we gonna start to see some fresh new deals on meh? It’s been the same stuff over and over again and getting old. When I joined years ago I remember cool stuff I actually wanted to buy being for sale, now it’s just blah stuff and no variety.
I’m not trying to be mean, I’m just being honest.
@Star2236 Fair. I am not at all focused on the brick and mortar store and the team formed for brainstorming/action here will have nothing to do with it.
Nah, just playin’, dawg. I am doing fine. I love working from home. Luckily for me it is possible in my line of work. We now have an official telecommute policy, so should be able to continue work from home into the future. I got a small promotion, but not really regular raises. Things could be better from an economy and revenue standpoint, but I can’t complain about my situation too much since I’m happy. Could certainly be worse.
I am kinda bored with meh. Maybe I’m more mature now, but I don’t find myself buying much nor visiting very often. Right now we’re in a self-imposed “spending freeze” at home to save up for 2 vacations that are coming up. So that kinda sucks…I like buying things I want.
See you in another few years.
@medz hey there, well I’m glad you saw the thread. I find your boredom perfectly rational. No fast fixes in mind here so I guess even my reply will be boring.
As a relatively recent denizen, there’s a lot of Meh history I know only as Lore, not Experience, but I think the slower-than-expected growth is an offshoot of a bigger trend. The Net is seeing some big ennui factors kicking in. A good bit of it, in my estimation, derives from what I call “|the Virtual Mall Factor”; every information source, every shopping source, every entertainment/infotainment provider follows one of the Accepted Patterns, and the resulting uniformity (and particularly the focus on The Sound Bite and the tendency to use video where text would be better) has made the whole thing, well, BORING. Anyone with enough neurons to change the channel has, at this point, gotten So Damn Tired of the clickbait (in particular) that the urge to just kill the browser and go take a walk or scritch the cat or water the vegetable garden seems far more compelling than trying to find something - ANYTHING - worth looking at online. But at the same time, The Site Which Must Not Be Named has become an automatic check-first for so many people when they need A Thing - but that company’s own search engine is such a fecking Gothic horror that a good many of us search with Google to find out if Big River has the thing rather than going direct to the seller site. And anything that reeks of The Shopping Channel is going to get X’ed in a hurry if it pops up in front of me. (This most emphatically includes all of the video content at Morningsave. I will never look at those items. Not Gonna Happen.)
To its credit, Meh seems allergic to clickbait tactics on the Meh.com site, but complies with and thereby falls victim to the Slime Paradigm issue in the daily spam email that I opted out of immediately.
But I think there’s more to consider in spotting why Meh hasn’t gone as far as it might. From where I sit, a big part of the problem is that while Woot really isn’t Woot anymore, Woot still exists, and trying to be The One True Successor in the face of that is a really tough sell. (Hell, I didn’t find out that Meh existed until a friend told me about it last year. Your observation that word of mouth isn’t doing enough seems correct.) And this lack of word-of-mouth is likely intertwined with and driven by a lack of excitement issue. Trying to pump the same merch on Meh that you pimp on the channels at Morningsave is a loser, really. The two demographics don’t share all that much. Meh needs to have the quirky, sometimes slightly off-target but useful stuff that isn’t perky and pretty and shiny, but works - albeit perhaps in a weird way in some cases. In my estimation, you hit that mark a few times a month, but miss it much more often. And right at the moment, with the supply chains loaded down with pretty much nothing but boring me-too stuff as a result of the Chinese propensity for shipping the same exact item under fourteen hundred alphabet-soup brand names, it’s an excitement desert out there.
Maybe things can change for the better. If Meh can be cajoled along and can find some interesting schmutz to hawk more often, you’ve got a better shot at having the word get out. It worked for Drew Alan Kaplan before there was an Internet to make it possible, after all.
@werehatrack lots of good commentary there and I love the DAK reference.
It feels like ancient history now but in the early and mid 2010s, the continuance of Woot post-acquisition was a low probability. Lots of colleagues still worked there, anxious about culture shock and future employment. Meh established that there was a spiritual successor were Woot to close and it anchored the spirit as a no-frills community based daily deal. While we would have enjoyed a word of mouth boost if Woot were to close, it was never a desired outcome. My team built Woot and we enjoy to this day that it has persevered within Amazon.
MorningSave is a separate channel with a different demographic. It’s a novel strategy that we are proud of and it allows us to continue experimenting in e-commerce. Other than that, it has little spiritual connection to the ethos here.
Ideas are forthcoming. How can we engage our community and add a stream of new friends to the mix. What does the supply chain offer to us that is not boring. What other niches of the market does Amazon have trouble dominating. These are fun challenges to take on again.
@snapster @werehatrack speaking of the word of mouth piece… i do share meh… hell I have your logo tattooed on me. BUT, there’s an incentive for people who know about meh to keep it a secret. Which is to say that when there is a coveted mehrathon with IRKs, it is simply a higher statistical probability of snagging an irk with fewer viewers on the site.
I’m not sure how you could address that.
BTW @snapster, I still love this place.
A year before the pandemic my employers of thirty years retired. A few people asked if I could make the custom window treatments and soft furnishings from home, then a few more and so my business was born. Working in a much, much smaller space is a challenge as is learning the business end of things: Pricing, supplies, taxes, scheduling, etc. but it’s going really well.
I am a huge fan of Wordle and it’s many variations.
Meh is still part of my morning routine, sometimes just a quick click, other times keeping me very entertained far longer.
Nice to see you online again!
/giphy howdy old friend
hey! I’ve word of mouthed you to two people - that’s almost all the people I know. Can’t I get an IRK or something???
Way too late noticing this to contribute properly but, hey, I like necromancy.
Not visiting daily anymore, but still paying for vmp. I’m definitely part of the problem.
It seems like there’s just been less weird stuff, or maybe I just need less stuff now that I never leave the house. Some of the weird food items have been great, and there’s a certain joy to getting a stupid quantity of corn nuts in the mail. I miss some of the old staples, especially knives for some reason. Have been having to buy those at retail. Feels strange.
I miss having things for sale that I needed to go to the forum to figure out if they were any good or not. I do that a lot less often now.