#FAD Market

[heckyeahponyscans]

A retrospective on the 80s fad toy Wacky WallWalkers

[hentired]

A lot of people are missing the point for that marketing post i think about Barbie / Oppenheimer / Grimace Shake challenges etc.

Its not about not posting about seeing a movie. You can see a movie and tell your friends about it, post about liking it or whatever. That's fine. The problem is that it's becoming a trend to go see these movies or participate in these challenges. People aren't doing it out of intrinsic motivation, but because they want to be part of the trend. This is what makes every corporate marketeer cum their pants.

Marketing is not to cater to people who would watch these movies nonetheless. Its to convince the people who normally wouldn't to do so anyway. Its about making people who don't participate feel left out so they'll go see it anyway and post their pink Barbie-watching outfits on Instagram so everyone else knows they're in on it. Its social manipulation to convince people to be part of something. Its very healthy to be conscious about it when you post about these trends and its also good to remind yourself that you shouldn't do anyone's marketing for them for free.

Again, there's nothing wrong with seeing a movie and posting about it. There is something wrong with making people feel left out for not seeing something and pressuring people to see something to belong in the in group.

[sandboxworld]

Pet Rocks: From 1970s Fad to Interplanetary Travelers

Can you dig it? It’s been half a century since advertising genius (or madman?) Gary Dahl pulled off one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll swindles—except there was no music, just rocks. And not the Rolling Stones kind, either. This guy put a rock in a box, called it a Pet Rock, and laughed all the way to the bank. No, not the Bank of Bedrock—this was cold, hard cash, baby. The Rise of the Pet Rock…

[blondebrainpowered]

Pet Rock creator Gary Dahl became a millionaire from his rock sales in the 1970s. Each rock came in a special box (bottom left) with a detailed instruction manual.

[neon-moon-beam]

The irony of stores selling "stim toys" or "sensory toys" and then blasting pop music really loudly and having bright, fluorescent lights, or even flashing lights...Really seems they think "stim/sensory" means "'satisfying' to watch on the video app du jour" and not what it actually means.

[mars-ipan]

do you folks remember when food youtube was good

[sapphia]

people who think that ai can replace writers in fields like literature, tv, film etc are commenting on how dull and shallow they think modern consumers and their mediums are rather than how possible it is to actually is to do

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

The opposite of this is those little niche businesses like Pepper Palaces that you wonder how they’re possibly making ends meet.

i love commercial real estate that is essentially zoned exclusively for momentary fad businesses that will go bankrupt. hmm, ok, we are the 8th comic book store in this zip code, and, fuck, uhh, ok nobody is going to any comic book stores anywhere, hmm, ok, vape lounge, old robot style vapes, yep nope ok we don't really sell anything and we're bankrupt. now we're a Vape Store. ok we're the 8th one on this block. ok. they've changed the locks. hmm. what's next. Axe Throwing, Axe Throwing Will Be The Nex-oh, shit, fuck. ok. I got it. We sell fake weed.

[soysaucevictim]

Hmmm... sometimes I hear about medical breakthroughs that claim to kill cancer in vitro and like.

Damn near anything can kill cancer cells in a petri dish. And lotsa other maladies. Rubbing alcohol is p likely to kill it outside of the body. But no reasonable person is going to say, "let's drink iso alcohol."

That's preliminary data, we gotta hold our horses until in vivo HUMAN data comes out to support things. The next step would/could be animal studies, but that too has a lot of limitations. Something that will work in mice isn't guaranteed to work in people.

Because we still have loads of questions that are needed in investigation. Like. How does the proposed drug interact with complex human physiology and metabolism? Will it reach the desired target? Will it get metabolized into something inert, or worse, harmful? What about drug interactions? Side effects?

Just. Some medical literacy things that I think gets lost in the shuffle of science communication/journalism.

[thatbanjobusiness]

The trend of modern, flimsy record storage needs to die in a hole. It only proves that vinyl is a fad, for display and clout rather than practicality.

Extra points for the stackable, collapsible, cloth boxes that are "for vinyl." Because that's not record damage waiting to happen.

And like. It's one thing if there are good alternatives easily available on the market. But 95% of what I see is an accident waiting to happen in some form or fashion. The remaining 5% is expensive as twice butt and stores a paltry sum.

I'm going to become a box maker out of spite. I am. Going to be. A box maker. The best box maker in the damn world. Out of S P I T E.

[reasonsforhope]

"A group of 200 UK businesses and charities have signed a pledge that company work weeks will be shortened to 4 days without a loss in pay

Including marketing and advertisement; tech, it, and software; and charity groups as well, the companies employ more than 5,000 people.

Organized by the 4 Day Week Foundation, it follows something less than a trend but more than a fad in which a mixture of employees and executives believe that a happier, more balanced workforce is key to driving productivity.

That balance, they would argue, can be achieved by far more people through the reduction of the 5-day work week to a 4-day one.

“[With] 50% more free time, a four-day week gives people the freedom to live happier, more fulfilling lives,” Joe Royle, the foundation’s campaign director, told the Guardian.

“As hundreds of British companies and one local council have already shown, a four-day week with no loss of pay can be a win-win for both workers and employers.”

This sentiment isn’t shared by all workplaces, but market competition should demonstrate over time whether or not firms that implement unorthodox work hours are in fact as productive or more so than traditional ones.

Economics says that with all else being equal, if enjoying more free time leads to greater employee retention and motivation, then these 4-day work week firms will begin to out-complete the old ones, which in turn will be forced to adapt or risk losing market share.

London firms have been the most enthusiastic, with 59% of the 200 workplaces being located in the capital. With so many firms for talented workers to choose from, it’s no wonder that some are looking to seek advantage in attracting this talent through more desirable working terms.

Last year, GNN reported extensively on a report that was released by a county government in Washington called San Juan, detailing their one-year experiment with a 32-hour, or 4-day work week. In the report, quitting and retiring decreased by 48%, while 55% of employees said their workflow wasn’t interrupted even though they lost an entire working day’s worth of time to complete it.

Even in the famously hard-working nation of Japan, a 4-day workweek seems to strengthen productivity."

-via Good News Network, January 28, 2025

[iatrophilosophos]

Hey I'm hearing uh. More, and more, and more buzz about GLP-1 agonists like ozempic from random ppl and healthcare providers alike and there's like a terrifying lack of lucidity abt it so I just wanna say, if you've heard some stuff and are curious:

Ozempic is a chemically-aided crash diet. That's it.

Like metformin, an older diabetes medication used off-label for weight loss, it's functioning as an appetite suppressant in this use-case. It's not magic; it's not changing how your body makes or uses fat; it just makes it less miserable to eat less. It is contraindicated by histories of disordered eating and should absolutely not be prescribed without a full screening for above-adequate food intake and nutrition *and* ongoing screening for adequate nourishment/malnutrition: this is broadly not happening.

I've also seen no indication that ozempic/GLP-1 agonists are any less likely to lead to weight cycling (w/o constant use) than a straight crash diet, or do anything meaningful to limit the known, significant health risks of weight cycling.

Nothing has changed:

The main things we know from a western scientific perspective about weight and weight loss are that 1) almost all people who lose significant weight gain it back and 2) weight cycling causes cardiovascular and metabolic health complications. Yall we aint even have strong evidence to suggest that weight loss is beneficial to health conditions associated with higher weights. This *should* point to Dr's never ever reccomending weight loss (we do know it can hurt, don't know it can help) but yknow we live in uhhhh fucking world.

We are possibly ripe for an aggressive intensification of anti-fat medical rhetoric, especially in pediatrics

Among the projections for an RFK FDA that ive gotten from folks i know in these fields is a renewed focus on childhood obseity and general military-style fitness. As the ozempic fad has already been ramping up, I'm kinda! concerned! about this being a major point of focus for the oncoming administration--i figure we're ripe for another mass diet craze associated with a wide variety of deaths anyway and that existing cultural+market inertia added to it being literally on the agenda spells some not great things. I really seriously reccomend paying extra attention to this area.

Clinics love ozempic because it's extremely popular and extremely profitable--i even know someone who's job was threatened for refusing to prescribe it. We already know that we cant trust doctors to be informed around weight or for the system to sound public alarms.

Obviously, people have the right to do whatever they want--but the disclosure just isn't there and people are being sold this stuff based on the idea it'll make them *healthier* and prevent disease. It can't and it won't.

If the claims here about weight in general are new to you, start here: (Don't love the title of the article, second the exasperation)

If you want to understand more about glp-1 agonists specifically, like, start with the Wikipedia article and do some googling it lays out the pharmacology in relatively plain language. Sry i ain't doing a buncha work to find citations ppl won't click; there's not a lot of good critical stuff out there that's actually published but it doesn't actually take a lot of reading up on critical weight science to form a critical take on the sources singing ozempics praises.

Peace, good luck, do whatever you want forever, maybe tell ur mom that this isn't any different from the disastrous weight loss fads of the 90s.

[prokopetz]

You mentioned the baby Huey show when talking about the inexplicable "what was the audience for this?" cartoons of the 90's and why I don't disagree with that notion I do think there was some of that same energy in the 2000s as well, Baby Looney tunes and Loonatics unleashed anyone?

(With reference to this post here.)

I'm not sure I'd concur. Loonatics Unleashed was clearly a delayed reaction to the late 1990s fad for edgy reimaginings of classic media properties, and while the idea of doing that to the fucking Looney Tunes is misguided, there's no mystery about what target audience they were aiming for. As for Baby Looney Tunes, that's even more obvious – it was Warner Bros. trying to cash in on the then-lucrative cartoons-for-preschoolers market. It's hard to picture preschool entertainment being a big cash cow in 2024, but remember this was way back in 2002, before YouTube existed.

I need you to understand that you're DMing me out of the blue about a post from 2015 with – at the time of this posting – a whole 75 notes, and if I wasn't the sort of genetic freak who can remember off the top of his head every social media post he's ever made, this would be an utterly incomprehensible thing to say.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Reading weird poetry and short stories and unapologetically strange novels really does teach you that a lot of stuff people teach you about writing is just not true. Almost anything someone tells you must happen when you’re writing has an exception and writing advice has trends and fads just like anything else.

I was struggling to find where I fit as a writer until I found writers like Daniel Olivias who wrote short stories in ways I’d never seen before. I owe a lot of my current inspiration in my writing to Latin American magical realism writers. Finding magical realism and surrealism really opened doors in my brain that had been shut before.

You can get weird with it. You can get weird in content, weird in form, weird in structure. You don’t need a plot. You can tell a story backwards, you can just sit in an idea, you can explain, overexplain, skip explanation, get political, start ideas, end ideas. No ifs ands or buts you can just throw traditional story structure out the window.

I know what kind of writer I am now. A weird one. You don’t have to be held to standards of predictability, genre fiction, markets, tropes. You can just do whatever. Truly. Honestly. Completely. For ten words or a hundred thousand.

[soft--dogs]

help they turned me into a marketable 90's fad and now they're fighting over who gets me in the divorce (disclaimer: sammy beanie babies sadly do not exist in the physical world)

[seat-safety-switch]

Based on the remarkable sales success of my powerful new business book, Sell Shit To Idiots, I've been swimming in marketing contracts. Thing is, I'm really expensive, mostly because I sell shit to rich idiots. That makes me feel guilty that I'm passing over a lot of poor idiots, who simply don't have the money for my time. Here's one for free: you can often sell more of something by making it bigger or smaller.

Cars have been getting bigger every year, and they're still selling. Theoretically, there should have been some point where we simply stopped buying them because they were the size of an elementary school gymnasium. Now they're high-school sized, and we're still going. How do you fight this trend? Tiny cars, which also sell pretty well to people who are a little weird and don't carry eight family members, sixteen dogs, and the contents of their house with them everywhere.

Bigger or smaller. This simple truism has been lost in our rush to business-school fads. Artificial "intelligence?" Who gives a shit? I dare you to find me a nerd-assed computer that is willing to say the plain truth: your product would sell better if it were much larger. Staple an "XL" on the end of the name, if you have to. Do you sell popcorn? Get a scientist to make you larger popcorn. I'm not talking a bigger bag, that's last-century talk. Bigger popcorn. Big enough that you get worried about herniating yourself when you grab a handful while watching Die Hard 2. Big enough that you could club a man with it. That shit will fly off the shelves, guaranteed. You probably want to buy it already.

Do you need additional evidence? Just take a look at cupcakes. In any major metropolitan area, there are several cupcake bakeries that exist entirely by making slightly smaller-than-normal cupcakes. What was their investment? Less. What do they charge? More. It's been awhile since I read an economics textbook, but I'm pretty sure that's how you get paid.

I can hear a lot of my haters in the back starting to get up, shuffling towards the door, unable to come up with a coherent counter-argument or even a reckless heckle in my direction. You run, you fucking cowards. And when you get home, you can write your apology letters to me with a comically large ball-point pen.