M-Zone (Samsung Brand Shop) (2005) Schmidhuber + Kaindl Seoul, Korea

look at this meme I saw on a bridge in Chicago

I’m going to start exploiting this immediately 

Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?

They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.

Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?

So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.

And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.

And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.

If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.

I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.

There is no joy like the joy of a writer who has just figured out that a throwaway line they put into the first few paragraphs of a story is actually the key to a major plot point and possibly even the theme underlying the entire thing.

Just…yesssssss.

sitting in her room and getting bored all day is the bravest thing a girl can do on a sunday

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I really appreciate your social and cultural historiography. While I'm familiar with English and French Monasticism from 1300 onward, my focus was on clerical life and theology having contemporaneous context is really helpful. Your explanations are also clear and funny, which I appreciate as well. I haven't gotten too far into your studies yet but do you have any knowledge of European Muslims outside of the O.E.?

Aha, I am afraid I don’t actually know what you mean by “outside of the O.E.” (this is on me for not being a Cool Kid, no doubt, but there you have it). However, if you mean Muslims in medieval Europe, medieval Europe’s perception of/interaction with Muslims, how this changed in the late medieval/early modern period, and where these sites of contact were most likely to happen: yes, I absolutely have all of that! (Edit: @codenamefinlandia kindly suggested that this might mean outside the Ottoman Empire, which I doubtless should have thought of, but I hope this is indeed what you mean? In which case, yes, the below resources will be very helpful for you in exploring the European Muslim presence well before the Ottomans.)

I wrote briefly about Muslims in my Historical People of Color in Europe post, including in the context of the crusades, their long-term settlements in medieval Spain and Italy, and the relationships of the Muslim empires with Elizabethan England. There are, as you might expect, many studies focusing on Muslim-Christian contacts in medieval Europe and in the wider medieval world, of which the crusades are probably the best-known example. Below follows a selection of some reading material which might be helpful:

Sea of the Caliphs: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic World by Christophe Picard (this is about medieval Islamic trade in the Mediterranean, as it says on the tin, starting in the 7th century with the original Muslim conquests, and focuses on its role in cultural contacts between Muslims and Christians of southern and eastern Europe)

The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe, ed. Dionisius A. Agios and Richard Hitchcock (a collection of essays about Arabic influence on medieval Europe, this one doesn’t have any e-version so you might need to consult a university library)

The Muslims of Medieval Italy by Alex Metcalfe (examines the rise and fall of the Islamic presence in southern Italy and Sicily between about 800--1300, and how this was transformed into a frontier of cultural contact, exchange, and conflict alike)

Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100--1450, by Suzanne Conklin Akbari (examines how the Islamic world was depicted in the ‘high’ medieval era, and the developments of some of these Orientalist images in the 19th century and onward)

Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages by John V. Tolan (in something of the same vein as the above; he has written another book called Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination which focuses more on the semiotic, literary, and narrative construction of the “othered Muslim”).

Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader, ed. Jarbel Rodriguez (a GREAT book with multiple types of examples, primary sources, regions, and types of contact between Muslims and Christians from the seventh through the fifteenth century, including Byzantine, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian authors of the time period)

Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050--1614, by Brian Catlos (another book which I really need to read more of, focusing on medieval Muslims who actually lived IN Europe, including in Spain, Italy, Hungary, the Balkans/Eastern Europe, and other places).

The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment, by Alexander Bevilacqua (studies how the study/approach to Islam changed i the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how many Enlightenment scholars learned Arabic and read Islamic texts)

As Catlos says in Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom: “In fact, the Muslims of medieval Europe included substantial communities scattered right across the Latin-dominated Mediterranean, from the Atlantic coast to the Transjordan, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. In some areas they survived for only a century or two, whereas in others they persevered for well over five hundred years. They did not live as isolated enclaves, they were not uniformly poor, and were not necessarily subject to systematic repression; rather, they comprised diverse communities and dynamic societies that played an important role in the formation of what would eventually emerge a modern European culture and society.” In other words, while we’ve discussed before that medieval Europe was never uniformly white and never uniformly Christian, people tend to think that Jews were the only other religion that lived permanently in Europe. While Italy, Iberia, and the Balkans maintained the most enduring Muslim communities, that was not the only place they lived, and they were not merely merchants passing through without settling (though there was plenty of interreligious trade). We’ve discussed before how Yusuf/Joe would not necessarily always be a surprising or unexpected sight in Europe, and how people there would be a lot more used to him than you might expect. So: yes, Islam was always embedded in the fabric of medieval Europe, both as enemies during the crusades and as long-term citizens and communities at home.

Bonus: have some work on queer medieval and early modern Muslims, because reasons!

Sahar Amer, ‘Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-like Women’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18 (2009), 215-236

Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Samar Habib, Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality, 850--1780 A.D. (Teneo Press, 2009)

Samar Habib, Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations (London: Routledge, 2007)

Samar Habib, Islam and Homosexuality (Praeger, 2010)

E. J. Hernández Peña, ‘Reclaiming Alterity: Strangeness and the Queering of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Spain’, Theology & Sexuality, 22 (2016) 42-56

Gregory S. Hutcheson, ‘The Sodomitic Moor: Queerness in the Narrative of Reconquista’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Glen Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 99-122.

Gregory S. Hutcheson et al., eds., Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)

Scott Alan Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflections on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (Oneworld Publications, 2010)

Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1997)

Anyway. Let me know if you want me to expand on any of these topics in more detail, and I hope some of these resources are helpful!

Btw much as I love to make fun of twitter and reddit's business decisions, I have 0% trust in tumblr's management to not go a similar route so this is your gentle reminder that you should regularly go to your blog settings to export your blog. That's a fancy way of saying you can download a backup of your blog so if everything goes down you'll still have a backup of your posts & convos.

the new family drama i’m obsessed with has been the saga of my eight year old cousin trying to understand how our uncle is related to our grandpa and not our grandma. the answer is our grandpa cheated on her with a nurse and had our uncle, but NO ONE wants to explain cheating and adultery to an eight year old so they’ve just been telling him to ask someone else. so far it’s gone my mom -> me -> his mom -> his dad and he still is no closer to an answer. we are very quickly running low on knowledgeable adults and i cannot wait to see where he goes if that trail goes dry