So, what’s new in the knitting community today Polecat? Well, I’m glad you asked because it’s these guys.
The fuck? You ask. Those sound like a couple of hustle culture, low level tech bros. Yes, yes they are. And they spent $80,000 on a knitting domain name thinking that they’re going to make millions.
Yes.
Really.
Do they knit? No.
Are they aware of Ravelry (the leading social media & marketplace site for knitters & crocheters)? Also, no.
Have they reached out to notable knitting pattern designers? Also, no.
Are they familiar with the culture of Local Yarn Stores? Also, no.
Does one of them at least have a 6 year old who learned to use a knitting loom? Yes!
Needless to say, Reddit&Twitter ripped them a new one. It has been very amusing.
………….
It’s two days later and I can find ZERO information on their blog about this project, except for the “knitting community response” post. I can, however, reconstruct from reddit and twitter how utterly and thoroughly they got eviscerated by the knitting community, and it’s a delight to watch.
I listened to bits of the podcast bc I honestly just kept waiting for them to say something meaningful instead of throwing out buzzwords like that replaced having an actual plan…and let me tell you the techbros have no plan and even less respect.
They consider their only real competition to be box stores, China, and grannies who have run a blog for 20 years.
And the Chinese are apparently disadvantaged because they don’t list things properly, they don’t knit, and they can’t do videos because no one wants to see Asians in videos. Customers only want to see “western people” in their opinion.
It’s implied the old ladies are in the same category as small businesses?
So there’s all this good in-between market space that they can take advantage of to do… well they’re gonna sell stuff apparently using Amazon. They clearly don’t know what yet, but they’re gonna have innovative stuff. At least a dozen products maybe more!
Their business model:
Also they didn’t want to go with fishing as their new business because it’s so simple with its lures and poles. No room for innovation there.
Would you be surprised they mentioned coming up with their ideas over drinks multiple times? Also they talked about it while on a road trip? They looked up the metrics on the word knitting and thought the market was reasonably in the 41k range. You know not too saturated or something?
Basically they’re setting this up as a demonstration of look how I made my money and if you follow my capitalist recipe for just fucking around and hoping other people are stupid enough to click links on google, you too can make boatloads of money! type thing. So they didn’t really think the knitters would find out about it this soon and dogpile on them for their bs, because if you listen to them they don’t care about knitting. Their podcast wasn’t for knitters. It was for other folk interested in get rich quick stuff. I think one of them said something like website names were the first NFTs as if that was a good thing.
They basically deserve every incensed remark at their little venture.
I did a little poking around on the subreddit about these guys, and stumbled upon this adjacent thread:
I poked around a little in the WHOIS info on their (allegedly) previously successful domain flip, tacticaldotcom. (Don’t give them the hit by checking it out - it’s an SEO factory capitalizing on doomsday paranoia and filled with Amazon affiliate links, literally nothing more to it. The same model they’re proposing for knittingdotcom.) The domain has WHOIS privacy enabled, but the current domain registered agent is Terran Marketing, LLC in Nevada. According to open corporate, Terran Marketing, LCC is a defunct entity with Michael Jackness (one of these two assholes) listed as the primary agent.
So… they apparently DID NOT sell it for a profit, and they’ve been lying about that to try to get people to sign up for their course.
And this reply:
They managed to fail selling emergency supplies during a pandemic?
When people tell me, an archaeologist, what they find exciting about our profession
* big royal jewelry
* ancient temples
* decoding a long lost language
* dinosaurs
What actually gets us excited
* that time we were lucky with the weather
* when the digger knows his job
* lifting skeletal remains and the ribs don’t break
* when you manage to put the scale down for a photo without creating new crumbs
When you tell a member of a descendant community about what you found and they go “no shit! Uncle Tommy told me about that!”
Things that are where they shouldn’t be. Bonus points if it’s obsidian
Hitting virgin sediment before hitting the water table
Conspicuously dense and diverse berry patches
Cut marks on bones. Bonus points if they’re more than 20,000 years old
In addition to these because those were spectacularly relatable for Australian archaeology:
When the temperature is Just Right™ for fieldwork
When the car has really good aircon travelling from site in the afternoon
One of the Indigenous representatives on a fieldsurvey goes “hey i wanna show you something” (it is ALWAYS something worth looking at)
a member of the public shows up to talk and DOESNT say “found any gold????” but actually knows things about the site
Things that are where they shouldn’t be AND that make the senior archaeologists blurt out “well thats weird”
pets visiting
Can’t answer the berry thing with 100% certainty so I’ll let @rhysintherain explain it if they’re willing but I can answer the obsidian thing: obsidian is an EXTREMELY useful material. Can be cut into incredibly sharp and fine tools and weapons. Has been used by humans for eons. Plus it’s pretty. Obsidian also has a very specific geographic range because it is created by volcanic eruptions from magma with specific mineral components. So when you find some in a geographic location that doesn’t have any natural obsidian? You have solid evidence of human trade networks. Very exciting indeed.
On top of that, obsidian can be fingerprinted to the exact flow it came from, to the point where Rudy Reimer has identified several flows from the same volcano with different fingerprints.
So if you find a piece of obsidian at a site and go “huh, I wonder where that came from?” There’s a solid chance you can send it to someone with an XRF gun and they’ll be able to tell you.
The berry patches thing isn’t as widely recognised or utilised in applied archaeology (although it really, really should be), but Chelsea Armstrong has done some amazing work with descent communities that combines ethnobotany and archaeology, and has found that the density and diversity of food plants, especially trees and shrubs, is higher near old village sites than in “wild” forest.
These forest gardens were cultivated by indigenous communities before contact, and even after the people were removed from their villages they continue be incredibly productive sources of food.
There’s an abandoned village site on crown land near where I grew up that is surrounded by a circle of extremely dense berry bushes. At a site where I worked a few years ago, the area was covered in patches of native wild mint. A site I visited that was home to a very wealthy precontact village there was considerably more Saskatoon berry shrubs than anywhere else in the area.
The plants remember where they were taken care of. The stones remember where they were born. The best archaeologists know how to listen to that sort of thing.
