Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

so do wired headphones?
no one has made everlasting ear speakers yet

I have those Bose over the ear ones and even they apparently have very hard-to-replace batteries, which seems completely unnecessary.

As long as the speakers don't blow, it's relatively easy to repair wired headphones. Whether it's actually worth one's while to do so is a different question, of course.

Increasingly feeling this way about certain kinds of online shopping -- clothing especially. Order something, get it in two days, it doesn't fit right, take it to the post office to return, wait another few days for a different size. It's a lot more work than just going to a store and trying stuff on until you find what you like, only problem being that it's increasingly hard to find good clothing stores with adequate stock now that retail is killing them.

Online bookshopping will also never be as enjoyable as going to a bookstore.

Agreed re clothes shopping, it's a massive headache. Sometimes I'll look online ahead of going to the shop, make a mental note of what I want to look at, and 9 times out of 10 it's not in the shop. So then I've both gone to the shop AND had to order and send it back. This is why all my clothes are old.

i loathe online apparel shopping but i have gotten better at it with time. (i also just generally loathe the act of apparel shopping)

main beef is related to vocabulary. you have to know what the items are called to look for the items you want -- how do you search for the type of thing you want if you don't know what the retailers are calling it? you don't! at least when shopping irl you see something, you like it, you never need to know what it's called by the vendor, you just buy it and wear it.

scrolling page after page after page of H&M's website looking for vocabulary is not my idea of a good time

the alternative is to stay up to date on fashion terms via fashion publications, which i have strenuously avoided for decades

Search for "puffy Seinfeld shirt" yielded 10 results

were any of them what you were looking for?

my most recent online shopping adventure involved finding a brand of shoe i liked. looking at retail prices and offerings, then going to ebay and searching for my size (which i had to search more to find out) to see what pops up. i bought some new (and another pair of near-new) on ebay for a fraction of the retail price and they are great. this took a significant amount of time and effort and know-how. i don't see how this is better than going to the shoe outlet and just hoping to find something acceptable aside from the fact that i hate shopping and walking into a store is some kind of insurance that i will walk out emptyhanded. at least i got my two pairs of shoes and paid like 1/4 of what i would have if i had bought them from zappos.

this is where lumpen masculinity finally comes out on top, we don't do any of that, we just go to target and eyeball the sizes to figure out how many Xes of L to get in one of the four colors they have

ah yes, I still have no idea what a "slubby tee" is

figure out how many Xes of L to get in one of the four colors they have

Wrong. Figure out your size then get it in ALL the colors.

Once I know what I want I get it in all the colors. When those clothes wear out I buy them again. It is very convenient.

lucky you that they keep making the same things for you to buy over and over
doesn't work like that for women's clothes 99% of the time
if you like it and you get 4 of something, by the time you go to buy 4 more they are loooooong gone and you're searching ebay again

There are a couple brands that I can just reliably buy online, like I know my favorite levi's jeans fit so I can just buy the color I like. Those don't change much over time. J. Crew sizes and fits are also pretty predictable.

LL, I quite agree that the way women's clothes are sized and sold is a travesty. In the meantime, yeah, men can just buy the same khakis over and over and the pockets are great and they are sized reasonably by things like a standardized measurement in two dimensions.

If I knew what economic levers to push to change it I would be doing so.

women's pants can't be counted on to remain the same cut/shape/color selection for very long
if there are brands that can be relied on, tell me what they are and i will shop for them on ebay

embrace middlebrow east-coast basicness: Land's End, LL Bean

i've completely stopped shopping unless I have a specific thing I need to get for a job or I am already out somewhere and need to kill time. Some sites like asos are a whole day's work trying to sift through.

Land's End and LL Bean always seemed like 100m from the parked car camping clothes.

yes i don't shop unless i need something. in this case, i needed 2 pairs of shoes.
it is a waste of time

pre-transition: just go wherever and buy however many pairs of 36x42 pants

post-transition: try on six dresses, all the same size, no two of which fit the same. also no stores carry your shoe size because women above sz 10 are sideshow freaks.

buying women's shoes online is not a matter of "will they fit" but "how badly will the fit be off, and is it more of a hassle to exchange them or just put up with it?"

zappos has the best customer service and return policy i've ever found in an online retailer fwiw
the struggle is extremely real!

no one has made everlasting ear speakers yet

Hah, just to gloat, I am right now wearing the Koss K6/ALC headphones I got in the 1970s, having once sent them in to the manufacturer along with a $6 check for repair. I vote wires.

I went on a whole long rant this morning to one of my coworkers, who does the "capsule wardrobe" thing, about how much of a fucking mess clothes shopping is when you're transitioning. All you have to do as a man is buy some clothes that fit reasonably well and fucking half of the guys don't even do that and nobody fucking cares. Since I haven't transitioned yet at work I come in wearing these clothes from before I lost 50 pounds, they're fucking clown clothes and nobody goddamn cares because that's just how cis guys DRESS. It's not just that people are looking at you and judging you it's that women have all sorts of different shapes whereas men apparently come in either the "stick" or "stick with big belly" variety and no two designers seem to have a shared idea of what shape a woman is, and despite that somehow whatever your shape is it seems like all the clothing designers have collectively decided that literally no woman in the world is shaped like you. And then there's the idea that you can own a really cute top but not wear it because it doesn't go with anything, which is literally impossible for any article of men's clothing.

And yeah shoes are a whole different level of bullshit, I'm short and so am only a size eleven so I get a whole three pairs of shoes to choose from in stores, and I'm so delighted I buy them and then when it's time to wear them out realize they are way less comfortable than I thought and, again, don't fucking go with anything I own, and also for the only shoes they had were suede and since I live in Portland it's going to rain for the next three months straight which for some reason I didn't think about when I was buying them, so I just wear my damn men's shoes out again. I'm probably wrong, but I feel like nobody in the history of time has ever been clocked for wearing men's shoes.

I'm sorry, this is probably an I Love Style post, I should be complaining about how online shopping is so much worse than shopping in person, but if you're a woman, it seems like even if you like shopping for clothes you also think it's bullshit.

As someone who wears size 15 or 14EE shoes, I’m thankful for online shopping.

I don't like buying clothes or shoes online. Partly because I can never tell what something really looks like, and because it's such a pain to return things. Mostly I just wear the old stuff I already have. I bought some shoes online recently for the first time, a size and brand that I already owned, but they still weren't exactly what I was expecting.

the GAP

if you're a woman, it seems like even if you like shopping for clothes you also think it's bullshit.

My wife has thoroughly educated me about how much bullshit the women's clothing industry imposes on women and I wish there were some escape hatch I could show her, other than telling her whatever she does to come to terms with it, I'll support her. This doesn't help much with her anger and frustration, but it does help a little.

i'm a 'stick' cis man and i love clothes and i love shopping for clothes. i do it maybe twice a year though. things rarely fit right, particularly trousers, but honestly.... it's not like some great burden

thrift stores y'all. unbeatable selection. and if you find a good deal that isn't for you, sell it on eBay or something. Technology eh

and hell yeah wires. wires and solder, keep em going. drivers (the speaker bits) don't break easy.

I’m a veteran thrifter and even started a thread about it here on I love style board — thrift stores are not a technological backward step into the pit of despair that is *online* women’s apparel shopping.

Right on. Some of my favourite junk to watch on YouTube is people digging through thrift stores and garage sales, trying to make some money on eBay (used stuff) and/or Amazon (new stuff). I dabble in this a bit (mainly getting rid of my old stuff) but it's nuts to think how just a few companies have this market sewn up and we all just accept working for them if we want to flip much of anything.

Feel like this technological thread has taken a "backward" step.

dentist wants me to buy a water fountain to floss my teeth. oh it grinds my gears.

My dentist is a horse

i don't even HAVE any teeth

and no two designers seem to have a shared idea of what shape a woman is, and despite that somehow whatever your shape is it seems like all the clothing designers have collectively decided that literally no woman in the world is shaped like you

Actually -- technology has kinda made things better here tbh -- you can now find size charts for most designers online -- (the problem is when there is internal inconsistency, and then, ideally, the store's site will note that it "runs large" or "runs small" or they will have customer reviews that point this out). You can also fairly easily find articles (mostly clickbait) that recommend designers and styles based on certain general shapes: column, pear, apple, hourglass, etc.

I feel like plus-size designers/e-tailers are fairly good about this stuff tbh -- and are working to improve where they have issues (e.g. the size 14 model who is 5'11 -- yes, she is closer to what the customers look like than the "normal size" model, but still ... ), because their customer base are generally women/femmes who have been demoralized for years, if not decades, of being treated horribly by the fashion industry. ... Anyway, I like online shopping for clothes, I like it a lot! (women's shoes otoh ... every time I look for women's shoes, I am reminded of why I only wore mens shoes for about 2 decades)

doesn't work like that for women's clothes 99% of the time
if you like it and you get 4 of something, by the time you go to buy 4 more they are loooooong gone and you're searching ebay again

the world of women's pants is like this .... for the past couple years, high waist pants and jeans have been the thing, and I am hoarding them because I know, maybe in just a year, the wheel of pants fortune will turn back to "natural waist" or "low rise" and they will all fit me awkwardly because I'm high-waisted. ... and hopefully I will not gain or lose a significant amount of weight so that my hoard remains useful through the lean low-rise years.

haha! i hoard high rise pants too :)

Hah, just to gloat, I am right now wearing the Koss K6/ALC headphones I got in the 1970s, having once sent them in to the manufacturer along with a $6 check for repair. I vote wires.

Right now, I'm wearing the same Grados I bought 10 years and apart from needing a new set of ear pads a couple years ago ($10 or so including shipping) they keep on keeping on. Wires all the way!

I don't accept the devices mentioned in this thread

You don’t accept pants?

Not from strangers

Possibly mentioned before but Google apricot (autocorrect). Picks the wrong word 50% of the time, see above.

In forever correcting Brad and Dallas whenever I write my shopping lists (bread, salad). It doesn't seem to learn.

Speaking of pants, it annoys me that around 15 years ago I had to migrate my change to a back pocket of my jeans, since I don't want the coins to damage the touchscreen on my phone. (My wallet, of course, is in the right front pocket -- don't get me started on people who keep their wallet in the back like George Costanza...) We've just accepted the fact that we now need to occupy THREE pockets of our jeans rather than just two -- creating one lumpy ass cheek -- which doesn't seem like a step in the right direction.

people dance less at clubs and certainly don't go crazy and mosh about at gigs afaict, and that's largely down to mobile phones (not wanting to break them or be videod dancing like an idiot

Not sure if we've mentioned this yet, but as someone who only watches a bit of TV now and again, it sucks that Netflix, Now TV, Amazon Prime and BBC iPlayer each have approximately 2-3 shows I'm interested in and a whole load of dreck I'm simply not interested in.

small wallet and change in the right, no?

knee pocket is the right answer (or left answer - right knee pocket for keys)