UK BJD Shoppers

hahah we can sit together and yell "IT WAS FOR A GAME!"

I'm not about to stop googling weird stuff, none of the stuff I google is illegal and if they ever try to arrest me i'll demand they prove a crime has been committed. Good luck to em.

But oh so much porn. I mean let's face it, the kind of things most people do online means either they'll sift through porn, selfies, wikipedia or similar (omg I get so lost on tv tropes) and a heck of a lot of cute animal photos.
Yeah, good luck with that guys. I mean come on, you really think the real criminals are gonna leave folders on their pcs saying "top secret terrorist plans" ? You think they'll google stuff that's incriminating? Nah man, in all liklihood these spies will just be stuck reading about Chelsea's holiday in magaluf, how many reps Steve did today and endless selfies and food photos.
most people are crazy boring online.

Seriously I have a friend who's search history is 75% chickens. CHICKENS! How to buy chickens, how to raise chickens, how to feed chickens. All chickens all the time.

Mine is mostly dolls, dolls, a bit more dolls.

Wow these spies are gonna be bored. That's the only thing that keeps me going, knowing how bored those spies will actually be while they're invading everyone's personal space. It's that teeny silver lining.

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In other news, we totally need more UK based etsy people. If someone opens a uk store with medieval fantasy stuff, I am THERE.

 

@purple_monkfish tbf, she banned quite a lot of the porn too, so I imagine there's a great deal less of it to wade through now *snort* In all seriousness, it got through because no one in the supposed opposition party did anything to, ya know, oppose it. Much like Brexit, tbh.

On the heartening side, if you have dual citizenship, you do have quite a lot of rights and the ability to get out in a hurry, which is better than nothing eh! (I also have dual citizenship and cling to it!) I like to think my fiction writing search history has given whichever poor drone got my backlog to read through a bit of a giggle!

On a hobby related note, I'm sincerely hoping this results in some more nice and legit UK dealers appearing because we could REALLY do with the importation issues being dealt with by a business instead of constantly fighting for individual sets of fees.

 

@elve Honestly, I am not surprised. I would love to see more dealers open up provided they do it legitimately and don't take that variety of stupid risk. A monopoly does no one any good. Not consumer or dealer in the long run as I think we'll probably start to (if we're not already) see in the form of a nose dive in customer service and wait times stretching into the ridiculous.

Actually, this does lead us on to the point of how long we, as the consumer, are prepared to put up with the doll companies themselves selling in USD, even to the dealers, when a large portion of their market is NOT in the US. It's not a particularly stable currency anymore, let's face it, it's as volatile as many of the others, so I do wonder why they don't just let you pay in whatever their native currency is and be done with it. Mind you, I also think they're going to have to take a hit on profit margins because the world is not the place it was even 3 years ago and money for luxuries is nowhere near as easy for people to find.

 

What you have to do as a uk dealer I think is offer something Carol can't/doesn't. So offer different companies. But yeah, it's rough. It's rough even for established dealers and companies.

Maybe we more need to pool together as a small uk community and try to organize more group orders? Dunno how much that'd help though, with import fees and so on. Ouch.

 

What we really need is to find ways to source without importation, tbh. That's a world of pain in a hobby like this, tho, and requires the variety of mass, organised co-operation the UK community is truly useless at, sadly.

 

They actually want the currency. Why, I don't know. They're not too concerned which currency so US dollars is convenient and easily traded. The Chinese send illegal workers out to other countries to work and the workers are 'obliged' to send a portion of that money back to China, in that currency. There are thousands of them working in Eastern Europe on farms in summer. The Eastern Europeans go to Europe to work. The Japanese though do often deal in Yen but not many doll manufacturers are Japanese. I don't know why the Koreans want dollars but it's probably for the same reason as the Chinese.

 

I just discovered CandyKitten's Emporium is uk based. I splurged on a pair for my girl who has awkward eye holes but I will be trying them in all my crew. Hopefully the low dome will fit my awkward guy in which case I'll be ordering some small iris eyes for him. And a couple of styles are a lot like the first acrylic eyes I had that I've never been able to replicate with glass - but ten times more vibrant. So that will be two more pairs. At least.

So I've gone from ugh we have nothing cool, to grasping desperately and getting ridiculously excited over, admittedly, very pretty eyes.

Im probably already on some kind of watchlist for mentioning that the US is long overdue a presidential assassination. They elected Trump. They got a shart.