I savor the Internet, more and more each day.
For me, it’s a status of awe-inspiring possibilities. One link leads to another, it’s like navigating through this mountainous forest of words and ideas and best of all you can learn anything in a nice puny condensed paragraph!
Its like sitting next to the luminous kid at school and being able to ask them anything and catch a succinct response without hearing them sing and point out unbiased how stuuupid I am!
So now, into this electronic wonderland of the kindly, the poor and the bonkers, I have found a unique state, a special somewhere which is the ideal antidote to the anodyne spread of the mega-store, to the loss of simple independent shops, a area for artists and craftspeople to stick a finger up to the “culture” of the bland and its called Etsy.
I discovered this location whilst looking for a birthday expose for my Aunt. After hours of scouring shopping malls and the usual Internet sites for a new gift where nothing seemed special or appropriate – Eureka! I stumbled across a shop on Etsy, selling handmade flying saucers and toy ray-guns, perfectly normal gifts for a sixtieth birthday in my family.
Etsy is a plot where all things are handmade, novel and sold directly by the artist to you through their bear personal Etsy shop which means they salvage to preserve a far higher percentage of revenue and you procure uniquely handcrafted gifts at any time of the day or night – perfect for procrastinators and last diminutive shoppers like myself.
On Etsy, I found not only ray guns and UFO’s, but also Vanilla hazelnut mocha candles (I had no concept such things existed), an autobiographical funny concerning the trials and tribulations of having teeny cramped boobs called Boobage, an origami butterfly brooch – which is assured to be permanent, a fried egg organic cat nip toy and most importantly the zombie sock monkey (non washable) – undoubtedly the perfect gift for someone out there…
Now, in which hypermarket or uniformly mediocre shopping mall would you score such wonders?
You wouldn’t, there’s nowhere tremendous enough to house the sheer scale of creativity, imagination, lunacy and genius that Etsy contains within its pages and it’s all at your fingertips.
So for any art shops and craft-stores that are feeling the march of the featureless powerhouses (Uber-savings at insidious costs) and for shoppers, sick of the insipid, the mass produced and tired, please say your peepers to this fabulous position, I am converted – hallelujah, forever Etsy!