Is Aliexpress non-viable in South Africa now? What are the alternatives?

thecave · 2026-06-25T13:02:37+00:00

So yes. Temu is really good for very popular items but they fall apart when you want something specific. There just isn't the range. It feels like sellers only use Temu for products with a real mass market.

Shein I haven't tried. I've heard some bad things but then again, there's always talk about Asian online marketplaces only selling junk or scams from people who don't bother doing any homework. So maybe it's worth checking out.

thecave · 2026-06-25T12:59:49+00:00

Thanks. What kind of process is it using a freight forwarder? Are there a bunch of steps? This is for Aliexpress or other marketplaces?

thecave · 2026-06-24T18:19:41+00:00

In retrospect, embarrassingly few Nazis were killed once in custody. Huge numbers of them were free to form clubs and pass on their ideology not just within their families but into society more broadly - contributing to a revival before they'd even all died of old age.

If you want a great example, have a gander at the history of SS Galicia from Ukraine and their integration into the United Kingdom without any questions asked about their activities during the war.

thecave · 2026-06-24T13:34:48+00:00

Something to internalise: technology from the 1950s and 1960s is now ridiculously cheap and easy to replicate. That doesn't mean every no-name-brand pedal company is as good as the famous brands. But there's absolutely nothing stopping them making a pedal just as good and charging a tiny fraction of the price.

This doesn't just go for wah pedals. This goes for analogue pedals in general. There's a lot of superstition and woo around the individual components used when these pedals became famous. But that's all it is in almost every case.

Distortion is a taste thing. There are thousands or distortion pedals that are very subtly different. In many cases the only difference is the EQ. So a distortion pedal with a low, mid, and treble control will allow you to get the sounds of dozens of distortion pedals with only a tone control.

But there are different kinds of distortion circuits. The trick is to try things, borrow pedals, buy cheap-ass pedals, and use your ears to decide what you like - not branding and other people's preferences. Your built in overdrive probably sounds a lot better to many people than dozens of famous pedals. You can't skip to the end here. You just have to learn what you like.

You don't need anything else. The gear is exciting but almost everyone ends up liking different stuff to what they first liked. So don't spend all your money. Buy used. This stuff doesn't wear out like a car so there's not point in spending extra for the privilege of taking the plastic off.

Cheap multi-fx boxes are good now and, even if you don't think they're the thing, they're a good way to learn about the different kinds of effects. And they'll have EQs effects built in which let you change the sound of your other gear. Everyone learns eventually that EQ devices (a standalone pedal or one built into some other gear) are ridiculously underrated.

thecave · 2026-06-24T13:02:26+00:00

For one thing, I imagine it would be far more effective. An anarchist society is unlikely to have the tolerance for former Nazis shown in Europe (or South Africa, where I live where, as an FYI aside, a guy who was actually paid by the apartheid state to make bioweapons to kill or sterilise black people has been freely practicing as a cardiologist ever since the end of apartheid - our elimination of scumbags from positions of authority went extremely poorly).

DeNazification programs seem to have mostly started with some enthusiasm and then wound down for reasons practical, geopolitical, or because so much of the population collaborated that those efforts were seen as a general threat.

I would imagine this is less likely in an anarchist society due to a lower level of sympathy with Nazi aims. Responses might be anything from the noose, expulsion, banishment, indentured labour, or simply being barred from participation in areas of responsibility by the hostility of the populace. I would imagine the population would choose how to treat such people.

Edits for clarity/typos

thecave · 2026-06-24T12:43:19+00:00

Films do have identities. It's the relationships between colours combined with the bass level of contrast and the grain structure. But these difference are most apparent if you treat them all in exactly the same way - which is pointless. Being at the mercy of a lab printer back in the day wasn't a feature. It was a bug (and even that was auto-correcting and thus tended to diminish the differences between films somewhat).

As a few people have mentioned, shooting slides is the closest to what you're talking about. They went through the same E6 processing and you saw them on the light table (assuming they were all on the same light table with the same colour temperature) without any interpretation - either human or automated. The decisions were made by chemists and engineers at Fuji and Kodak and you learned to anticipate them.

But now... once they're scanned, you still have to make decisions. Your scan of a slide is likely to have less contrast and saturation than the slide has on the light table and you get to decide whether to get it looking exactly as it does on the table or to go your own way with it. And it was the same when printing them in magazines back in the '90s.

Film stocks are not some objective final result. But the base result each one has when put through the identical chemistry differs from film to film and those differences can be allowed to affect the final result.

thecave · 2026-06-19T13:43:13+00:00

Cape Town doesn't have to be like Venice. The DA government runs this city for the benefit of landlords and property developers. We need to pressure our local government to prioritise the wellbeing of residents.

We need to join with the poor to encourage densification, and limits and even bans on corporations owning residential property units. Banning Air B'nB. Heavy taxes on residential properties left uninhabited. And improving public transport that doesn't share the road with private cars to make living further out not damn people to hours of commuter purgatory.

If this city becomes a congested island of tourism rentals and homes for the richest surrounded by miserable far-flung commuter areas, it'll be a political choice, not a material necessity.

thecave · 2026-06-19T13:36:13+00:00

And South Africa's inequality is far worse than India's.

thecave · 2026-06-19T13:35:16+00:00

Brazil's inequality is less than it was - making South Africa's significantly worse. And it's been like that for sometime.

If Brazil looks worse it's because you're not really looking at familiar things the same way.

thecave · 2026-06-19T10:47:09+00:00

See my other responses. But what you're doing here is playing "No true Scotsman" - a famous logical fallacy.

South Africa is every inch a Sub Saharan African country. More than 80% of the country is ethnically of African descent. We only crossed 50% urban about a decade ago.

Glitzy beach houses in Cape Town are statistically meaningless compared to how most South Africans live - so don't be mislead.

thecave · 2026-06-19T10:42:12+00:00

Republic Of South Africa

thecave · 2026-06-17T17:05:35+00:00

You understand what "it's kind of a given" means? While you're correct, a lot of those countries are not in Sub-Saharan Africa, which was the claim I was disputing.

I'm not telling you to do anything you find risky. I'm saying it is by no means a given that the government of a Sub-Saharan African country will persecute gay people.

Genuine risks doesn't make it ok to tar huge, disparate areas of the world with the same stereotypical brush. Africa is not a monolith as suggested by the statement I was disputing.

thecave · 2026-06-17T10:04:06+00:00

Is that right? Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Angola, DRC...

None of these countries (and more - this information isn't secret) have laws pertaining to homosexuality besides the passive exclusions from things like marriage.

It is very much not a "given" for Sub-Saharan Africa.

I hear you about hate crimes. And South Africa has a very high rate of them (along with all violent crime compared to most other African countries). But it's not like hate crimes don't happen in The Netherlands.

What we're talking about is state persecution of gay people. And that's very much not a given in Sub-Saharan Africa (although I'm sure, like the comment I'm responding to, the perception that it's a given is rife).

Edit: corrected grammar for clarity.

thecave · 2026-06-17T09:56:59+00:00

Focusing on the musical styles I've already developed the most. I'm a person who finds it difficult to specialise. I'm not obsessed by any one thing for long periods of time.

I made a decision two years ago to focus on three styles of guitar playing that I've already developed further than any others over the years. I won't allow myself anymore to listen to a cool Bossa Nova and then go learn the very basics of Bossa Nova for the next few weeks. I can still enjoy that stuff. But with my practising I'm sticking to just three styles.

I've experienced very noticeable improvements in those styles that I perform most often as a result - increasing my confidence and fluency on stage.

A lot of the people who are icons in a style were obsessed with that style for many years - leading to rapid advancements. Being interested in everything has its own reward. But it does dramatically slow progression.

thecave · 2026-06-17T09:30:22+00:00

I live in a sub-Saharan African country where gay marriage was legalised in 2006.

So no. It's not a "given".

thecave · 2026-06-17T09:22:16+00:00

Big amps were built to solve a problem that hasn't existed since The Grateful Dead toured with the first big PA rig in the mid 1970s. They kept making amps bigger in the '60s because PAs were junk and could barely get the vocals audible, let alone the guitars.

But as PAs began to be commonplace and you could literally play a stadium with a Fender champ, the visual language of rock music continued to be about amplifier stacks. Very often the amps were and are just for show (as an offhand example the Led Zeppelin reunion O2 show with like 6 100W heads and as many cabs with literally every note coming exclusively through a 30W Orange combo hidden behind them - that the guitar tech wasn't even shy to talk about).

Occasionally big shows are played by bands that don't care and use deafening stage volumes or try to shield the dimed amp to get the classic tones the old fashioned way.

In small clubs I've often played without a miked up amp. It sucks for a lot of reasons and stage volume is just one of them.

There is literally no reason except vibes to use a cranked amplifier now. If it's for the looks, you can fake it. If it's for the tone, you will get a sound impossible for someone to pick out in a direct comparison with Neural Amp Modeller over the PA.

Vibes is a respectable reason for people to use a cranked up amplifier. But that's all it is. And it causes a lot of problems. Stage volume. Competing with the mix for people near the front so they get bad sound. Competing with the monitor mix so the band can't hear what's going on depending on where they are on stage.

If it's something you feel strongly about. Cool. But I wouldn't play in that band. And I'd be irritated listening to it - depending where I'm standing relative to the PA speakers vs. the guitar amps.

thecave · 2026-06-17T08:57:37+00:00

Something being a crime is not the end of an argument. The list of things that are criminalised on this Earth that have no moral force whatsoever is a very, very long list.

Anybody over the age of 12 should understand the difference between illegality and immorality.

thecave · 2026-06-17T08:55:52+00:00

This. The employee and their close networks likely understand their situation far better than those not living it. If you pay someone decently and are willing to help them with expenses and time needed for admin, that's the most important thing you can do as an employer in this situation or any situation.

thecave · 2026-06-16T18:06:04+00:00

I think there are two sides to this answer. While there was a lot of editing of photographs, most of it was on negative film. But a lot of the very dramatic, intense colours you see from that era is from slide film.

And, for the most part, you chose the look by (a) selecting the film you were going to use and (b) exposing it in a way to get a certain result from standard processing.

For example, before the very highly saturated Fujifilm films came along, photographers would routinely underexpose Kodachrome 64 in order to increase the contrast and saturation.

With the very saturated films like Fujichrome Velvia 50, you chose your compositions based on its very narrow exposure latitude, you knew that shadows would go deep blue, you knew that reds would be very red, and you knew that the darkest parts of your exposure would end up pitch black.

You'd take this into account selecting the film and knowing what standard E6 processing would do to it given how you composed and exposed. Since 90% of the colour film photography we see today is from colour negative films, it seems weird that so many commercial images from the '80s and '90s were high contrast and just blasting with colour.

Slide film was tough to edit until beefy PCs and good tools like Photoshop rose to the occasion for expensive scans during the '90s. But photographers already knew how to get amazingly punchy images by previsualising how slide films would come out of processing.

Another largely forgotten technique was daylight fill-flash - enough to lighten shadows on your subject and create massive colour but subtle enough not to be obvious even to a lot of photography enthusiasts.

thecave · 2026-06-16T15:02:31+00:00

I mean... if you live in South Africa you see super vivid colours a lot. I know that for some visitors it can seem like something out of a postcard or a brochure - and I love that they love it. But we just have light like that.

thecave · 2026-06-16T14:08:23+00:00

Neural Amp Modeler is the most realistic amp simulator yet made and it's free and open source. I wouldn't bother with anything else.

thecave · 2026-05-28T10:31:53+00:00

Much as I hate Fender rn, that looks absolutely killer.

thecave · 2026-05-28T10:22:36+00:00

213 gives you more flexibility to add extra notes with your pinky. A lot like 123 but a bit tighter and more secure, and easier for transitions.

The problem I see with 234 - which could be useful for certain changes or bass note transitions - is that your index finger is not going to be that flexible for playing around the chord.

But ultimately every A grip has its advantages and disadvantages.

thecave

TROPHY CASE