seasonal stress baking
to distract from the full-time work of deleting fundraising texts
I’m working through a variety of concepts for the prestige streaming series or movie I would make about this: “Parks and Rec for libertarians”, “the boring parts of halogencore*”, “Halt and Catch Fire at the DMV”, etc. I even tried to engage the robots to help with naming it:
Anyway, here are a few slightly/tremendously unsettling things, roughly about the future? The future of work? The current state of… consumption?
I firmly believe there are fewer than ten perfect snacks**, and this piece, while detailed, mostly just affirmed a lot of my concern/horror at the processed-snackfood/dual-income-industrial complex. While I don’t want to police anyone’s eating, I’m very happy to police industrial food processing’s relentless efforts to increase our demand for little treats (we are very good at doing this ourselves, thanks very much). Also please stop messing with Oreos and Cheetos; they don’t need it.
gross. I mean, it’s Forbes; I’m not surprised at the nature of the effort, but tbh I am impressed at the performance (because it’s… Forbes***)? as always, good luck buying a mattress.
~cries in ESG~
I read this during a thunderstorm which darkened my midmorning enough to require turning on several lights in the house, kinda feeling like someone was trying to make a very specific point about, uh, idk America and density and waste. anyway, very cool for Germany
related: very cool for lots of Europe
me, for 6 years, into a void: “idk how to solve it but one way to slow it down is avoid buying plastic sold by ‘brands’ created by a slot machine of letters?”
adjacent: this is just a genteel, non-edgelord-y elon vibe. (except for the ‘bureaucracy mailbox’, which, is just a standard elon vibe. also, lol.)
also me, into a void: “don’t fill out facebook fun-facts surveys that reveal all your ‘secret question’ answers and don’t upload dozens of photos of your children’s faces to various security and verification services for unspecified security and verification use cases that may never materialize?!?!?” also: sign me up for the service where I can stand in a slightly slower line and get a stamp in my passport book rather than having my photo taken and compared against a database of photos of me****.
cries in slop
this… doesn’t surprise me but maybe it should? idk
and to wrap up, a small handful of nice things:
this is cool and “(technical note: to be used at low level)” is great multipurpose guidance
apologies for linking to a corporate blog, but enjoy learning about the National Park [Design] System’s history, AR images of bison, and some classic Yosemite vistas
please vote, early if you can! early voting frees up campaign resources to go after “undecided voters”, an ephemeral, synthetically-engineered variety of human that wreaks absolute havoc on the country every 4 years.*****
** obviously I want to tell you what they are: classic Oreos no extra filling no weird flavors; smooth peanut butter on a banana; classic weird knobby Cheetos; a single very large spoonful of peanut butter; baby carrots dipped in hummus; apple slices accompanied by a scoop of peanut butter; 2 Baby Bel cheeses OR mozzarella string cheeses (why two? because one is not enough but three becomes effort)
*** actually what would be really impressive is if any of the folks involved were 30-under-30-ers
**** I do not for one moment believe the screen that says “your photo will be deleted”; if you think amazon nonsense brands are bad, I regret to inform you that amazon business™️ exists to sell those same nonsense brands to lowest-bidder government contractors who are supplying tablets to TSA. We will absolutely see data leaks from these companies within 10 years. I can’t wait for all the tiktok explainers of the difference between a hard- and soft-delete, and more importantly, which is more aesthetic.
***** also, voting is just step 1 (warning: long, bleak)