GREETINGS FELLOW SOCIAL MEDIA WEIRDOS. Yes, you could have chosen to go to twitter and be angry, or Facebook and explain that, no, that thing is not true to your great aunt, or even IG where people have nicer bookcases than you, but you picked HERE with PEOPLE WHO HAVE VERY FERVENT OPINIONS ABOUT 20 YEAR OLD MEDIA and I love you for it.
Oh today I’m only having very strong opinions about 11 and 7 year old video games!
I did a whole series of white animals on collaged backgrounds awhile back. I had thought it wasn’t that long ago, but then I looked one up and it was thirteen years old so if anyone needs me, my hollow bones will be bleaching in the wind.
Digital, Procreate, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed these. They aren’t terribly complicated, just an excuse to draw friend-shaped animals, but there’s a lot to be said for that. (Also I wanted to see if I could do the same look digitally.)
I have one! It lives on the Bun Shelf!
Oh my gosh, I was just looking at that one and going “I really enjoyed those…”
The Least Intimidating bakery in the village has closed for good so now I’ve got to go to the Intimidating Bakery, it’s awful. If you don’t have a PhD in being French I don’t recommend going to that bakery, here’s the humiliating account of the 3 times I’ve visited it so far:
the first time I went in there I pointed at one of those extra-skinny baguettes and said “a flute, please” feeling pretty sure of myself, and the baker said “… that’s a ficelle” (you idiot) (was implied) “a flute is twice as large as a baguette.”
That’s insane, first of all, a flute is a skinny instrument. Call your fat baguette a bassoon, lady—I made some timid remark about how it would make more sense for a flute to be a skinny bread and the baker said, “In Paris it is. I thought you were from the South?”
oh, that hurt
I guess I’m from the part of the South that’s so close to Italy the bread’s waist size matters less than whether it’s got olives in it, but I left the bakery having an existential crisis over whether living in Paris had made me forget my roots
the Least Intimidating Bakery just had normal baguettes vs. seedy baguettes vs. horny baguettes (easy mode, some have seeds, some have horns), while the new bakery has breads that are only different on a molecular level—there’s a good old loaf and then another, identical loaf called a bastard? google told me a bastard is “halfway between a baguette and a bread” but denouncing them like “those are not regulation-sized bastards” would get me banned from the bakery for life
on my 2nd visit (while I stood in line discreetly googling baguette terminology) there was an English tourist who asked for a baguette while pointing at what was either a rustique or a sesame and I felt a bit worried for them, but the baker just clarified “this one?” to waive any responsibility if they found out later it wasn’t a classic baguette, then handed them the bread without educating them in a judgmental tone and I felt envious
I know it’s because she thinks the English are beyond saving but still it made me want to come back with a fake moustache and an English accent so I wouldn’t be expected to play bakery on expert mode just because I’m French. I asked for a pastry this time and the baker asked “no bread with that?” which felt cruel, like she wanted me to sprinkle myself with ashes and admit out loud that my level of bread proficiency isn’t as advanced as I once believed it was
The third time I went, I had lost all self-confidence and I hesitantly pointed at a bread and said “I’d like this, uh—what is it called?” and the baker looked at me in disbelief and said “That’s a baguette.”
God.
for the record, if that stupid bread had been flanked by a skinny bread (ficelle) and a fat one (flute) then yeah of course I would have known to call it a baguette, but in the absence of reference points I now felt lost and scared of being called a Parisian again
it’s hard to express the depth of my suffering so I’ll just let the facts speak for themselves: this morning a French person (me) stood in a French bakery in France surrounded by French people and pointed at a baguette and said “what is this called”
Couple years ago I saw these two board games at the store back to back. Well, not saw them per se, but ya know. Spied them out of the corner of my eye. And for a moment without reading the text, I couldn’t tell you which was which decade at first. Funny. Either they were in a rush to get these out the door or they wanted their throwback trivia game boxes to look uniform. I didn’t think too much of it.
Only, from then on I started seeing it MORE. Every time someone markets a 90s or 80s throwback…
Goddammit they’re identical! What??! How did we let this happen? As a 90s survivor and a designer, this drives me up a wall.
Look, I know I’m late to the party to complain about “the 90s look” when we’re just starting to get sick of the Y2K nostalgia train. But c’mon, the 90s were not The 80s: Part Two™
Trust me when I say that we weren’t all wearing neon trapezoids up until the year 2000. The 90s look being peddled is so specific to the tail end of the 80s and an early early part of the 90s - a part of the 90s when it wouldn’t stop being the 80s. This is Memphis design being conflated with the wrong decade.
Keep reading for a long ass graphic design history lesson and pictures of old soda and fast food.
Okay these doorstops on the Martha Stewart curated collection on Etsy are beautifully made but “doorstops” is not what I clocked these as at first glance.
i mistakenly thought /lh was Laughing Hysterically for some time and when someone used /lh /nm together i learned that /nm was Not Mad and so i asked if they would ever use /lh when they were mad??? and at the time they said no, but later when i learned /lh was LightHearted, i explained my confusion they were like. okay but i would laugh hysterically when i was mad though.
And the thing is! It’s not even about “being boring”! It is so not about that! With a humanities degree, the only thing you really learn is how to process information, and generally, these degrees are designed to give it to you via various different perspectives and frameworks: you receive it, contextualize it, and then you’re encouraged to make an argument about it. That’s literally it, for years.
…And when people are no longer in uni (no matter their degree), a lot of them enter the work force and are too tired to do any outside learning–like, say, consuming nonfiction about politics, the environment, social sciences or racism, or fiction that heavily features those themes (or, featured enough that the person spends a not significant amount of time thinking/talking them through). This makes sense: we live in a late-capitalist hellscape and everyone is tired. Sitting down to read Audre Lord at the end of my workday is a tough call when Good Omens is literally right there. It’s not that I don’t want to do it, it’s that I have to force myself, because I spent the whole day not having fun, and I have 5 hours before I have to go to bed and not have fun again tomorrow.
So most people don’t make this effort in their own time–which, again, fair. Ideally, then, you’d want to at least train yourself to think this way while in school, right? My ability to incorporate multiple perspectives into my critiques of even stupid shit, like reality TV, far outstrips my STEM, MBA and CompSci friends who don’t do a lot of self-directed learning–not because I’m smarter by any means, but because I was literally trained to question every piece of information I was given and then told to make an argument about it, and I was given a lot of texts with themes of facism, racism, classicism, sexism, religion, colonization, het- and amatonormativity, etc etc the list goes on. When you consume enough of this shit, it becomes easier to spot–and if you don’t practice, you get rusty as fuck.
This whole “university is a business and teaches employable skills” thing is pretty recent; people used to go to trade schools for that. If you were at university, you were there to learn how to think. And theoretically, humanities degrees are poised to make humans who are much harder to fool with things like propaganda and mob mentality. Question anyone who is celebrating the decline of this kind of learning, degrading it, or making fun of it. Why? What are their motivations, and what do they gain from a generation of young people unprepared to do the kind of thinking a humanities degree offers?
The face of an animal who has ignored her pile of blankets and pillows and the three dog beds in the room (one of which is a human sized bean bag chair she has claimed for herself) in order to take up both of the other cushions in the couch the moment the human leaves the room to get a drink.
ALT
