#“thank you for selling me these items” is such a wild phrase to say to a cashier

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #398

“freedom is just man’s invention, & a soldier is just a slave”

What do you do the most when you’re online? Watch/listen to YouTube. Do you have a bobblehead? No. Have you ever spent your birthday alone? No, that sure would suck. Were you afraid of heights as a child? Actually no, but NOW I kinda am. Have you ever had a lead role in a play? No. Would you ever take a solo road trip? No, that sounds super depressing and lonely. Do the mountains fascinate you? Of course! So much history built into a magnificent, awe-inspiring piece of nature. Have you ever been insulted or called names by a significant other? Wow, no. I wouldn't tolerate that for a second. What’s your favorite movie battle scene? The fight between Simba and Scar is very powerful imo. Have you ever been to a same-sex wedding? No, but not because I'm opposed. I'd love to go to one and be the photographer. What’s your favorite Marvel movie? Probably one of the Spider-Man films. I don't remember which it is, and I don't want to spoil it by explaining what I do recall. Did you have a Walkman when you were a kid? No. What’s the most difficult experience you and a significant other have gone through together? Being long-distance when we really wanted each other's physical comfort. Have you ever attempted to pick a lock? Did you succeed? Yes, because Ashley locked her keys in the car. I don't remember if it worked, actually. Have you done the Bratz doll challenge for YouTube? No. I've seen a couple people do it, though, and it's both cool and creepy. Does the hospital in your town have a good reputation? NOOOOOOOOOOOO. What is your favorite nickname that you’ve had? "Bee" from Megan. Have you ever gotten a professional massage? No. I would be SO uncomfortable. If you had braces, do you wear your retainers still? No. :/ Well, the one you put in, anyone. I have a metal one behind the front row of my bottom teeth. If you had braces, have your teeth moved since you got them off? Yes. Do you know anyone personally who’s lost a child? I know way too many people who have suffered miscarriages. Do you take your medications regularly? Yes. What’s one luxury item you wish you could afford? An actually nice house. What’s your favorite thing to do in a swimming pool? Just kinda casually swim around. Have you ever been abused by a cop? No. What is one thing that you took to show-and-tell as a kid? My Snorlax plushy. Do you remember losing your first tooth? No. In the summer would you rather have the windows down or the A/C on in the car? I strongly prefer A/C. Have you ever been addicted to a game? What game? I had a long-time addiction to World of Warcraft for a couple years or so. I still play it now, but I'm not addicted to it anymore. As a matter of fact I get bored of it easily now. Which was better: the original The Lion King or the sequel? The original, but I love both very much. Do any of your grandparents have a tattoo? I don't know if any did. Do you believe that your pets feel love towards you? Roman, 120%. It is so obvious. Venus, no, as reptiles are literally incapable of experiencing that emotion. I do, however, know she trusts me. Are you proud of your body? FUCK no. Have you ever been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance? No. How do YOU believe the world & universe started? I don't know. I feel like MAYBE there is some sort of ultimate intelligence that formed the universe (maybe prompted the Big Bang, though I've always been dubious of that occurring naturally), but I don't think of this topic frequently at all. Does it really matter, after all? We're here, so just focus on that and live in the now. Have you ever stuck gum under a desk/chair? NO, that shit grosses me the hell out. When shopping at a grocery store, do you return your cart or just leave it? Return your fucking cart, please. It is NOT that difficult. What is one thing you’d never want your parents to find out? Certain places I've, uh, "done" things. When you were little, did you like Dr. Suess books? Yep. I seriously loved Green Eggs and Ham. What would you consider unforgivable? Rape is #1. Would you rather give your food to a homeless shelter or money to charity? Food to a homeless shelter, but I'd love to do both. What was your least favorite year of your life so far? 2016 was a fucking NIGHTMARE. Have you spent money on a game online? On one occasion, I asked if Mom would reactivate my WoW account, and when two expansions came out, I asked if she could buy them. I HATED asking. Thankfully, now, I'm rich enough in the game to pay for the "token" currency, which renews your subscription for a month, so I essentially play for free now. Have you been called a bad influence? Yes. Have any self-done piercings? Noooo. I only trust professionals. Ever pierced someone else? Again, no. Leave it to professionals, as well as someone without tremors. If you had a child with down’s syndrome, would you keep him/her? IF I wanted kids, of course I would. It really, REALLY bothers me when DS is the reason behind abortion. Mind you, I am pro-choice, but come on... Don't treat down's syndrome children as a curse. If someone tried to murder your child, do you think it would be wrong to expose them publicly and talk about it on social media? Of fucking course I would. I'd damn that person to hell myself. Is there a toxic person that you miss? I sometimes miss Colleen. Are you still contemplating going back to someone you shouldn’t? With Jason, yes. If he actually wanted me back (that will never happen, but anyway), I fear I'd say yes and probably would, realistically. When was the last time you had a new crush? When I realized I was bisexual. Do you want Jesus to come back soon? Back when I was a Christian, I was terrified of Judgment Day. I don't believe in it now. What is something you can’t wear because of your body type? I COULD wear whatever the hell I wanted, but I refuse to wear crop tops or strapless tops (or strapless bras). Oh, and thongs. No thanks. If you have curves, do you like them? I'm not curvy naturally, I'm just fat. Have you ever worn matching pajamas with someone? No, but that'd be cute. Has anyone ever mistaken you for being anorexic? No way. What fast food place do you avoid at all costs? Arby's, to name one. Are you afraid of deep sea creatures? Yes, especially giant squid. Have you ever agreed to purchase something on Ebay and got scammed somehow? Ugh, I got Ico THREE TIMES and they were ALL broken; they'd freeze in the first few minutes. Has anybody ever given you a promise ring? No. What is your favorite kind of cake? Red velvet. Honestly, have you ever eaten raw cookie dough? Yeah, multiple times. Were you outdoors or indoors more as a kid? I'd say it was a split down the middle. Have you ever had a relationship that began via text? Jason, Tyler, Juan, and Sara all began over text. Girt asked me out over Facebook Messenger. Do you think sloths are cute or ugly? They're cuties! What eyeshadow suits you best? I only wear black eyeshadow. Do you watch the show Wizards of Waverly Place? I did as a kid and really liked it. Have you ever been to the rainforest? No. I don't think I could handle the humidity, though I'd love to see all the beautiful wonders. Are you a member of any clubs? No. Would you shave your head with a friend who had cancer? If it was someone I was very close to and they were extremely self-conscious about it, I'd probably be willing to get very short hair, but I don't think I could handle no hair at all. How did you meet your pet? Roman was one of the kittens of Ashley's mother-in-law's cats. She has way too many cats and needed to get rid of the kittens, and I'd been wanting one like mad. I found Venus via the online reptile-selling hub called Morph Market, and I became VERY interested in the many, many ball python morphs, and when I saw her, I immediately knew that was my baby. Did/Do you have any PEZ dispensers? I did as a kiddo. What are some of the phrases in your personal ‘bingo’ card? "Mood," "can't relate," "hi, how are ya," "jinkies," "yikes," "oof," shit like that. Have you ever been through a trap door? No. Do/did you have to wear a uniform to your high school? No, only middle school. How many video games do you own? A whole lot. Have you ever visited a sex shop? No. Have you ever ridden a bicycle through a busy city? No, I'd be very scared to. Do you use Instagram? How often do you post there? I have two for my varying photography subjects. I post very rarely on both. Have you ever had a scary encounter with a wild animal? I have not.

[el-cadejos]

Travel to Japan

So, after my visit in 2018, I wanted to share some of my tips for making the best of your trip to Japan:

Language

You don’t have to speak native-level Japanese, but it helps to know common phrases and questions to communicate better. Japanese people greatly appreciate and are more willing to help when they see a foreigner attempting to communicate in their language, instead of making them try to communicate in a foreign one (after all, you are the one travelling to their country!)

Younger generations do have English as a course in school, but they get little opportunity to practice it once they finish. Someone that speaks another language is going to be hard to come by, so prepare as best as you can.

Recommended phrases to know (included in the phrasebook):

hello

thank you

excuse me

I am from ___,

Is English ok?

Is a picture ok? (Can I take a picture?)

Where is ___ station/building/etc?

Is credit card ok?

I’d like ____

This, that, here, there

Resources

Lingodeer - app

Boutique Japan Tiny Phrasebook - handy for almost any occasion!

Culture

Respect

Japan is known for their emphasis on respect. While they have historically kept to themselves (even having a closed economy for centuries), they know Japan is very popular with tourists, and are used to seeing foreigners. However, not all foreigners keep this in mind, and make Japanese uncomfortable by talking loudly in commute areas, skipping lines, pointing at people, taking advantage of public resources, etc.

Expected behaviors that are common to miss:

Always ask people if it’s ok to take their picture, or something of theirs

Check the train carts, some are specifically for women (due to assault, harassment, etc). Similarly, avoid using the seats reserved for people with special needs.

Keep your voice down in commute areas (trains, buses, etc). Set your phone to Silent Mode.

At religious sites, there are items/dances/altars/etc that should not be photographed under any circumstances. There will be signs in English, Mandarin and Japanese to help you.

Japanese reserve personal space for those they have a lot of trust in. Please keep a moderate distance when possible (trains are an understandable exception).

Garbage

Trash cans are few in public areas. This is related to the Tokyo Subway Sarin Attacks in 1995, in which terrorists left dangerous chemicals inside them. Authorities removed a great number of trash cans to reduce the danger to citizens (this was not the only reason, but an important one). Keep your trash on yourself (plastic bag/inside your backpack or pockets) and dispose of it when possible.

Food

Not much to say about food. Just make sure you understand how much a dish costs, because they can vary from $2 to $35 without skipping a beat. Restaurants usually have plastic representations of their dishes, so you can point at them to order. Coca Cola is quite popular, but otherwise Japanese prefer tea or coffe based beverages.

Other

Money

Japan is a cash-oriented society. Most business take credit card, but make sure to ask first. Otherwise, keep a healthy amount of cash on yourself. Buy a coin purse, it will come in handy (also, they are very cute and sold everywhere).

Transport

Google Maps is your friend! Highly accurate in all of Japan, it will give you a lot of independence to move around. I recommend getting a PASMO card for subway/trains/buses. The JR Pass is great for travelling hassle-free to places away from the main cities, but it is somewhat expensive. I highly recommend it as long as your visit is for more than 7 days, and you are free to choose your schedule. Otherwise, it isn’t worth it.

Free Tourist Guides

These are Japanese volunteers that want to practice their language skills, so they offer themselves to guide you through the city in a language you are comfortable with. I found in English and Spanish, and requested ones that spoke in Spanish for my mother’s benefit. They were all extremely helpful, friendly, flexible and knowledgable. 

Connectivity

Not knowing the language well, and other particularities of the trip made me very nervous, so I was eager to have connectivity during the whole trip. I bought SIM cards for my parents and myself (to ensure we could always communicate, specially if we got separated) from eConnect Japan. They were delivered to the Narita Airport beforehand, so we had them the moment we arrived. The instructions are very simple, and connectivity was great everywhere.

Recommended Locations

We used Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka as our “headquarters”, and traveled elsewhere by train.

Tokyo

The city is massive, so I was not able to check everything out. However, I did hang out in Shibuya, Akihabara, Akasaka, Shinjuku, Odaiba. There is a lot to see. It will depend on what interests you. Meiji Jingu is impressive, just like Senso-ji.

Kyoto

Fushimi Inari has the famous 1000 red gates. The city center in general is very nice, and there are plenty of shrines to visit. Kinkaku-ji is highly recommended. Nijo Castle is next to the Kyoto Imperial Palace. I hope you can visit them thoroughly. I arrived after a typhoon hit the city, so they were damaged :( 

Fujisawa

Enoshima Iwaya Caves

Yokohama

In general, the city is worth walking around.

Osaka

OSAKA CASTLE OF COURSE. Dotonbori is the main tourist location. It also has the famous Glico Man sign.

Nara

Famous for the wild deer that populate the city. There are many landmarks here. The deer are not domesticated, so even if they let you approach to take photos and pet them, they can and will bite, tackle or out right steal from you (food mainly). Special cookies are sold to feed them, just be careful.

Nikko

Attractions include the mausoleum of shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu (Nikkō Tōshō-gū) and that of his grandson Iemitsu (Iemitsu-byō Taiyū-in), and the Futarasan Shrine, which dates to the year 767. (wikipedia). I learned a lot about the Shogunate here, so if you are interested in it, this location is a must.

Final Words

Walk as much as you can! Japan is everything the media sells you and more. An amazing cultural shock that, if you are up to it, will teach you greatly!

[kaibutsushidousha]

Artbook Data - Kaede Akamatsu

There was at least one implied chapter 6 spoiler on this one.

Seiyuu’s comment: Sayaka Kanda

I already had the honor of participating in DanganRonpa: The Stage before, but this is my first in a DanganRonpa game, so I was a bit nervous in the first recordings (laughs). Kaede Akamatsu-chan is a character as adorable as she looks, so I’m very, very glad to have voiced her. I played her with as much energy, as much spirit of “I wanna pull everyone closer to me” as I could.

Kodaka’s comment: A girl kind, strong and most of all, dignified

As one of the two protagonists of this game, we developed her design in a way that makes her feel opposite to the other protagonist Saihara. We decided to make her a female protagonist from the start, but we want to make her different from Komaru Naegi, the protagonist of Ultra Despair Girls, much more protagonist-like than her, so we carefully designed her to make her facial expression kinder and stronger. Also, like all the protagonists before her, we cared make reasonably plain, with no huge personality quirks, to facilitate empathy between the protagonist and the player. It didn’t took much longer for us to decide to make her a pianist. The idea came from us thinking we could use a song as the key element for her conversations with Saihara. Her name is positive but also transient... that’s basically the idea I was trying to convey.

Now about her role, in all DanganRonpas so far I always aimed to make it so that “all characters get as much characterization as the protagonist and you never know who the culprit and the victim will be”. In that case we’re still missing the plotline where the protagonist falls victim to the killing, no? That’s how the story started. More than that, we didn’t make it so that she was the victim, we went one step further and made it into the story I’m sure you are all familiar with. But this part of the script was really  the most difficult to write in the entire series.

A protagonist switch requires making the player grow attached to both the old and the new protagonist for it to work. For that reason, we meticulously calculated everything that would made Akamatsu more sympathetic when incorporating it to the script. Another step for the plan is the huge help I got from her seiyuu Sayaka Kanda. Being the protagonist gives you a lot of attention from the media and interviews, so this process can be quite hard without someone I can trust to support me as an “accomplice”. Kanda-san not only has already performed on The Stage, but is also someone I know to deeply understand DanganRonpa, so she was the best choice for this point. This also means you can say I can’t imagine anyone other than Kanda-san playing her.

Design Notes:

Music Note Hairpin: She holds her hair with music note-themed hairpins very popular with music fans. She places them on both sides of her forehead combining style and practicity.

Flat chest: Iruma calls it like that every freaking time, but if you look at the numbers or even at the actual chest, anyone can tell she’s wrong. She’s not even close to a flatboard!

Backpack: Score sheets, CDs, music players. She a lot of things she needs to carry around and it’s super convinient not to need to carry all of this in her hands. It’s a trendy box-shape backpack whose main selling point is its large volume.

Underwear: Pink panties, always popular with girls. The noble design with the modest lace boys dream of is an item we would want to thank god for.

Fingers: Her miraculous fingertips gave life to melodies admired by the world. In other words, these are the tools of her trade. She takes thorough care of them so they won’t get hurt and trims her nails very short to hit the keys with more accuracy.

Skirt: A skirt designed with music notes running through a staff notation score. It’s fairly short but with her amazingly admirable activeness, she climbs and crawls with it without a care, always marching forward in the energetic pace of a Zundoko-bushi.

High Socks: High socks decorated with crest of the Hikariboshi International Academy. Thigh-highs are what’s mainstream nowadays and it’s nice that they show her youthful good-looking kneecaps.

Favorite presents:

High-End Headphones: A pair of high-quality headphones for elitists, specialized in reproducing the fine, delicate sounds from classical, jazz and similars. It satisfies even Akamatsu’s fine ears.

Tattered Music Sheet: Worn-out hand-drawn music sheets. The unfinished work of a highly famed composer, or so it claims itself to be. It’s good enough to make the classical music fangirl Akamatsu drool!

Metronome: A musical tool used to measure the tempo with a fixed reverse pendulum when playing an instrument. Akamatsu is in a long-term relationship with metronomes since she was six.

Hated presents: 

Pigeon Food: Carefully selected fresh seed to feed pigeons with. You can’t just give to wild pigeons thoughtlessly. A horribly unsuitable gift to give to a girl!

Key phrases:

The Piano Freak’s Grand Brilliant Journey: Akamatsu is the Super High School Level Pianist she is now thanks to her natural talent and sensitivity and to her continuous efforts through her entire life. Since she was very little, she was raised with pianos instead of toys and only developed interest in things related to music, almost as if she born just for the sake of becoming a pianist. In the past she has even  performed Chopin’s 3 Grand Brilliant Waltzes (Trois grandes valses brillantes) to an European King travelling incognito. Knowing about her succesful career led to one student offering her an absurd invitation to rule the underworld as his partner, but she can ignore that and keep really looking forward to her future works!

Her Beloved Musics: Like the young celebrated pianist she is, Akamatsu’s favorite song are all state-of-art classical music. She casually namedrops famous songs like Satie’s Gyminopedia, Ravel’s Sonatine, Chopin’s Military Polonaise and Raindrop or Debussy’s Clair de Lune in regular conversation. Her acute sense to find rich emotions was most certainly fostered by her contact with famed songs.

The song she wanted to perform to encourage Saihara was Debussy’s Claire de Lune. It’s a song that moves people closer to her.

The Prologue to the Escape!: “The prisoners of Saishuu Academy will ultimately not manage to escape”. Monokuma said this as nothing but a threat. Even if he really means all the lunacies he says about the Killing Game, she will prove they can escape. With that idea stuck in her mind, Akamatsu encouraged her friends with her characteristic positivity and hot-blooded words, leading them to repeatedly embark on the secret road that looks like a possible secret exit. An underground tunnel with tons of traps and misteries waiting for them. But no matter how dangerous, she could never refuse to give a try as long there’s still a possibility. The 16 keep moving motivated by outstanding indomitable spirit, but for what end?!

The Pianist Loves Automated Mechanisms: A “Rube Goldberg Machine” is a mechanism that operates through multiple intrincately connected part moving in a chain reaction, similar to a karakuri puppet. This weirdly fun device, designed perform unnecessary domino effects and perform simple tasks through excessively complicated methods is named after its creator. Akamatsu is a real fan of this chain/domino setups and karakuris. I wonder if the hidden camera setup she thought up along with Saihara will work just as those?

Main Quotes: 

“Once all of us leave this place, how about we become friends outside?”: The Kiling Game enforced by Monokuma with their escape as the stakes. Strangers would naturally all throw suspicion leading to an unavoidable chain reaction of distrust, but things might be different if they are all trusted friends. But Akamatsu would never give to any to cause tragedy through discord. She declares everyone will overcome all dangers and become friends. If anyone was feeling down, she would use her strong positive words to make them believe in a future shining with the light of hope.

“That’s why... No matter how scary it is, we gotta fight. With the truth“: They must expose the culprit of the murder case among their surviving friends. Realizing how this fact is making Saihara tense, Akamatsu whispers to him: “I know you can do it“. Because they investigated together, she can fully trust and encourage him. For Saihara, who struggles because revealing the truth can make people suffre, her words feels like the biggest support he can get.

Final comment: Annoyingly unable to give up hope! After sheding her tears in secret, she will keep a strong face to encourage everyone one more time. Here starts heart-burning Akamatsu March!

[shirtlesssammy]

10x08: Hibbing 911

Ah, the episode that planted the seeds for a movement. So happy to be recapping Dodio this week!

Now:

In Hibbing, Minnesota, a tagger artist preps to spray paint smiley faces on an alley wall. He hears a noise, but continues with his task. He’s suddenly attacked from behind, and beaten to the point where his blood flies out of him and on to the wall. Impressive! And stylishly cool, show.

After the title card, our fearless leader, Jody, finds herself at a sheriff’s retreat in Hibbing. “You can do this,” she encourages herself before taking the plunge to socialize. #relatable She runs into a bohemian homeless-chic young lady in the parking lot and gives her some lunch money, before heading inside to her doom.

Once inside, she’s greeted by the ball of sunshine herself, Donna Hanscum. Donna is 100% rolling out the welcome wagon for our reluctant sheriff, and she let’s Jody know she grew up here and knows all the town’s ins and outs.

Donna’s EXTREMELY UNLIKEABLE ex-husband Doug decides to make an appearance. His insults towards Donna do not endear him to Jody. Her face is priceless. (Also, petition for the show to not make weight loss/fat jokes for Donna this season and in Wayward? Plz and Thx.)

At the bunker, Sam and Dean continue to search for a cure for the Mark of Cain. (Also, I’m side-eyeing some of the titles of books the Men of Letters have.)

The sheriff’s retreat kicks off with one very awkward Sheriff Len Cuse announcing Partners! for the duration of the retreat. Jody’s busy checking in with Alex so she misses out on partnering up --but that’s ok, so did Donna. Looks like they’re stuck with each other!

Another sheriff asks Donna if she “heard about the body?”, piquing Jody’s hunter interest. Donna assures her that this is very uncommon. 

Jody heads off alone to make a call to Sam. Some minor clunky exposition ensues where Jody finds out Dean’s back, and mostly normal. She then tells them about the case, and Dean offers their assistance. Jody declines. Jam flirtations intensify. Dean’s going stir crazy though so the boys head to Hibbing.

Jody tries to make inroads on the case by examining the body, but is rebuffed by the morgue attendant. Donna arrives and makes nice with Shelly, and the two are quickly ushered over to take a look at the victim. Donna can’t make heads or tails of the bite pattern on the vic. Jody quips, “I was afraid of that.” But keeps Donna in the dark about what she suspects.

Meanwhile that night, secret smoker Howie takes the trash out, and ends up Hibbing’s next mysterious victim.

At the retreat, Donna and Jody start asking Sheriff Cuse about the case, but he’s interrupted by Deputy Graham. They have an issue with “the raffle.” They take off, and it’s then that Donna notices Doug the Dick flirting and dancing with another woman. She exits so she doesn’t have to witness the gross. Jody heads off to pester Len again. He admits there’s been another attack. Jody’s on Hunter High Alert.

She makes a check-in call to Alex, and this episode is kind of hilarious when it comes to her interactions with Alex. Alex is painted as a total hellion that Jody can barely control, but that’s just not the Alex we met in Alex Annie… or in any other episode. I know it’s in the show, so it’s not out of character.I just have to accept that Alex went through a brief phase of adjustment. Donna catches the phone call, and calls Jody out on her less than perfect homelife. Jody admits there was another attack. Then they proceed to have a conversation about Alex and teens and I’m still baffled about it all. Alex isn’t a normal teen? Approaching it simply from Jody’s point of view --connecting with a teenager that she didn’t raise, etc. --does help. I think in many ways Jody had slammed the door shut on any domestic home life for a long time. Suddenly she’s in charge of someone, and that alone is a struggle --it’s extra fun when she’s an ex-blood slave to vampires.

The next morning, the boys pull up to the sheriff’s retreat.

For science:

They share notes with Jody. It seems that both victims were missing leather items. Donna arrives with coffee for her new BFF, and recognizes “Agent Frehley” and “Agent Criss”. (Boy, I hope they used the same names! I wonder if they use names regionally?) 

They make small talk, but in order to keep Donna in the dark about the supernatural, Jody agrees to distract her while the brothers investigate.

Dean and Sam head off to talk to the sheriff...(four men raise their hands)...of Hibbing. Sheriff Len gives them an update on the “animal attacks” while everyone whips out their dicks and measures them right there in the hotel lobby.

Sam wants surveillance video of the attacks but the Sheriff denies there’s any record of it. Meanwhile, the deputy sips his coffee...shiftily. After the flock (herd? flight?) of sheriffs departs, Sam heads off to crack the police evidence database while Dean decides to crack the deputy. (Note to self: Mind out of the gutter Mind OUT OF THE GUTTER failed)

Classic dialogue alert:

Dean: This badge means something.

Sam: I made it at Kinkos.

Dean: Yeah, you did. Be proud of that.

Meanwhile Jody and Donna tour the expo and end up next to a firearms dealer. He tries to sell them a small handgun so they can be armed while they have their nails done.

The two sheriffs exchange a LOOK and proceed to display their weapons knowledge and prowess about a larger gun on display. “Ten pounds pull weight. Cute,” Donna notes.

“Call this a big one? Hope you drive a porsche,” Jody says. Boom DEAD.

Donna’s douche ex husband Doug strolls up and calls Donna a wolf in sheepskin. “Thank you,” Donna replies, adorably. “Wolves are majestic creatures.” Doug proceeds to rip Donna about her weight again, asking why she’s not out on the prowl herself.

Donna tries to laugh it off (while we stop paying attention to the episode so we can start plotting an elaborate “Goodbye Earl” death for Doug). Jody’s had enough. She asks Doug what his problem is, calls him a douche, and off he goes. Donna is understandably pissed about this because, even as we all get Jody’s motivation, she’s also made things harder for Donna. “‘Til you’ve actually lost a husband, you keep your mouth zipped about mine.” Jody suffers a bloody flashback from this, remembering how she found her son eating her husband. UUUUGH (Me: Gives Jody a hug and a warm blanket and a bunny.) Donna notices the dead look on Jody’s face and apologizes quickly, then heads outside to get some air.

Meanwhile, Dean circles around to the deputy and schmoozes him over. The deputy admits that the password on the surveillance server was changed by the sheriff a day ago.

Armed with information about the suspicious sheriff, we cut to Donna. She’s outside when she notices a blood trail. She follows it to find Sheriff Len busting out in fangs and crouching over the body of the pretty young Sheriff Goodhill. (Me: The one part of this episode I didn’t like because I felt like that sheriff was being punished for going out on a date with our protagonist’s ex.)

Jody checks in on Dean, asking how he’s been doing since she heard he took off a while ago. God, I love how Jody takes the time to care about her friend. JODY you are the best. Sam tells them the surveillance videos were deleted and we think we’re at a dead end when Donna runs up. She pulls Jody aside.

Jody immediately apologizes for butting in but Donna is one billion percent past this. “You ever think there are things out there? Things that don’t end up in the police blotter?” She tells Jody about the fanged sheriff. Jody believes her immediately. Donna quickly recalls which room the sheriff booked at the hotel because she is my very favorite sunflower.

Jody and Donna bust into the sheriff’s room. There’s sunscreen on the bed (heh heh vamps) and Donna scribbles out the tracings of a note on the bedside table. It’s an address.The door rattles and Jody whips out a machete. It’s the Winchesters! Hey, buddies. Donna learns quickly that the sheriff is a vampire when Jody drops this fact like a dead potato (shut up, that’s totally a popular phrase).

“You wanna give her the talk?” Dean asks Jody. Well, sure I do, pardner.

After “The Talk” they all head outside. “Heck,” Donna says. “When we were at the weight loss spa?”

“Monsters,” Dean says. “Suckin’ on your fat.”

Dean. Bean. Just...sigh.

Anyway, they’ve got an address now and it’s time to head out. Dean tries to get Donna to stay at the retreat. DEAN. BEAN. >:( But Donna and Jody insist.

The farmhouse is indeed old and creepy and mist covers the ground. Dean pulls out machetes for everyone (YAY) and tells Donna that she’s gotta chop of the head of the vamp. She takes this in totally calmly because she’s Donna Fucking Hanscum.

Sheriff Vampire pops up and tells Sam to run but a vampire gang’s already got everyone else. They knock out Sam and Dean and hold Jody and Donna hostage. Everyone gets tied up in the barn.

Hippie Vampire runs her hand longingly down Dean (get mind out of gutter get mind out of GUTTER) and tells him they’re going to use “every part of the buffalo.” Sheriff Vampire tells the hippie that he doesn’t kill people anymore. In fact, he stood over Sheriff Goodhill and vamped out over her blood, but didn’t bite.

“A vampire that doesn’t feed is like a tiger eating salad,” the vampires explain. (So...like Sam, amirite?) It’s a nature v. nurture argument and they’re going to destroy Hibbing until Sheriff Vampire goes back to the nest. They only found the sheriff because he got his photo in the paper from running a police retreat. “You didn’t just go straight. You became a damn cop. Now THAT is wild, man.”

Len and the hippies (the worst band name) chat while the hunters all saw at their ropes. The hippies try to force Len to kill the trapped hunters but he refuses, so Hippie Vampire chops his head off. Just then Dean busts free and starts to fight the vamps. Sam and Jody do what they can while still tied up when suddenly Hippie Vampire hisses at Jody, ready to chomp her. WHAM SLICE Donna chops her head right off.

“Hakuna matata, Lady,” Donna says. We all jump up and cheer shouting BEST CHARACTER EVER.

Outside everyone checks in with each other. Donna feels sick about chopping off her first head but she’s still standing. Jody and Donna MEGA BOND over it.

Dean and Sam check in with each other because oh yeah, this isn’t Wayward yet. Dean admits that for the first time since he got back he doesn’t feel like the Mark of Cain is pushing him to do things. Sam raises his brow at this because MY DUDE that’s a long time of pretending everything is fine.

“Knowing that these things are out there makes the world seem...I don’t know...bigger, darker,” Donna says. Jody offers to keep Donna apprised of how to fight monsters and they all head off to their lives while Dean rubs the arm with the Mark in a totally normal, not-suspicious manner.

What the Quotes?

You are true blue as ever, Donna.

I love the smell of parchment in the morning.

She smokes grass under the bleachers but at least she’s not luring men to their deaths.

Oh, pal, the FBI doesn’t do cute.

What the cuss? A vampire?

I’m sure it was all kombucha and kumbaya.

Are you feeling dirty, Len? ‘Cause we’re about to have a bloodbath.

Want to read more? Check out our Recap Archive!

[arplis]

Arplis - News: The year was 1995, and I was watching television

Frasier, to be specific, whose placement in the NBC “Must See TV Tuesday” lineup my family took literally. This was event viewing in the Michelman household, and my tweenage brain soaked it up like a sponge: the fashion, the erudition, the many glasses of sherry. One moment stands out above all else, wherein the audience is given a brief glimpse inside the Crane family refrigerator, which is revealed to be stocked to the brim with glowing blue glass bottles of mineral water imported from the United Kingdom. In the context of the show, this was just another item—like the Macclesfield ties, Joan & David loafers and Frasier’s apartment itself—meant to symbolize wealth and class. I discussed the topic with my mother; she told me that the water on Frasier was very expensive, and that in this family we drank water from the spigot on the fridge door. “Imagine paying money for water,” I remember thinking. Today, I wish we’d bought stock in La Croix. Bottled water of a clear, identifiable origin has long been popular in Europe, where the history of drinking site-specific mineralized water dates back thousands of years. But here in America, mineral water has baggage. I believe I speak for many readers when I describe first encountering mineral water as a totem of yuppie excess vis-à-vis late 20th-century movies and television, obsessed over by the likes of Patrick Bateman (he drinks Ramlösa and Apollinaris) and the aforementioned Frasier Crane (those iconic blue teardrop bottles of Tŷ Nant, from Wales). This identity wholly disconnects mineral water in the U.S. from its curative, egalitarian image abroad. It’s a status symbol, something rich people drink as a class flex: the little bottle of San Pellegrino, same as what they sell at the grocery store across the street, marked up to $12 at a restaurant catering to assholes. Frasier may be relegated to the great rerun loop of history, but today’s outlook for mineral water in America is evolving quickly, and there are merchants for the cause. One of them is a guy out of Fort Lauderdale named Brett Spitalny. With his company, Aqua Maestro, Spitalny has, since 2002, overseen a portfolio of imported bottled water. And that’s all he sells, offering about 30 different fine waters from around the world (including Borsec from Romania, Fiuggi from Italy, and yes, Frasier’s beloved Tŷ Nant), selling to a collection of retail and wholesale clients around the country and providing water education along the way to high-end hotels and restaurants. “What’s coming from the source is what you find in the bottle,” he says. “It’s not adulterated, and it hasn’t been purified or filtered or messed with.” The sentiment might be familiar to anyone who’s set foot in a natural wine bar. Aqua Maestro’s portfolio includes some recognizable brands, including Fiji and Voss, as well as deeply obscure bottles like Iskilde, a highly oxygenated still water from Denmark that “comes out of the ground looking like milk.” “Imagine paying money for water,” I remember thinking. Today, I wish we’d bought stock in La Croix. Ashley Epperson of Salacious Drinks, a Washington D.C.–based distributor and direct seller of mineral waters, looks at the seltzer boom as a pump primer for the U.S. market. “As far as Americans are concerned, we are way behind the times,” she tells me. “If you go to Japan, Europe, Australia, even Canada, they have huge water markets. But we are so used to the idea of free water, or buying purified tap water in a bottle. Most people don’t know what fine water tastes like.” In this way, a brand like Salacious Drinks caters to people who have had their interest piqued by seltzer, and are ready to learn more about the world of fine water. “We love someone saying, ‘Oh, I like La Croix’ because that means when we sit down and do a fine water tasting, they are going to say ‘Ohhhh…’” If mineral water is a beverage primed for growth in the American market, its punky cousin seltzer is surely to thank. The year 2019 was the year seltzer peaked: The stuff is everywhere, filling entire aisles at your local Target and spanning the spectrum of popular culture, from New York Times think pieces to Coachella activations to junk science finger wagging. La Croix in particular has been embraced by the extremely online millennial work force (especially in media), showing up in desk office candids and work fridge tableaus. There’s even a secret Facebook group for devotees of seltzer, profiled by everyone from The Spoon to The Guardian. (I’m a longtime member.) My own avid consumption of La Croix, which is just filtered tap water that’s been force-carbonated and flavored, had become reflexive, habitual, desultory—a drink to drink when I didn’t feel like using my brain, the water equivalent of ordering a Starbucks coffee. By contrast, Borjomi, a Georgian water I credit for thrusting me down this rabbit hole, tastes as if it were beamed in from another consciousness entirely. It is creamy, lush, with just a touch of finessed funk, like a beautiful raw milk cheese, or a piece of foie gras, or a glass of farmhouse saison (minus the hops and malt). I found myself (quelle horreur) skipping past the wine section and forgoing the beer at World Foods—the excellent specialty food and beverage market near where I live in Portland, Oregon—in favor of more Borjomi, and eventually, other delicious waters from around the world: Antipodes of New Zealand, Jermuk of Armenia, Llanllyr Source of Wales, and Essentuki of southern Russia, not far from the border with Georgia. The seltzer boom (and likely impending bust) has opened a door for us to reconsider what mineral water is, and who it should be for. If brands like Polar and La Croix (and yes, even White Claw) have helped unmoor fizzy water from its wealth-and-privilege trappings in America, then I say bully; after all, La Croix is owned by the same company that makes Faygo, the beloved soda of the ’90s horror-rap crew Insane Clown Posse. How bourgeois could it really be? In the pantheon of affordable luxuries, mineral water has few peers—a .75 liter bottle of Borjomi, the utterly delicious, naturally sparkling mineral water of the nation of Georgia, costs somewhere between $1.99 and $3.99, depending on where you’re purchasing. Turns out this was just scratching the surface. The well for water appreciation runs deep, and all aqueducts lead to the work of the world’s leading authorities on mineral water: Martin Riese and Michael Mascha, who together run Los Angeles’ Fine Water Academy, bestowers of the official Water Sommelier Certification. Germany native Riese first gained fame in this country for his work with the Patina Restaurant Group, whose properties across the United States include multiple operations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and in New York’s Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Riese’s water menu for Patina is the stuff of legend, helping land him everywhere from The New York Times to Conan. “People started to come to [LACMA] just for the water menu and try the different waters and taste the differences between them,” Riese tells me. “I was a little surprised and almost scared.” Mascha, meanwhile, runs FineWaters.com, an international clearinghouse for water information and advocacy, and a compendium of bottled water brands large and small. A former professor at USC, Mascha came to water as an alternative to alcohol following a serious health diagnosis. “My cardiologist told me I could live, or drink alcohol, but not both,” he says. “Naturally, I made the decision to stop drinking, but by removing one bottle from the table I began to focus on another.” If mineral water is a beverage primed for growth in the American market, its punky cousin seltzer is surely to thank. Key to the duo’s methodology is understanding the differences among individual water sites. Not unlike wine, tea or coffee, water is a product of its place of harvest—in this case, different sites around the world through which rainwater is naturally filtered. Each mountain range and hillside has its own geological calling card, with a noticeable impact on a given water’s flavor and mouthfeel. Different waters vary in chemical composition, which is why the water bottled as Lurisia (from the Italian Alps) tastes vastly different from the water bottled as Borsec (from the Carpathian Mountains of Romania). Riese and Mascha discuss this in terms of total dissolved solids, or TDS, a phrase well-known by espresso geeks—low-TDS waters have an almost drying effect, while high-TDS waters taste rich and smooth, even sometimes a touch swampy (in a good way). On his website FineWaters, Mascha categorizes a range of mineral waters from “super low” (0-50 mg/L) to “very high” (1500+ mg/L). By this categorization, the 2,210 milligramsTDS on my beloved Borjomi is incredibly high—more than four times higher than Perrier, for example. It makes sense that this would be the water that hooked me. In specialty coffee, a topic I’ve written about extensively, it’s common for new acolytes to have a “light switch moment” with coffees that explore wild expanses of the flavor spectrum: Think wild-fermented and genetically diverse “natural-processed” coffees from Ethiopia, or highly prized and rightly expensive Gesha variety coffees from Panama. Same thing in wine, where young drinkers have gravitated in droves to the electric Technicolor “natural” wines of boundary-pushing makers like Anders Frederik Steen, Furlani and Cornelissen. These experiences fall on the extreme end of the product spectrum, and that’s why they hook new drinkers: The journey to “aha!” upends the preconceived notion of what coffee or wine should be, redrawing its culinary and cultural application. Same with Borjomi, an extremely mineralized water that led me to explore a world of flavor experiences—some more subtle, some even more extreme (say hey, Essentuki #4). “We’re seeing a wave of adoption where people realize that water is not just water,” says Mascha. “They get hooked for whatever reason, and then they realize that water has terroir, it comes from a place, it has flavor, and it can be integrated into epicurean ways like wine.” Ladies and gentlemen, it me. I was first suckered in by flavored filtered tap (La Croix), then had my mind blown by the outer edges of the mineral spectrum (Borjomi). It’s roughly the trajectory a wine drinker undertakes, from nipped high school Boone’s Farm to Jura savagnin sous voile, with a land of exploration and subtlety to discover in between. (Burgundy, if you’re paying.) Riese and Mascha advocate seeking out different styles and weights of water for different meal pairings and experiences: Cantonese suckling pork with Cana Royal water from Slovenia, or smoked fish roe with a low-TDS Swedish glacier water, which Mascha describes as tasting “like you’re in the middle of nature, and it’s raining and you open your mouth.” And in our conversations, each encouraged me to explore offerings across the minerality scale, like the soft, low-TDS waters of Svalbardi, Lofoten and Lurisia, or the complex, naturally sparkling waters of Vichy Catalan, Pedras and Ecuador’s Guitig. Unlike so much of today’s zen koan cacophony of wellness trend buzz, mineral water is certifiably good for you, something czars and soldiers and doctors in Europe have known for centuries (to say nothing of the older regulars at the 127-year-old Russian & Turkish Baths in New York’s East Village, swigging huge plastic bottles of Narzan). Mineral water is culinary, yes, but it’s also elemental in a profoundly satisfying way—an organism consuming the most delicious and interesting version of something it needs to live. “Like with wine, like with coffee, it’s not about finding what’s best,” says Mascha. These days he’s expanding the role of water to its place beyond the glass, working with cocktail bars to develop custom ice and chocolatiers seeking the perfect water to blend into chocolate bars. This feels like a natural expansion of the implied conclusion, which is that by re-evaluating the identity and flavor and history of the water we drink, we can then extend this new consideration into water’s role in the wild beer we drink, the cocktail ice we stir and shake with, the sip of water we take to realign our palates between the bites and bottles of everything else we love. “These waters come from a real place, from a real source with a cultural identity attached,” says Mascha. “They mean something.” The post Seltzer Is Over. Mineral Water Is Forever. appeared first on PUNCH. #LaCroix #MineralWater

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/the-year-was-1995-and-i-was-watching-television

[bigyack-com]

American Teenagers Are Declaring ‘Virginity Rocks’

Some are wearing them in jest. Others sport them sincerely.But whatever their motivation, teenagers across the country have been going wild for shirts that bear a chaste declaration: “Virginity Rocks.”The clothing items became popular online thanks to a social media influencer and are now stocked by a major retail chain with a presence in malls across the United States. The trend has puzzled some school administrators, who have banned the shirts only to face criticism, and other adults, who have wondered if youth abstinence is on the rise.It can be traced to Danny Duncan, a 27-year-old YouTube personality and prankster, who said he started wearing “Virginity Rocks” shirts in his videos as something of a joke in 2017. Mr. Duncan said that his use of the phrase was “tongue in cheek,” and that most people wore it humorously. But, he added, he is proud to have seen it catch on with young people who champion abstinence.“I have sex, obviously, but I want people to do whatever they want to do and not be pressured into anything,” Mr. Duncan said. “I sell ‘Practice Safe Sex,’ too, which could be funny but is also a positive message at the end of the day.”Mr. Duncan has built a following of roughly 3.5 million subscribers on YouTube with his prank videos. In his most popular post, he repeatedly trips and falls while holding a box of pennies in places like a mall escalator, startling the people around him. Other videos show him precariously riding a hoverboard down stairs, jumping out of a golf cart before crashing it into a tree and pulling high jinks while grocery shopping, such as sneaking behind the milk displays. Mr. Duncan said that according to his YouTube statistics, 92 percent of his audience is male, the majority 24 and younger.And that audience has wholeheartedly embraced “Virginity Rocks.” Mr. Duncan has done branded tours to meet his fans (and sell merchandise). He shared Shopify data that showed millions of dollars in online sales. And a partnership started last year with Zumiez, the teen retailer with more than 700 locations in the United States and abroad, has increased his visibility.The chain, which specializes in action sports brands, prominently showcases “Virginity Rocks” apparel featuring Mr. Duncan’s name online and in stores, where cardboard cutouts of the floppy-haired YouTuber grin at customers in some locations. The wares, which include bucket hats ($40), lanyards ($12) and slide sandals ($40), alongside the ubiquitous hoodies ($55), have been a hit. Mr. Duncan said Zumiez had told him that it has sold more than 400,000 pieces of merchandise.Zumiez even invited Mr. Duncan to its annual gathering of top sellers last month in Keystone, Colo., where he presented an award to one of the chain’s top salespeople. (The prize was a Tesla with horns, a reference to a joke from one of Mr. Duncan’s YouTube videos.) He was bowled over by the appreciation from the chain’s associates at the event, he said.“These employees would be like: ‘Thank you so much. You made me so much money because the shirts are so easy to sell,’” Mr. Duncan said, adding that the merchandise would soon be available in stores in Canada and Australia. “I’ve only been there seven months. It’s kind of mind-blowing.”Zumiez, which is based in Lynnwood, Wash., said it was company policy not to talk about specific brands.“We are not going to release sales numbers or disclose our top sellers for competitive reasons, but we do really appreciate Danny’s partnership and the partnership of all our brands,” Chris Work, the chief financial officer, said in an email. He said that there was “truth to the Tesla” anecdote and that he appreciated the help of all the chain’s brands at the annual event.The success of “Virginity Rocks” merchandise has startled some in Mr. Duncan’s orbit.“We’re doing these meet and greets for Zumiez and thousands of kids show up and the whole mall is covered in ‘Virginity Rocks,’” Stefan Toler, Mr. Duncan’s manager, said in an interview. “It started as more of a joke, but now it’s an actual brand where we’re outselling Thrasher, Nike, Adidas and all these brands in Zumiez, and we’re like, ‘What the hell?’ Even Zumiez is like, ‘What’s happening?’”He theorized that those buying the “Virginity Rocks” apparel were split between teenagers who endorsed the message and Mr. Duncan’s fans, who were wearing it ironically. Still, he said, he believes that the popularity of the shirt is making virginity cool among Mr. Duncan’s supporters.“I’m 32, so back when I was in high school you would not say that, but he’s made it cool with his fans in general,” Mr. Toler said. “If Danny’s fans are virgins, they’re psyched to be virgins.”Mr. Duncan has a trademark for use of the phrase on clothing, greetings cards and condoms, according to public records. Mr. Toler said policing the trademark was “insane.” Still, he has been able to remove imitators on Amazon by using the site’s brand registry and has been successful when he has sent emails to sites like Teespring, which allows people to customize apparel, asking them remove items, he said.For some school administrators, the clothing has presented a confounding problem, and they have struggled to address its popularity. Teenagers have been suspended for wearing shirts with the phrase at schools in Oregon, Wisconsin and Missouri. That has outraged parents, who believe the clothes are bearing a positive message.One student at Roseburg High School, in Roseburg, Ore., was sent home in 2018 after wearing a “Virginity Rocks” shirt. His grandmother wrote a Facebook post wondering why the principal found it offensive. The school, which declined to comment when contacted by The New York Times, told a local news outlet at the time that the shirt would have been disruptive in class, and that the same treatment would have extended to shirts that said “Sex Rocks” or “Smoke More Pot.” The school also gave the student the option to turn the shirt inside out or change into one it provided.Mr. Duncan, who lives in Los Angeles, subsequently visited Roseburg, filming a video that he posted on YouTube. The video shows him emerging from a sleek black van emblazoned with “Virginity Rocks” and being greeted by a large group of screaming teenagers in a parking lot. He then distributes free “Virginity Rocks” shirts to the ebullient crowd, which begins chanting the phrase with him.A high school student in the Chetek-Weyerhaeuser school district in Wisconsin and a middle school student in Wentzville, Mo., have also been disciplined for wearing the shirts, according to local news reports. Some of the incidents have been picked up by conservative news sites, which have framed them around the issue of schools banning pro-abstinence clothing in an affront to Christian values.“I don’t understand why you would ban it,” Mr. Duncan said. Plus, he added, “a lot of kids kind of like it when they’re not supposed to have it.”Mr. Toler said they might introduce a new set of merchandise to address the issue. “We’ll put a censored bar over ‘virginity,’ but kids will know what it is, so that way schools won’t take the shirts and suspend them,” he said.On Instagram, the hashtag #virginityrocks leads to photos of Mr. Duncan, selfies of young people wearing clothes with the phrase and memes that are often inappropriate. It also leads to pictures from Zumiez stores.Mr. Duncan believes that the success of the term is tied to his persona. It would mean something different if it had been popularized by Bam Margera, the professional skateboarder and “Jackass” star, he said, and send yet another message if worn by the pastor Joel Osteen.“The shirt wouldn’t sell if I didn’t have my face behind it,” he said. “I’m just trying to get it as big as possible.” Read the full article

[strangecollectorcupcake-fan]

4 1/2 predictions for marketers in 2019

The internet is replete with predictions of what’s going to happen in the coming year. I usually don’t put much stock in them because this industry changes every 5 minutes. If even half of the predictions come true, I’m impressed.

That’s not going to stop me from putting out my predictions for next year. But they’re not predictions so much as observations of what the natural evolution in our industry could be. The last thing I want to do is to pontificate on high because I’m just another schmuck trying to make a living.

I’m also going to take it a step further and not just talk about what I think will happen but also what you can do to turn it to your advantage. That’s really where the value is, right?

Okay, here we go!

1. Privacy will continue to grow as consumer and government concerns

The United States is surrounded by countries whose privacy laws are stronger than ours, whether it’s GDPR in the European Union, CASL in Canada to laws that are either being enacted in California or being considered in Congress.

What’s clear is that the Wild West of data use is coming to an end. What are hastening its demise is not just the almost daily announcement of data breaches but also the high visibility of some of those breaches and mistakes in data use and protection.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal involving Facebook was a watershed moment because the impact is that the consumer is tired of having their data used or misused everywhere.

The Russian probe will have a greater effect on consumer attitudes because of allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the advertising that was done on a personal level.

People see these things happening more often and affecting them more personally, and they begin to doubt what’s true. This doubt and the apparent lack of control they have over where and how their personal data is being used is scary for consumers.

California just enacted a strict privacy law, and Colorado and other states are drafting their own legislation that will attract the feds’ attention. I expect to see something crafted in the next year at the national level, but whether it will be worth anything is anybody’s guess.

What the marketer must do: Get up to date on everything that’s happening, not just here in the U.S. and not just in the countries where you have customers but also in countries that have a major influence in email marketing.

For example, do you know what the key provisions are in CASL (Canada’s Anti-Spam Law)? What about GDPR? That new California privacy law I mentioned before?

You can’t rely on your privacy officers or legal counsel to tell you what to do with email. You are the one who will drive that conversation.

2. Marketers will keep getting smarter because of technology

Smarter, that is, thanks to the technologies that ancillary providers like Kickbox, LiveClicker, Phrasee and real-time email tech providers have created to jumpstart the continuing need for relevance. Marketers will continue to advance because these companies give them the tools to push the proverbial “easy” button.

These technologies are part of the second wave of email innovation that I described in a previous column that is making email, and the people who use it, more relevant and useful to recipients.

What the marketer must do: Although many of these new technologies are making email and marketers smarter, you need to be careful to avoid “shiny toy syndrome,” also known as GMOOT (“Get me one of that!”).

Get up to speed on all of the new tools and processes you can use to learn more about your customers and to put that information to work in your messaging programs. But don’t innovate for the sake of innovating.

Think instead about how innovation can help your customers, how you can better serve them and increase the value you represent to them.

3. The rise of the machines and the plague of misinformation

Today, when I hear people talking about artificial intelligence and machine learning, I want to throw up. Mainly, it’s because of all the misinformation masquerading as expert information about what each one means.

On one end of the spectrum, people talk about AI as if it were the voice of IBM’s computer Watson when he (I mean, it) was on “Jeopardy.” That is, it makes decisions for us and makes us smarter.

On the other end are the people who understand it and know that both AI and ML need humans to feed in all the data and context the computer uses to make decisions. Flaws in the process mean the output driving your automation and insights will be flawed, too.

In 2019, we’ll continue to see more refinement in what each technology means – AI and ML are not the same – and how they can help us make the right decisions. We’ll learn more about how to make the inputs valid, too.

This could come from third-party tools or resources, by companies leading by example or by agencies pushing their clients forward.

What the marketer must do: Get smarter about how we explain and implement and do things in a scalable way instead of buying a technology that just allows us to check a box in our reports to the directors of our companies.

Read up on all the changes in technology, tools and processes that are available to us now. Sit in on webinars from respected sources, not just vendors but outside groups like Forrester, Gartner and Internet Retailer.

These groups don’t have vested interests in the topics they cover. Instead, they report on the movement of the industries they study. Be educated so that when you are talking to your boss or looking for vendors, you can call out those who claim they’re using AI or ML but really aren’t.

Many vendors use these technologies interchangeably or are just trying to capitalize on the buzzwords of the moment. You are responsible for being able to see when a vendor’s claims are legitimate or just smoke in the wind.

4. The personal brand experience will change

I was at Kroger (a U.S. supermarket chain) to pick up groceries I had ordered online. My experience with the brand fulfilled my expectations: I found everything I wanted by using the search form. The carryout worker brought my items to my car. The process took less than 5 minutes.

This impersonal brand experience will spread to other industries. This online experience, in which apps deliver what you need without having to talk to a person, will change how customers identify and choose brands.

That means a company’s order and fulfillment process will become a major driver of its brand experience, which is like a contract between the brand and the consumer.

What marketers must do: Recognize that the brand experience is changing and evolve brand communications that retain instead of selling.

Kroger does a great job of following up its “pick and click” sales with emails that thank me for using the online ordering system and ask me about my experience to make sure everything was okay. This is a “must” with impersonal online systems, where your customers will never go into a store.

This evolution in the brand experience makes post-transactional emails and other brand communications essential elements of the experience. These are not emails that sell anything. Instead, they reinforce the brand promise and seek to retain customers who might choose easy of buying over loyalty.

4.5: 2020 political email is already competing for attention in the inbox

The midterm elections are over in the U.S. Wasn’t that fun? Now we have to look forward to 2020 and the general elections, including a presidential run. If you thought the unending assault of emails, calls, commercials and mailers was bad this year, just give it a few months.

For marketers, it means even more competition for attention, in the inbox and beyond it. So, why is this prediction only half of one? Because we’re still two years away, and the volume so far isn’t that large.

But, in 2020, I’m predicting that we’ll need to head for the hills. We already have many distractions in the inbox, but political email is becoming a regular feature there.

Sure, there’s a difference between retail and political messaging, but political cadence and volumes continue to increase. We will continue to see increased communications as the amplified division drives to Election Day.

What the marketer must do: Work harder to differentiate your emails in the inbox.

If all you send is promotional messages, they’re no different from a political email seeking a donation. That’s like Democrats and Republican groups saying, “Those other guys are bad. Please send $25.” Aren’t we doing the same thing with our promotional emails, only with prettier pictures?

For 2019, do something different. That’s what I asked you to do last year in my year-end column. What did you do differently this year? Build on that or try a new approach that will help your messages stand out.

Between political emails, the rise of machines and changing privacy, technology and brand experiences, we have a lot coming at us. So, take a moment to reflect. As Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

I wish you all a Happy New Year.

More Expert Predictions

20 expert predictions: Here’s what successful marketers will do in 2019

The post 4 1/2 predictions for marketers in 2019 appeared first on Marketing Land.

from Marketing Land https://mklnd.com/2s4u69W

[theconservativebrief]

Dan Nosowitz was scrolling through Instagram when he saw it: an ad for a cooking device whose sole function was to heat up raclette cheese.

“I had to click through because I had no idea what it actually was,” he explains. “Finding out that an algorithm believed I would be interested in a discount ‘traditional Swiss-style electric cheese melter’ is sort of comfortably bumbling. It’s like watching a Roomba bonk into a wall.”

Whether the humor inherent in the ad comes from the fact that the gadget is so oddly specific, or because raclette is an incredibly high-maintenance cheese and therefore hardly a common grocery item for most people, is difficult to say. What we do know, however, is that the complicated set of algorithms that serve targeted ads on social media are the most brutal, most incisive owns of our time.

In Nosowitz’s case, he figures he likely saw the raclette warmer because he’s a food writer who Amazon surely knows has previously browsed cooking tools on its site. That’s because Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and the rest of the internet track your every keystroke and will then use your history to show you things they think will make them money. So it’s no wonder that it feels so deeply personal when we get targeted ads for, say, “dressy sweatpants,” colonoscopies, underwear whose selling point is that they are easy to take off, preparing for your own funeral, or, somehow the biggest attack of all: tickets to Jagged Little Pill: The Musical.

The simplest explanation for why targeted ads are so creepily intimate: Your phone, your computer, and the internet in general contain a gargantuan amount of information about you. Google, for instance, knows essentially every website you have ever gone to in your life, and thanks to geolocation can tell where you live, where you work, and where you’ve traveled and when. Credit card companies know what you buy, and the brands that sell those items can use that data to predict the things you’ll buy in the future — in Target’s case, it can tell that you’re pregnant before even your family knows.

There are ways to prevent at least some of this, but the more the internet entrenches itself in our lives, the more difficult and time-consuming it is to opt out. The consequences are, of course, potentially democracy-shattering. For our purposes here, however, the thing in danger of being shattered is our self-esteem.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who has written a book on how the internet uses your data, has himself experienced the strangeness of being targeted by a Facebook ad for hair loss cream despite never having posted anything about balding.

“It was a little like being in a Seinfeld episode,” he explains. “I had never worried about my hair and always thought hair products were a total waste of money. And now I had to wonder, ‘Am I crazy? Should I actually be taking a product for hair loss?’” (He, however, ended up deducing that it was probably because two-thirds of men start losing their hair by the time they’re 35, and that the ad simply targeted all men around that age.)

I just got a Facebook ad for hair loss product. Are they using my pictures to figure out I am balding? I am pretty sure there is no other way, using my internet behavior, for them to know that.

— Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (@SethS_D) March 29, 2018

Facebook, undoubtedly the platform with the worst and most prolific targeted ads, said in a memo this April that while it allows companies to target their ads to users that fit a certain profile, it keeps users’ actual identities private from them.

But companies are able to target specific people by other means, namely through sending Facebook a list of emails, which Facebook can then use to find associated accounts. If you’ve ever bought anything from, say, Urban Outfitters, the brand could use the email you used to either make the purchase online or the one you gave at the checkout counter to specifically target you. And if you happened to be browsing Glossier.com, while still logged into Facebook, you might return to the social media app to find ads for Boy Brow.

Plus, the blog post doesn’t mention the fact that marketers can take advantage of your data that isn’t simply demographic — it theoretically could, for instance, reach users who seem to match a specific personality type or emotional state, thereby taking advantage of already vulnerable people. So ads for funeral preparations or musicals about mid-’90s female angst could be more than just a coincidence and instead referendums on your actual current mood.

The most horrific item I have ever seen in a targeted Facebook ad was a sweatshirt emblazoned with a bunch of Celtic knots that implied the superiority of having “Jennings blood.” Ignoring the possible white supremacist connotations, the ad was ironic mostly because you can buy the exact same sweatshirt replaced with literally any last name that sounds vaguely Irish and about a zillion other versions, too. “God made the strongest and named them Rubin,” reads one. “Never underestimate the power of a person with name’s Brooke,” shouts another, despite the fact that this sentence does not make sense.

It’s obvious why this specific ad showed up on my feed: Facebook knows that my last name is Jennings, and marketers can easily target users with such information. What’s more complicated is how the hell all those last names ended up on a sweatshirt.

To be clear, they didn’t. The reason so many T-shirts and sweatshirts with oddly specific phrases is because online clothing companies have tasked algorithms with the heavy lift of actually filling in the specifics and photoshopping those results onto digital images of clothing. The sweatshirts themselves don’t physically exist until you hit “purchase.”

Michael Fowler had been in the T-shirt business for 20 years before creating a simple computer code that would change his life in 2011. It took a common phrase, such as “Kiss Me, I’m a [blank],” compiled hundreds of thousands of words from digital dictionaries, created a list of phrase variations using those words, and then generated images of T-shirts with each phrase. According to The Hustle, Fowler’s company went from just 1,000 T-shirts that were designed by actual humans to more than 22 million code-generated ones. Through targeted Facebook ads, he was eventually able to sell 800 a day.

Unfortunately, his success was not the reason Fowler would make international headlines. Two years later his algorithm was responsible for shirts that read “Keep calm and rape a lot,” among other disturbing and misogynistic variations on the famous World War II slogan. Fowler said he had no knowledge of the items, and in fact, they’d been available for more than a year before anyone noticed. But even though he quickly deleted the offending shirts, his company still ended up folding.

Robot-written word salad T-shirts, however, have managed to become one of the internet’s purest inside jokes. On the subreddit r/TargetedShirts, members share the most egregious versions they come across, be they weirdly antagonistic (“Walk away, this forklift operator has anger issues and a serious dislike of stupid people”), uncomfortably sexual (“I don’t need therapy, I just need to get f#ed in public by fourteen werewolves”), birthday month-related (“Never underestimate an old man who is also an air force veteran and was born in November”), or utterly nonsensical (“Good girls go to heaven, January girl go hunting with Dean”).

The sub even has its own parody versions, like “These titties are protected by a skinny white guy in his mid-thirties who wears DC shoes, yells at me in public and is addicted to percs who was born in February,” or “Only heros with an IQ of 121, work as a pizza delivery driver, have 3 spoons of sugar in their coffee and love reptiles & mice, were born in March by C-section 2 weeks before their due date.”

Its founder, David Moreno, launched the subreddit just ten months ago, but it already has more than 40,000 subscribers. He explained to Vox that the first time he saw a targeted ad, back in 2011 or 2012, “it did fuck with my brain for a while because it had my last name and month of birth and at the time I didn’t realize what was going on.”

These days, however, the practice makes sense to him. “Funnily enough, I work in marketing, so while it might seem like a desperate strategy, it is actually a very good way to target a very specific group of people without spending too much cash,” he said.

The best versions, of course, are the ones seen in the wild. The sub is often populated by surreptitiously photographed people in the offending shirts, like this one, with comments that lightly roast the wearer. They’re the best because they are the saddest — the catalog of folks who were not only owned by the algorithm, but scammed by it.

That’s the other part of what it’s like to see a hyper-targeted ad for something incredibly on-brand: sometimes they read us more clearly than any actual humans. This is an inherently depressing thought, considering that this is sort of the job of the people we love and the society we live in. But the more intimate our phones and our data become in our lives, it might increasingly be the case.

The prevailing cynical attitude towards targeted ads — tweets that say things like, “i just got an ad for preparing for your own funeral, what are you trying to say to me youtube” — can sort of be compared to the FBI agent meme of the past year and a half or so. The idea is that every internet user has their own personal agent monitoring their behavior through their devices, but instead of this being incredibly creepy, the joke is that the agent acts as a friend or frustrated mentor to the subject.

me: (sitting back down on my bed with a bowl of chips ready to binge a new series) hey so what does “fbi” stand for anyway

fbi agent inside my computer: uh Faraway.. Buddy.. Insideyourcomputer

me: cool. so what do u wanna watch next

fbi agent: i heard grace and frankie is fun

— jonny sun (@jonnysun) February 1, 2018

A Mashable article earlier this year explored the surprising poignance of the meme: “The agent wants the best for their subject,” writes its author Chloe Bryan. “The narrator, conscious of how boring their life must be to observe, tries to entertain the FBI agent. They have pleasant conversations. They develop a forbidden friendship. They become quiet, lightly subversive allies.”

In both cases, we’re taking our deepest technological anxieties — that the internet stores and sells our data and that the government is spying on us — and turning them into lighthearted jokes. Which is fair! It’s a lot more fun to pretend Big Data is actually just there to dunk on our most embarrassing shopping habits instead of manipulating U.S. elections or contributing to the rising wealth of the world’s richest people.

Which means there will probably come a day when an ad on Instagram for an enormous cheese-warming gadget targeted specifically to a person using a complex set of his internet data will no longer be funny. But we may as well laugh while it still is.

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Original Source -> The joy and horror of targeted Facebook ads

via The Conservative Brief

[wherethesunsetslast-blog]

11 Origins of 11 Super Mario Characters' Names

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When I found that out I did two things. For starters, I whipped out my message (yes, I ensure that it stays that real/nerdy which I still need an old NES connected in the room) of mine and made positive I can still match the game at will. (I can. Childhood not wasted.)

Secondly, I initiated down a rabbit hole of reading through Mario internet sites as well as Wikis and Articles. In the process, I stumbled upon the etymologies of the labels of a number of the key players in the Mario universe. Consequently, in honor of the video game which often changed the world, here they are, given in useful 11 item list form.

Mario.

When Mario debuted to the arcade game "Donkey Kong", he was only known as Jumpman. (Which additionally actually is the generic brand regarding that Michael Jordan dispersed leg Nike logo. Two of the most legendary icons ever both have generic versions of themselves called Jumpman. But merely one of them has nowadays gotten to the attempt of remaining very powerful that he shaved himself a Hitler mustache prior to filming a business and the balls were had by not one person to correct him.)

In 1980, as the Nintendo of America staff imported Jumpman to elevate him straight into a franchise-leading star (Hayden Christensen style), somebody noticed that he looked like their Seattle office building's landlord... a guy named Mario Segale.

Mario Segale didn't get a cent for becoming the namesake of likely the most prominent video game character perhaps, but he probably isn't extremely concerned; in 1998 he sold his asphalt company for more than $60 million. (Or 600,000 additional lives.)

Luigi.

Luigi has one of probably the weakest label roots of most of the super mario characters in the Mario universe (once again showing precisely why, for actual life, he would have a greater inferiority complex compared to Frank Stallone, Abel or even that 3rd Manning brother).

"Luigi" is merely the result of a group of Japanese guys trying to consider an Italian brand to accentuate "Mario." Why was that the Italian label they went with? When they each moved from Japan to Seattle, the pizza place nearest to the Nintendo headquarters known as Mario & Luigi's. (It has since gone from business.)

Koopa.

Koopa is a transliterated model of the Japanese name for the enemy turtles, "Kuppa." Stick with me here -- kuppa is the Japanese term for a Korean plate called gukbap. Generally it's a cup of soup with cereal. From what I will explain to it's absolutely unrelated to turtles, especially malicious ones.

In an interview, Mario's author, Shigeru Miyamoto, stated he was deciding between 3 brands that are distinct due to the high-speed of evil turtles, all of that have been called after Korean foods. (The other two were yukhoe and bibimbap.) Which means one of two things: (1) Miyamoto loves Korean foods and needed to offer a tribute or even (2) Miyamoto considers Koreans are evil and have to be jumped on.

Wario.

I kind of missed the debut of Wario -- he debuted in 1992, right around when I was hitting the generation exactly where I was way too fantastic for cartoon-y Nintendo games. (Me and my middle school buddies were into Genesis just. I was back again on Nintendo within four years.)

Appears the label of his functions both equally in english and Japanese; I kinda assumed the English fashion but did not know about the Japanese aspect. In English, he's an evil, bizarro marketplace mirror image of Mario. The "M" turns to turn into a "W" and Wario is produced. The name additionally operates in Japanese, wherever it's a combination of Mario and "warui," that implies "bad."

That is a very excellent scenario, since, as I covered thoroughly in the listing 11 Worst Japanese-To-English Translations In Nintendo History, not every language disparity finesses back and forth quite efficiently.

Waluigi.

When I first read "Waluigi" I believed it was hilarious. While Wario became a natural counterbalance to Mario, Waluigi sensed extremely comically shoehorned (just tacking the "wa" prefix before Luigi) -- including a giant inside joke that somehow cleared each and every bureaucratic step and then cracked the mainstream.

Well... according to the Nintendo folks, Waluigi isn't just a gloriously idle choice or perhaps an inside joke gone huge. They *say* it is dependant upon the Japanese phrase ijiwaru, which means that "bad guy."

I do not understand. I think that we'd have to meet them much more than halfway to get that.

Toad.

Toad is made to look like a mushroom (or maybe toadstool) thanks to the giant mushroom hat of his. It's a good thing the gaming systems debuted before the whole version realized the right way to make penis jokes.

Anyway, in Japan, he's considered Kinopio, which is certainly a mixture of the name for mushroom ("kinoko") as well as the Japanese variant of Pinocchio ("pinokio"). Those mix to be something around the collections of "A Real Mushroom Boy."

Goomba.

In Japanese, these men are labeled as kuribo, that means "chestnut people." That is sensible because, ya know, if someone requested you "what do chestnut people look like?" you'd almost certainly reach something roughly similar to the figures.

Once they were imported for the American model, the group caught with their Italian initiative and called them Goombas... dependent off the Italian "goombah," which colloquially signifies something as "my fellow Italian friend." It also kind of evokes the picture of low level mafia thugs without very a lot of competencies -- like individuals younger brothers and also cousins who they had to work with or maybe mother would yell at them. That also goes for the Mario Bros. goombas.

Birdo.

Birdo has nothing to do with this first Japanese name. Generally there, he's named Kyasarin, that typically translates to "Catherine."

In the instruction manual for Super Mario Bros. two, in which Birdo debuted, the persona explanation of his reads: "Birdo thinks he is a girl and additionally would like for being named Birdetta."

What In my opinion all of this means? Nintendo shockingly opted to produce a character who struggles with his gender identity and then named him Catherine. In the event it was time to come to America, they got feet which are cold so they determined at the last second to call him Birdo, although he's a dinosaur. (And don't provide me the "birds are descended from dinosaurs" pop-paleontology line. Not purchasing that connection.) In that way, we would just know about the gender confusion of his if we read the mechanical, and the Japanese had been confident Americans have been sometimes way too idle or perhaps illiterate to accomplish that en masse.

Princess Toadstool/Peach.

When we all got introduced to the Princess, she was recognized as Princess Toadstool. I suppose this made good sense -- Mario was set in the Mushroom Kingdom, so why would not its monarch be known as Princess Toadstool. Them inbreeding bluish bloods will always be naming their kids immediately after the country.

No one seems to be certain why they went that guidance, however. In Japan, she was recognized as Princess Peach from day one. The term did not debut here until 1993, when Yoshi's Safari came out for Super Nintendo. (By the manner by which -- have you had Yoshi's Safari? In a bizarre twist it is a first-person shooter, the only girl in the entire Mario the historical past. It's like the equivalent of a country music superstar making a weird rock album.)

Bowser.

In Japan, there is certainly no Bowser. He's simply referred to as the King Koopa (or comparable modifications, like Great Demon King Koopa). And so just where did Bowser come from?

During the import procedure, there was a problem that the American crowd would not understand how the small turtles and big bad fellow might certainly be known as Koopa. So a marketing staff put together dozens of selections for a title, they loved Bowser the very best, and slapped it on him.

In Japan, he is still rarely known as Bowser. Around here, his label is now extremely ubiquitous that he is even supplanted Sha Na Na's Bowzer as America's most prominent Bowser.

Donkey Kong.

This is a much more literal interpretation than you think. "Kong" is based off of King Kong. "Donkey" is a family friendly method of calling him an ass. That is right: The name of his is a valuable model of "Ass Ape."

Super Mario Bros. is a video game released for the household Computer and also Nintendo Entertainment System found 1985. It shifted the gameplay far from its single screen arcade predecessor, Mario Bros., in addition to instead highlighted side scrolling platformer quantities. Though not the very first game of the Mario franchise, Super Mario Bros. is very iconic, in addition to presented a variety of series staples, from power-ups, to classic enemies like Goombas, to the basic premise of rescuing Princess Toadstool out of King Koopa. Together with kicking raised a few inches off an entire number of Super Mario platformer video games, the wild results of Super Mario Bros. made popular the genre as a complete, really helped revive the gaming industry after the 1983 video game crash, and was largely responsible for the first success on the NES, with which it was actually bundled up a launch name. Until eventually it had been finally surpassed by Wii Sports, Super Mario Bros. was the very best selling videos game of all of the moment for nearly 3 years, with over 40 million copies sold overseas.

[lifepartnersincrime]

'16 "Tweets" on MOECHACHOS

Kid Sis lives in a city (of sorts–#Memphis), uses N-word, mocks minorities, covered up murders of 3 #Mexicans- #Lucky (outside #GoldStrike)

My dying Dad said I’d have Delta for many years to come. But she died young & so did my Ana, because of Indmar Wives

When my Mom died my creepy sister told me at #Paragould hospital she’d euthanize my dogs if I didn’t sign her back onto family bank account.

Orangutan hanging over #DedraOwens (‘Wife’ I later learned) told me I could not go back to my own home. I had no ride. My dogs were helpless

Polk Ballad Granny 👵🎤👭🎲💵 you got had by Gator Tranny 🐍🐊🐽💩🐒👵👭💵💸😈👹👺🎅😂👾💀🔚

‘Polk’ - for punk-folk - the most uninspired, ineffectual portmanteau word of all time. Invented by Dedra ‘Moe’ Owens.

Dad, early 2001, warning me never to trust my sister– “I lost all respect for your sister in 1991 when I was laying there dying in a … /1

… hospital bed and she asked me for your Mom’s car with that f-ckin’ geek standing right behind her looking at his watch.” /2

Incredible coincidence! Man blackmailed out of home & lifelong assets owned items identical2 ones that turned up 4sale by sister & Her Wife!

Cousin & I both got physically sick realizing Dei Moe Rowe probably dressed her “wife” in my Dad’s Marine uniform as a turn-on. Heard worse-

Never sign a shifty relative back onto your family bank account *before* she tells you the threatening thug hanging over her is her ‘Wife.’

In the greatest emergency of your life… Who you NOT gonna call? GLOAT BUSKERS! Those boys’ll pack up their gee-tars & begging bowls & COME

Dee Moe, Larry, Curly & pet monkey looted me, terrorized me, took my home for crack & casino money, & vanished in dust trail of lies #PTSD

Alive Despite Rowes #3WordsToDefineYourself #IndmarProducts #AngelaChristineRowe #DedraOwens #Memphis #Millington #DrugFrontBar

Gambling warnings at convenience store are more honest than Surgeon General warnings on cigarette packs. Gamblers steal or worse to lose ass

Moe’s polk album never came out–but Moe did! After I signed her back onto family bank account, left to me, to keep her from killing my dogs

Mystery solved: The creative giant behind “polk music” simply removed the “a” from “polka”–and freed it up for “electronicA”! #musichistory

#AngelaChristineRowe -“Old people smell”…You weren’t young in 2002 (w/mausolean “meth” Funk Breath). Now, crone, it’s daily Eau de Cologne

Deirdre (Moe’s “wife” insisted Moe call herself this, probably also thinking zebras should be zeirbres)–Dei Moe–has #Paragould accomplices

A Few Things I’ve Gotten Back from Thieves of My Estate ​Sometimes it’s not a matter of how wrong or how right something is, but how gross or how un-gross it is Thank u doctor 👍 Sincere Owens T-U⬆ That felt like RoboCop thanking The OldMan for removing his 4th Prime Directive so Dick Jones could go to The Great Board Meeting in the Sky Introversion is a hidden tragedy and a hidden gift. All introverts are pressured to be extroverts (who make up 75% of humanity). Impossible. Temperament of introversion baffles extroverts, who feed off interaction. When I grew up “nerd” was a slur. Too many syllables in introvert? Introverts keep few friends but tend to be “leaders.” Extroverts turn to introvert friends for ideas. Much of human behavior explained here. Maybe it’s nice to be anhedonic from depression. OCD causes depression. I have Major Depressive Disorder, bipolar symptoms. Denied anhedonia PTSD numbness goes beyond “subatomic level” of anhedonia. Dr F had mentioned anhedonia to me in 1999, before my parents died & I was #abused Dei Moe got the all-clear from a Memphis or Cordova psychiatric ward without telling them she ran a drug-front bar where 3 people were shot💀 Whoever sells any idea that people with #OCD can “recover” from that chronic, usually hereditary, brain disorder, is a liar. Liar😈 vs Buyer😇 Long solitude, shock, strong medication–"do the math” as a walking cliche would say. Any lone, *trapped* person is helpless protecting pets You sure don’t see the MOECHACHOS threatening me now. Already ate meat off my bones. But I’m here, I’m THE FACTS against the THE ACTS. C'mon I went years without reading, in a PTSD abyss. Moe had boasted I would suffer for being favorite child. Worse fate? Being Moe. Da SOOPA STAH Only therapy is confrontation–of problem, of problem-causer, of naked self. Numbness and depression encourage their aide-de-camp, avoidance You have 2B strong and indifferent. Save energy 4 what matters. Be fair, be distant. Generally, it’s harder 2 screw an ©sshole than a p°ssy. “A place you’d never want to go.” Many fellow Arkansans have used that phrase to describe *every other* Southern state to me. HALLELUJAH 😐😕🤔 I’ll never understand why people w/ 2-second-long attention spans ask questions…non-rhetorical questions. Others only answer for 2 seconds When dealing a 2nd time w/ a 2-second listener processing the start of my answer to their question, I like to just shut up.They don’t notice Then comes the bonus. A faraway-look face like a chicken’s, only missing a beak. A void stare. Can someone like this even watch television?😨 Short-circuiting inquisitors make the Ilia probe from Star Trek: TMP seem like Dear Abby. “Fascinating…no signs of brain activity at all.” I’m not keen on random talk. So quiet is my territory. Nip a game in the bud: just keep mum. Then: “Huh?” “Nothing.” Pure truth, that. Zilch Asking then ignoring is disrespectful. My “Ignore then absently ask 'What’?” tactic sure to earn you equal footing other party doesn’t want. That may not be respect,but there are other fine social parries than those that earn a snot’s fickle admiration. +element of surprise is fun “The Cook, The Thief~” movie still unsettling after all these years. Trauma from abuse finally drove it home for me. Grim score so funereal💀 Moe thought she was Spica to my Georgina. The dining room funeral procession should be Moe’s Wife served as sushi to the GS Casino Grannibal Took me years 2 work up nerve 2 watch TCTTHWAHL. I was a low-key guy. Will just say, Albert Spica’s vulgarity cannot compare 2 Dedra Owens’s Abused Poor Pup I was hands my metaphorical Georgina Albert’s substitute pee shooter…& Georgina is pissed at the chilling Private Function Whatever I enjoy about 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’ is what I enjoy about beatnik horror comedy A Bucket of Blood. Fine PLAYS Maxwell Brock, in fact, is sort of a benign version of Albert Spica, and Walter is Pup gaining Albert’s favor in a suitably gruesome fashion Another thing aforementioned movies have in common is a shock ending where justice is served. Walter’s stark suicide actually most unnerving Cook-Thief-Lover film is an assault on a viewer. And I was ravaged by 2 sapphic Spica wannabes & their flyblown sycophants. I still am. PTSD I suppose soundtrack to my thoughts of MUCHACHOS is roiling TCTTHWAHL closing music as glutton Albert tastes victim then dies by his own gun With vomit & cooked human flesh in his hideous devil’s mouth, Albert’s existence ends as he stares, shaking, at his victims & their avengers “Spica gets a taste of his own medicine” Nyman theme is the most unsettling piece of music I’ve ever heard. Saxophones in whirling madness 🎷 As much as I love optimistic science fiction, I lose myself in the searing voyage of scatologist Spica’s lunatic cruelty to foul last supper I’ve seen people more perverse than this unparalleled fictional psychopath gangster teach appreciation of a memorable restaurant experience🍴 I’m a sucker for a pretty face and an even bigger sucker for a perky pair of Gerber servers. Mags I grew up on, like Heavy Metal, delivered. Incredible news at doctor’s office. I can say with joy that there are good people who see the horror a sick victim of crime has gone through Mental illness doesn’t mean insanity. Some great arguments against term “mental illness”… My dr said, “You’re not crazy, you’re tortured.” And as for stereotype of the wild bipolar person… I have BD but have been told my behavior is virtually unipolar. If I joke, I’m irritated If MUCHACHOS hadn’t screwed me I’d never communicate online. Introversion is all I know. But yes I joke. Yes I care. No I don’t back down… Snow🌨️is falling, not sticking, and I am extra-medicated after a much needed new diagnosis for ANOTHER Moe-related illness. #PTSD bad enough “What the f@ck is this?” Dad said as mail to “Dee Moe” Owens came to our home. Moe’s Rich Wife, Moe, & Moe’s current Main Squeeze > 💩🐃🔭🐂🐂💩 “She promises to work on our computers, doesn’t show up. Get her on phone, her voice is groggy, in bed with that girl, on drugs. 'Wha-a-at’” HOW LONG WILL THE MOECHACHOS 'HUSTLE AND FLOW'? HOW LONG DEI

[arplis]

Arplis - News: The year was 1995, and I was watching television

Frasier, to be specific, whose placement in the NBC “Must See TV Tuesday” lineup my family took literally. This was event viewing in the Michelman household, and my tweenage brain soaked it up like a sponge: the fashion, the erudition, the many glasses of sherry. One moment stands out above all else, wherein the audience is given a brief glimpse inside the Crane family refrigerator, which is revealed to be stocked to the brim with glowing blue glass bottles of mineral water imported from the United Kingdom. In the context of the show, this was just another item—like the Macclesfield ties, Joan & David loafers and Frasier’s apartment itself—meant to symbolize wealth and class. I discussed the topic with my mother; she told me that the water on Frasier was very expensive, and that in this family we drank water from the spigot on the fridge door. “Imagine paying money for water,” I remember thinking. Today, I wish we’d bought stock in La Croix. Bottled water of a clear, identifiable origin has long been popular in Europe, where the history of drinking site-specific mineralized water dates back thousands of years. But here in America, mineral water has baggage. I believe I speak for many readers when I describe first encountering mineral water as a totem of yuppie excess vis-à-vis late 20th-century movies and television, obsessed over by the likes of Patrick Bateman (he drinks Ramlösa and Apollinaris) and the aforementioned Frasier Crane (those iconic blue teardrop bottles of Tŷ Nant, from Wales). This identity wholly disconnects mineral water in the U.S. from its curative, egalitarian image abroad. It’s a status symbol, something rich people drink as a class flex: the little bottle of San Pellegrino, same as what they sell at the grocery store across the street, marked up to $12 at a restaurant catering to assholes. Frasier may be relegated to the great rerun loop of history, but today’s outlook for mineral water in America is evolving quickly, and there are merchants for the cause. One of them is a guy out of Fort Lauderdale named Brett Spitalny. With his company, Aqua Maestro, Spitalny has, since 2002, overseen a portfolio of imported bottled water. And that’s all he sells, offering about 30 different fine waters from around the world (including Borsec from Romania, Fiuggi from Italy, and yes, Frasier’s beloved Tŷ Nant), selling to a collection of retail and wholesale clients around the country and providing water education along the way to high-end hotels and restaurants. “What’s coming from the source is what you find in the bottle,” he says. “It’s not adulterated, and it hasn’t been purified or filtered or messed with.” The sentiment might be familiar to anyone who’s set foot in a natural wine bar. Aqua Maestro’s portfolio includes some recognizable brands, including Fiji and Voss, as well as deeply obscure bottles like Iskilde, a highly oxygenated still water from Denmark that “comes out of the ground looking like milk.” “Imagine paying money for water,” I remember thinking. Today, I wish we’d bought stock in La Croix. Ashley Epperson of Salacious Drinks, a Washington D.C.–based distributor and direct seller of mineral waters, looks at the seltzer boom as a pump primer for the U.S. market. “As far as Americans are concerned, we are way behind the times,” she tells me. “If you go to Japan, Europe, Australia, even Canada, they have huge water markets. But we are so used to the idea of free water, or buying purified tap water in a bottle. Most people don’t know what fine water tastes like.” In this way, a brand like Salacious Drinks caters to people who have had their interest piqued by seltzer, and are ready to learn more about the world of fine water. “We love someone saying, ‘Oh, I like La Croix’ because that means when we sit down and do a fine water tasting, they are going to say ‘Ohhhh…’” If mineral water is a beverage primed for growth in the American market, its punky cousin seltzer is surely to thank. The year 2019 was the year seltzer peaked: The stuff is everywhere, filling entire aisles at your local Target and spanning the spectrum of popular culture, from New York Times think pieces to Coachella activations to junk science finger wagging. La Croix in particular has been embraced by the extremely online millennial work force (especially in media), showing up in desk office candids and work fridge tableaus. There’s even a secret Facebook group for devotees of seltzer, profiled by everyone from The Spoon to The Guardian. (I’m a longtime member.) My own avid consumption of La Croix, which is just filtered tap water that’s been force-carbonated and flavored, had become reflexive, habitual, desultory—a drink to drink when I didn’t feel like using my brain, the water equivalent of ordering a Starbucks coffee. By contrast, Borjomi, a Georgian water I credit for thrusting me down this rabbit hole, tastes as if it were beamed in from another consciousness entirely. It is creamy, lush, with just a touch of finessed funk, like a beautiful raw milk cheese, or a piece of foie gras, or a glass of farmhouse saison (minus the hops and malt). I found myself (quelle horreur) skipping past the wine section and forgoing the beer at World Foods—the excellent specialty food and beverage market near where I live in Portland, Oregon—in favor of more Borjomi, and eventually, other delicious waters from around the world: Antipodes of New Zealand, Jermuk of Armenia, Llanllyr Source of Wales, and Essentuki of southern Russia, not far from the border with Georgia. The seltzer boom (and likely impending bust) has opened a door for us to reconsider what mineral water is, and who it should be for. If brands like Polar and La Croix (and yes, even White Claw) have helped unmoor fizzy water from its wealth-and-privilege trappings in America, then I say bully; after all, La Croix is owned by the same company that makes Faygo, the beloved soda of the ’90s horror-rap crew Insane Clown Posse. How bourgeois could it really be? In the pantheon of affordable luxuries, mineral water has few peers—a .75 liter bottle of Borjomi, the utterly delicious, naturally sparkling mineral water of the nation of Georgia, costs somewhere between $1.99 and $3.99, depending on where you’re purchasing. Turns out this was just scratching the surface. The well for water appreciation runs deep, and all aqueducts lead to the work of the world’s leading authorities on mineral water: Martin Riese and Michael Mascha, who together run Los Angeles’ Fine Water Academy, bestowers of the official Water Sommelier Certification. Germany native Riese first gained fame in this country for his work with the Patina Restaurant Group, whose properties across the United States include multiple operations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and in New York’s Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center and Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Riese’s water menu for Patina is the stuff of legend, helping land him everywhere from The New York Times to Conan. “People started to come to [LACMA] just for the water menu and try the different waters and taste the differences between them,” Riese tells me. “I was a little surprised and almost scared.” Mascha, meanwhile, runs FineWaters.com, an international clearinghouse for water information and advocacy, and a compendium of bottled water brands large and small. A former professor at USC, Mascha came to water as an alternative to alcohol following a serious health diagnosis. “My cardiologist told me I could live, or drink alcohol, but not both,” he says. “Naturally, I made the decision to stop drinking, but by removing one bottle from the table I began to focus on another.” If mineral water is a beverage primed for growth in the American market, its punky cousin seltzer is surely to thank. Key to the duo’s methodology is understanding the differences among individual water sites. Not unlike wine, tea or coffee, water is a product of its place of harvest—in this case, different sites around the world through which rainwater is naturally filtered. Each mountain range and hillside has its own geological calling card, with a noticeable impact on a given water’s flavor and mouthfeel. Different waters vary in chemical composition, which is why the water bottled as Lurisia (from the Italian Alps) tastes vastly different from the water bottled as Borsec (from the Carpathian Mountains of Romania). Riese and Mascha discuss this in terms of total dissolved solids, or TDS, a phrase well-known by espresso geeks—low-TDS waters have an almost drying effect, while high-TDS waters taste rich and smooth, even sometimes a touch swampy (in a good way). On his website FineWaters, Mascha categorizes a range of mineral waters from “super low” (0-50 mg/L) to “very high” (1500+ mg/L). By this categorization, the 2,210 milligramsTDS on my beloved Borjomi is incredibly high—more than four times higher than Perrier, for example. It makes sense that this would be the water that hooked me. In specialty coffee, a topic I’ve written about extensively, it’s common for new acolytes to have a “light switch moment” with coffees that explore wild expanses of the flavor spectrum: Think wild-fermented and genetically diverse “natural-processed” coffees from Ethiopia, or highly prized and rightly expensive Gesha variety coffees from Panama. Same thing in wine, where young drinkers have gravitated in droves to the electric Technicolor “natural” wines of boundary-pushing makers like Anders Frederik Steen, Furlani and Cornelissen. These experiences fall on the extreme end of the product spectrum, and that’s why they hook new drinkers: The journey to “aha!” upends the preconceived notion of what coffee or wine should be, redrawing its culinary and cultural application. Same with Borjomi, an extremely mineralized water that led me to explore a world of flavor experiences—some more subtle, some even more extreme (say hey, Essentuki #4). “We’re seeing a wave of adoption where people realize that water is not just water,” says Mascha. “They get hooked for whatever reason, and then they realize that water has terroir, it comes from a place, it has flavor, and it can be integrated into epicurean ways like wine.” Ladies and gentlemen, it me. I was first suckered in by flavored filtered tap (La Croix), then had my mind blown by the outer edges of the mineral spectrum (Borjomi). It’s roughly the trajectory a wine drinker undertakes, from nipped high school Boone’s Farm to Jura savagnin sous voile, with a land of exploration and subtlety to discover in between. (Burgundy, if you’re paying.) Riese and Mascha advocate seeking out different styles and weights of water for different meal pairings and experiences: Cantonese suckling pork with Cana Royal water from Slovenia, or smoked fish roe with a low-TDS Swedish glacier water, which Mascha describes as tasting “like you’re in the middle of nature, and it’s raining and you open your mouth.” And in our conversations, each encouraged me to explore offerings across the minerality scale, like the soft, low-TDS waters of Svalbardi, Lofoten and Lurisia, or the complex, naturally sparkling waters of Vichy Catalan, Pedras and Ecuador’s Guitig. Unlike so much of today’s zen koan cacophony of wellness trend buzz, mineral water is certifiably good for you, something czars and soldiers and doctors in Europe have known for centuries (to say nothing of the older regulars at the 127-year-old Russian & Turkish Baths in New York’s East Village, swigging huge plastic bottles of Narzan). Mineral water is culinary, yes, but it’s also elemental in a profoundly satisfying way—an organism consuming the most delicious and interesting version of something it needs to live. “Like with wine, like with coffee, it’s not about finding what’s best,” says Mascha. These days he’s expanding the role of water to its place beyond the glass, working with cocktail bars to develop custom ice and chocolatiers seeking the perfect water to blend into chocolate bars. This feels like a natural expansion of the implied conclusion, which is that by re-evaluating the identity and flavor and history of the water we drink, we can then extend this new consideration into water’s role in the wild beer we drink, the cocktail ice we stir and shake with, the sip of water we take to realign our palates between the bites and bottles of everything else we love. “These waters come from a real place, from a real source with a cultural identity attached,” says Mascha. “They mean something.” The post Seltzer Is Over. Mineral Water Is Forever. appeared first on PUNCH. #LaCroix #MineralWater

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