Okay, so that's one large dumpster salad with caramelized BacOsⓇ and extra potato fritters, hold the gabagool. Your total comes to 01 06. Please pull up to the next window. Thank you for eating at #GarbageDigest. This blog complies with ISO 14064 standards for greenhouse gas accounting and verification.

📯 Content warning: in section 3 I talk about eating meat in a way some people might find gross, and in section 4 I snarkily yell at a corporation.

1. daily bleh
2. colour out of space
3. razor thin meat margins
4. the ipod is dead (year 8)
5. on citing wikipedia

daily bleh

In hindsight, I don't know why I thought I was more likely to read the Daily Dracula¹ than any other emails I get. When do I ever read emails? Maybe 0.01% of emails I've ever received are ones I've actually read instead of just marking them that way. I don't know why I thought it'd be any different if the emails were from Dracula. Sorry, Bram, nothing personal. I promise to read the ebook someday 🧛‍♀️

colour out of space

Okay, I have to stop fucking around with the stylesheets. I always do this when I have the ability to tinker, I start obsessing over what color to paint the bikeshed because I always feel like it could be a slightly nicer shade. I'm done. No more colored text, at least for now. I've settled on five six seven colors from the sega master system palette:

Style	Color
Italic	#FFAA00
Bold	#AA55FF
Italic bold	#FF0055
Bold italic	#AA55AA
Deleted	#FF0000
Confirmation	#55AA00
Dates2	#55AAAA

These colors pop sufficiently and the WAVE accessibility tool doesn't give any contrast errors. Good enough. The purples aren't quite as violet as I'd like them to be, but I have to accept that the colors I like from old arcade games and such (see styles upon styles —ed.) aren't as suitable for comfortably reading text. Gotta pick my battles. This is plenty of color and I like it, so I'm going to call the stylesheet finished and resolve not to tinker anymore (provided I don't notice some edge case I have to fix.)

I tried using a more faithful shade of pink from the SMS³ palette for the links and horizontal lines, but I couldn't convince myself it looks right, so I went back to the default sakura vader colors. Maybe I just got so used to #eb99a1 that the tiny difference between it and #FFAAAA is too fresh in my brain. Maybe if I stuck with #FFAAAA for a few days I'd get used to it too, and then all of the colors would—

Orangey salmon, meet pinkish coral. I think you two are gonna get along juuuuust fine. Or not.

No. Listen to me. I sound like someone... who needs to stop thinking about colors for awhile.

I did replace the lines between the header links with some nice purple dots though. I think it looks pretty sharp. I like having purple represented in the main color scheme, even if it's only a light smattering.

razor thin meat margins

Why does thinly sliced lunch meat taste so much better than thick slabs? Usually when thin things taste better, it's because there's more surface area for the flavor to get in during cooking. This is why a large, thin pancake tastes better than a small, thick one: you got all those square centimeters to get nice and brown.

But with turkey or ham, it's not like they cook it more after they slice it. Slicing is the last step in the process. But there's no denying that thickly-sliced cold meat is gross as hell, and I think most people agree, which is why all of the packaged cold cuts you find in the store are "deli-sliced".

It seems weird that a quarter-inch thick slice of ham would be upsetting in a way that an equivalent quarter-inch stack of razor thin slices isn't. What's going on? It must be a texture thing, but you'd think our omnivore brains would have evolved to find tearing into a slab of meat a sensorally pleasant experience. I enjoy it when it's, like, a steak. Maybe it's the fact that it's cold. For our ancient ancestors, eating a hunk of meat that isn't hot was probably an evolutionary no-no.

the ipod is dead (year 8)

The ipod died in 2014 when apple stopped making them. RIP. I never had one, but by all accounts the click wheel was a pretty good little control thingy.

In 2007 they started selling a product called the "ipod touch", which is an iphone with the cellular radio removed/disabled, and maybe more storage space? They just did a press release announcing that they're not going to make any more of those either. Here are my notes:

• Fuck off, apple, you don't have a "newsroom". You're not Walter Cronkite and this isn't the report from Vietnam. It's an ad.

• "Music has always been part of our core at Apple"—really? I thought it's been part of your core since 2007, when you bought the trademark rights from Apple Corps. Ltd. In fact, you specifically promised in your 1981 settlement that music wouldn't be part of your core.⁴ Leaving this history out of your reporting makes me think your newsroom might not be totally objective!

• WTF is a "homepod"? Oh, they sell their own spy speaker, of course they do.

• "[The] iphone is the best device for [...] storing an entire music library on the go"—really? I'd think anything with an SDXC slot would be better. You can store up to twice as much data for much, much less money. Also you can just put your files on it instead of being opted into the itunes experiment. In fact, not being able to put music on it was the #1 reason I stopped using an iphone, so one might call it the worst device for storing one's music library. But hey, different strokes!

Anyway, go back in time 8 years and pour one out for the click wheel 🤷‍♀️

on citing wikipedia

I know citing wikipedia is bad form, and I would never do it if I were writing serious published nonfiction. But for a blog, I think it can be more helpful than excluding citations completely.

I checked the references in the article, and the points I got from it are accurate. But for the record:

⚠️ Never trust a wikipedia citation without checking the references ⚠️

People can make wikipedia say whatever bullshit they want it to, and the editors can't always catch it fast enough. You don't have to do your own research—in fact, you shouldn't do your own research unless you're very, very sure you know what that means—but at least check and make sure the research being presented is from a trustworthy source. If the stakes were higher than a corporate slapfight, I'd wait until I had time to take it more seriously before writing about it, but for just making fun of apple I don't feel the need to be that rigorous.

It's tough, because I don't think a blog should be held to the same standard as the New York Times, but at the same time I recognize that blogs are a big part of what created the post-information hellscape we currently live in. I don't want to contribute to bad reading habits, like taking wikipedia citations at face value, but if I tried to hold myself to as high of a standard as I'd like, I'd never be able to write about anything but pictures of lunch and what colors I like.

I don't want to have to explain this every time, but I'll feel guilty if I don't. Guess I'll have to make an editorial policy page, sigh.

In conclusion, please read blogs responsibly, practice critical thinking and epistemic modesty, and if something feels like it might be wrong in an important way, check the citation's citations. I promise you'll come away with a better grip on reality 🦝

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1. Dracula, Daily. Daily Dracula (draculadaily.com, 1897 & 2022)↩

2. Technically nested <em><code> tags, which looks like this in markdown: *`2022`* gives me 2022. Not too complicated.↩

3. Dang, just realized in mobile data banditry (blog.self, 2022) I should have texted myself Alex Kidd in Miracle World instead of Super Mario Brothers. SMS over SMS! Well, sort of.↩

4. Apple Corps v Apple Computer (wikipedia.org; refs. 2, 3, 12)↩