a rickety bridge of impossible crossing

We've detected a glitch in the facetrix. Output is wordle salad. Please check cereal connection and try again

Welcome to volume 01, issue 03 of #GarbageDigest, your #1 source of word garbage in small, digestible info-capsules. One serving of this blog provides 15% of the daily dietary fiber needed to support a healthy digestive system

meta

I'm writing this at 22:11 local time. I've been working on a much longer article since yesterday that is necessitating an unusual amount of research and detail. Because it would make me sad to see my 12-day streak broken, hopefully I can do a quick #DG before midnight and it'll tide you over

Unfortunately, bear blog doesn't allow me to manually set a timestamp for a post. All I can set is the date. Meaning if I leave the date field blank, it'll automatically set it to whatever the local server time is, which is currently early Saturday morning. I'll have to manually set the date to Apr. 29, meaning it'll look like I posted it early this morning. Sorry for the discrepancy. There's been an issue raised on the github page about this, so hopefully a fix for this is in the works

And now, on to the garbage

potato salad

What if "potato salad" meant thin slices of raw potato, in a salad bowl, with vegetables, dressing, croutons, etc.? In my opinion, I think that would be worse, but I ain't gonna not eat it

face reveal

Since today's issue is content-lite, I thought I'd offer a world exclusive public face reveal. You won't see this anywhere else but this blog, unless you follow me on fedi and saw it earlier today

In a brilliant stroke of luck, the default editor on my phone has a weird glitch that makes everything look gnarly and fucked up if I draw on it with the pen tool. I have no idea what causes it, but it rules. This was a totally normal upright selfie of me in my office. All I did was use the pen tool to scribble over my eyes in purple and save a copy. No other filters or edits involved:

imgur
Hey buddy, my eyes are up here. Well, one of them is also over there

What a perfectly glitchpunk aesthetic. I can't believe it's just a bewildering android photo app bug

If used on a more regularly-colored image like a screenshot, the effect makes it look c y b r e without rendering it illegible:

imgur2
A sneak preview of tomorrow's big post! Who's excited for mobile network protocols??

It's going to make me sad when I inevitably break my phone or am forced to upgrade or the app stops working. I'll never have another tool this perfect for making glitch art

breakfast review: cereal and milk

Some things never go out of style for a reason. Breakfast cereal is an enduring solid gold classic. Up there with denim pants and antibiotics as one of the all-time great things. 8/10

the inverse value paradox

At my last job, there were a bunch of magazines in the break room that people brought in from home or stole from doctor's offices or something, just for people to sift through if they were bored. One of them that caught my eye was Railway Age, a magazine that's not only about trains, but about the business of trains, published in the United States

Now I like trains a lot, but I was really fascinated at how niche the audience for this magazine must be. I could believe a magazine about trains as a hobby or model trains would have enough readers to continue existing in print, but a trade journal?!

Curious, I went to their website, and my eyes bugged out of my skull when I saw the price they were asking for a physical subscription. It's different now, but at the time I think it was around $200 a year. For a monthly magazine. That's $16 an issue! And they were, like, normal comic book-sized. Maybe 50 pages.

But, you see, there was a special promotional offer. I could get the digital version... for free. No strings attached. Just give them my e-mail, and I was in. So of course I signed up. A $16 magazine? For free? I'd be a fool not to

And, well, they've been spamming me ever since with the magazine I signed up for that I don't want and am not interested in. I've discovered that to me, the value is actually far less than $200 a year. It has negative value, and it's making my life a little worse

It reminds me of owning a piano. If you want a piano, pianos are very valuable. You can spend thousands of dollars getting a good piano, and if you want a piano, it's worth it

But if you don't want a piano, a piano has negative value. It takes up tons of space and is just a huge nuisance. No one will take it for free, so if you want to be rid of your piano, you might have to pay someone to come and take your piano. No one will give you thousands of dollars for your piano, because you don't want it. A piano is only worth thousands of dollars if you don't want to get rid of it

I think railway trade journals fall into the same category. I'm sure for someone who wants it badly enough to pay $200, the prospect of getting a free digital version is very appealing, but personally I hope they stop sending it to me someday

wordle

Okay, I wasn't going to post today's wordle because I thought this was enough, but honestly, it's just too perfect. My god

Wordle 314 3/6*

🟨🟨🟩🟨⬜
🟨⬜🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

You'll understand once you get it

Edit: this worlde is now firmly in the past, so (sotto voce): the solution we were looking for was TRASH

at the tone

The time will be 23:41 and 23 seconds. blep 🦝

#GarbageDigest