Not Just Bikes: The Best-Designed Town in the Netherlands (and therefore, the world) [25min].
Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster #252: Jason Mantzoukas [1hr 20min].
[cardhouse] Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (2015). Notable Bugs, Tips, Strange Observations, Fun Diversions, etc.
Idles: Pop Pop Pop [4min].
I am running through the first 82.3% of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (the tastiness of missions drops off severely for the last bit) for the fourth time shut UP. There are actual advertisements from the 19th century plastered all over the city, “fire wheels” caught my eye because “fire.” Anyway, Fitch’s Patent Fire Wheels, a fire starter assistant, probably has cocaine in it, everything did back then.
The screenshot is part of the game in which you end up going “forward” through a time anomaly or rift or [FX: moves hands back and forth] interslice to help Churchie put a stick about in WWI: The First One, but there wasn’t any money in the budget to update the posters.
they are not liable
to explosion
The chain store that put stanchions up at the entrance and made you wait for a ~30 second “security pause” before being allowed in the store has relented. There is no more waiting when you want to enter the world of their particular consumer goods. It started around fall of 2022 when everyone had decided that they could make Covid go away by completely ignoring it and not doing anything more and shutting down all the monitoring etc etc etc, so that wasn’t the reason.
The reason was obviously some mid-high level executive read that little article about waitron units discovering they got better tips if they touched a person when handing them the check.
So, flip that ... maybe we can reduce our “shrinkage” if we make sure there’s an interaction between the security guard and ALL the incoming marks, that they have to sit there and THINK about what they’re getting into vis-a-vis shoplifting our beautiful products for at least thirty seconds.
This, and the whole whiny meltdown with drug stores/grocery stores putting everything in locked cases (I stopped going to one because of this). And Target’s impending good fortune w/all the suddenly unused real estate. It’s fascinating, the contortions businesses are going through to squeeze an extra cent or two out of Current Living by making things worse. Instead of thinking hey what if we, a giant business that has been sucking the money out of communities forever, tried to put some back? At all?
It’s like dessert every day.
I have no point here, just happy to watch you eat gravel, hard, then come back for seconds. Keep doing it. Love it.
Is “giving back” going to make these places sterling members of the community, beloved, etc? Also no. Giant chain stores should just die, full stop. Giant consumer-facing businesses. There’s no need for them, they can go away now thank you. I am bringing you the opinions that matter. Mind-blowerning revelations.
A New Way to Use the Phonograph for the Entertainment of Your Children. The Phonogram January 1892, pg11. Pretends to whip the phonograph.
bloo bloo bloo
i am just a phonograph
The children were amused by the beating.
ON IT (1916 Jan-Feb Montgomery Ward Groceries Catalog).
spitballing advertisements ...
woo hoo
take phenobarbital
woo hoo
for benzodiazepine withdrawal
woo hoo
The New York Public Library Digital Collections: Automat chocolate doughnuts promotional photo.
I have been playing the daily version of Timeguessr for awhile now and need to beef up my flag/language script skills. A lot of the quizzes available are fill-in-the-blank and/or timed, so they are shunned. Ideally quizzes would be the same as the conditions w/Timeguessr ‒ here’s a flag/language, where on this world map is it. Not, here’s a word, you have thirty seconds to type the country and here’s the leaderboard every-single-time-you-answer and here’s a giant reaction gif when you’re wrong so it takes you four times longer to get through the quiz. These are as close as I can find.
Flags of the World ... Name that World Flag ... Guess the Language
It wasn’t 1927, it was 1928! Stupid stupid stupid ... I will say that the amount of points you get for dates is not balanced properly. Also the “share with friends” icons showing your score are also weighted oddly.
Dragon street art outside Giovanni’s.
Pretty sure I’ve e-chatted with this artist at least once, back when everyone had Flickr accounts before it/tech-in-general decided to explode and catch on fire and flail around and explode again.
Trash Theory: Tragedy, Togetherness & Rock Lobster ‒ The B-52’s Story
David Van Tieghem ‒ Ear to the Ground [1981; 4min]. “Van Tieghem ‘plays’ the streets of New York City as if it were a giant musical instrument. (1981) All sounds recorded live on location ‒ no processing, Foley or overdubbing.”
I excised almost all social media/news feeds, got sick of the doomscroll. Started a discord thing so I can blather about the projects I’m working on and random things so (among other things) I don’t climb the walls. It’s available through the ko-fi.com/cardhouse patreon.com/cardhouse patron accounts. The patreon one has a “free” “tier.” I keep forgetting to mention them, so this will take care of advertising for the year, let’s say.
Also, it is close enough to the one-year anniversary of my bike to look back to help look forward. Trying to make this work from such a dead location has been a chore. Mass transit is a 20 minute walk, just enough to be annoying. There’s no going back to cars [FX: shoves all chips into BIKES section].
Icash 2.0 Scotch Brite branded pre-paid cash card (Taiwan).
You take your little Scotch Brite thingie to an “add value agency” or metro station
and you throw some cash at a machine/clerk. Now you’re carrying around a loaded Scotch Brite scouring pad pre-paid cash card, God help you.
Grouse Hinds art deco design traffic signal cabinet/keyway.
Icypi was a cone-jacketed rectangular ice cream system created in the mid-1920s, “The Snappy Pal for Ice Cream.”
There are many different ice cream scoopers. A lot of rectangular ones including Icypi. See also the clipper.
I have my own theories about rectangular ice cream systems. First, look at these ads.
Where’s the ice cream? Yes, it’s completely enveloped by the cone like a big ice cream hug, but still. Think about a regular ice cream cone, you see the cone, you see the ice cream. Big ball of ice cream. Never mind that the void of the cone is completely empty. It looks like more. I don’t have access to an Icypi dipper (these are going for $100-$200, usually) but it also feels like it’s more. One of the major selling points of the Icypi is that it’s more efficient at distributing ice cream to the marks, so more profit$ for you, you you. Hey, let’s make the Icypi scooper smaller than normal as well, that’s more profits! [SFX: groaning noise]
For a demonstration of the Icypi rectangular solid ice cream scooping system, please see this video.
What are the ice cream cones you remember from your years/decades of eating ice cream at an ice cream shoppe? That’s right, the ice cream server person who went totally ham on your ice cream ball, just did not care that those profits were slipping out of the owner’s pockets. But the Icypi is the same thing, every time.
Your choice: you can get a rectangular less-than-normal scoop of ice cream totally hidden in a cone ... or down the street you can get a big-ass scoop of ice cream from the Johnson’s kid who’s quitting at the end of the day and is over it.
What? For the most part, French vanilla, thanks for asking. For awhile it was cookies and cream. Tiger tail, but that’s regional. Straight up licorice.
What? Yeah, I don’t do camel case. Icypi. Iphone. Iamnotsorry. Yes even when I’m programming. Why add more effort for zero payback. Why.
Philly Justice w/Mike Schur ‒ Good Hang w/Amy Poehler [1hr 15min].
1967 Sun Star ARM brush case box lid. ARM brush cases are so strong, an elephant can step on them. Perhaps you would like to purchase this exact item at Yahoo Auctions.
Bring back this design, so amazing. I’m going off the seller’s information for the year.
Here is another one! It is already sold, you cannot purchase it.
Sun Star is apparently owned by Bandai-Namco. Would I play a videogame designed like this brush case box lid where I was an elephant that had to step on things and then the boss was the brush case and the brush case defeated me but we joined forces to step on bigger things? Fuck yes.
I tried to write Sun Star but I couldn’t get the submit button to submit, in five different browsers.