Category — Uncategorized

I found a Moomin cruise that goes between Helsinki and Stockholm, and told everyone about it while I was making breakfast. The ChickieNob commented that seeing as she gets seasick easily, feeling queasy while surrounded by Moomin murals did not sound appealing, and Josh said, “What are Moomins?”

ChickieNob and I didn’t believe him, but his brain has somehow blocked out all things Moomin. Hippo-looking things? Vaguely problematic at times? All of it seems like a fever dream?

We found him a playlist with 78 episodes, as well as the books at the library.

For your viewing pleasure.

We have a favourite restaurant in London that we go to at least once, but usually several times each trip, depending on the length of the trip. At the end of the final meal, we split a plate of tiramisu. We take a photo of the piece of cake with four forks, and then the empty plate with the four forks. I have so many of these photos.

But it occurred to me that I could make tiramisu. And then not just have one slice, but make myself ill eating as much tiramisu as I wished.

ChickieNob and I set out using this recipe, mostly because it didn’t contain eggs and seemed super simple. And it was. It was a really easy recipe if you have a stand mixer. The only change I made was to use iced coffee instead of espresso.

We didn’t even need to wait to try it. We took leftover lady fingers, dipped them in the leftover coffee, and then smeared up the leftover mascarpone cream. It was so good. Even with the lady fingers still a little crunchy.

Some people have shared this video expressing sadness over the way we spend our time, but I’m not sure why we feel activities need to remain the same. I mean, sure it’s a little depressing to see sex fall off the screen, but for every loss (hanging out with friends) you also see a smaller amount of time devoted to activities that used to eat up much of our day (housework).

Also, this is the collective trend, not the personal trend. In my own world, I read for more than two hours per day. On the weekend, that number is much higher. I don’t need anyone else to spend the same amount of time I do on that activity as long as I can spend that time on that activity.

And take all of it with a grain of salt. Sleeping doesn’t feature on this 24 hour list. Or bathing. Or getting dressed. There are a lot of time-consuming activities missing from this list.

Once upon a time, Burrito Brothers dotted the city, and people would line up in the early hours of the morning for delicious post-bar meals. And all was well.

There were many Burrito Brothers locations in the city. They opened. They closed. But there was always the store on Capitol Hill. It had been there forever.

We were telling the kids about Burrito Brothers — they had it once at the Union Station location when they were in early elementary school — and we looked it up to see the closest location so we could go for a meal, and we learned THAT IT HAD CLOSED FOREVER FIVE HOURS EARLIER.

I feel like we somehow caused this. Or maybe we just felt a disturbance in the air, and it made us start talking about it. I will never get to have another spinach burrito, and I am so sad.

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to refer to the way of online platforms, moving from awesome experience for users, to making it shitty for users to please businesses who are bringing money to the platform, and finally making it shitty for everyone as they focus solely on shareholders.

But the term works with programming and products, too. A few years ago, we signed up for a concert subscription. The first year, it was awesome. The second year, they reduced the number of concerts. Then they limited how many concerts you could sign up for at a time, so you constantly had to manage your account or get shut out of concerts because it was first-come, first-served (or get a 15% discount on full-priced tickets to account for the 15% discount you already paid for with your subscription). The third year, they raised the price of the subscription by 25%. And finally, they announced they had new restrictions, effective immediately, on bag size (only a small clutch) and banning personal water bottles.

It went from awesome to not very enjoyable, all in a three-year span. I’m trying to see it for what it is now vs. remembering what it was like three years ago. Is it worth the cost right now? We have a few months before the renewal date to decide.

But here’s the thing — in our experience, the first year was great. But we hadn’t been there for the year before that. What if people who had started their subscription a year before us thought that our year was terrible in comparison to the year they had come from? Totally possible. It only seems shitty because we have a comparison. Without a comparison, if we started now, we may think things are wonderful.

It is really hard not to think about things in comparison. To judge things as if nothing had come before.