F
I've had a few conversations on here about the corrosive impact of advertising and whenever I do I always see one comment that I sympathize with, but all find concerning.
"At this point when I see ads it makes me want the product less."
I think nearly everyone has felt this way from time to time, and yet the "adspace" keeps expanding to new frontiers and levels of obnoxiousness.
Advertisers know that their ads are effective. Even on people who have promised themselves they aren't.
I live in a building with over 100 units and if about half of the people do even modest tips it ought to add up to something nice.
I'm just going to need to find a way to spin my own bowl. 
You can have sitting creases added to your jeans in advance if you want.
"That's the style, it's a little wavy"
NO.
No. The "style" is a perfect circle. Perfect as you can make it and if you don't wince when you notice it's not quite there you've kind of missed the point.
Anyway.
The reason I treasure the imperfections in the circular shape of the tea bowl is because I know the person who made it was trying their best to make a perfect circle, something impossible to do by hand, even with a wheel. So the imperfections tell a story.
But someone wrote an article in some "Home" magazine about "wabisabi design" and now there are all these tea bowls with *deliberate* imperfections. I hate it.
Give me the machine made bowl instead.
And don't call me a hipster. I'm mad.
The true "spring trap" were those heat lamps where the biscuits slowly turn into leather.
I was a big fan of the first game. Brilliant game design, tapped into some core creepy memories.
But then it became so kid focused it stopped really being scary.
Popeye's fast food fried chicken chain is doing a FNAF themed promotion ... And I'm kind of disturbed they don't think it's too creepy?
I guess they don't sell pizza or have animatronics so... still. Very bold choice for a food chain IMHO.
People on fixed incomes, and people who are going through hard financial times may not do a tip. No one is upset about this.
It's a kind of chaotic system.
But that's what the "card" is about.
In NYC garbage and mail get no holiday tips. But also you rarely even know who that person is as it can change from day to day.
Yeah you see doormen so much tipping them all the time would be wild. It's a once a year gift. Like 50-100 bucks for full-timers and at least 30 for everyone else. But I live in the south bronx in a very old building.
These numbers go much higher if you have "concierge" service and more fancy staff who do many other things beyond keeping the packages safe and minding the door.
I keep thinking that we should do away with this whole thing and just have a flat service fee so it's predictable. But, it's a non-starter at the co-op board meetings since no one wants to raise fees and it's hard to predict what the impact will be.
A building can have as many as 12 or more full time staff and even a modest $20 adds up.
So how much? I go with 2/3rs of maintenance divided between everyone. Which might be a little stingy.
2/2
The combination of American "tipping culture" and NYC leads to the stressful question of "how much should I give the doormen?" around this time of year.
If you are new to NYC you might be surprised to find a card from your building staff about now... a very early "Christmas card" featuring everyone's names and job titles.
This is so you can prepare your tips.
If your building has staff you are supposed to prepare a cash tip for each person. Please do cash never a check.
1/
Yes, sort of, having a look at it. (I had not seen Wittenbauer's parallelogram before, but this is perfect for these lessons...) Wittenbauer's parallelogram works by making triangles and connecting their midpoints. This makes sets of parallel lines.
Something similar is going on above.
That is an old god.
Is this geometry problem fun or is it evil?
“prove LMNO is a parallelogram” #matheducation
I would like to tell a parable about how STEM and tech gatekeeping has given us the landscape that we see now. But, it's not that simple. And the insularity of tech nerds is a small (annoying) force compared to these large companies who want us all neatly monetized paying them our monthly tithes for propaganda.
But maybe if we let more people into the club we'd be stronger, you know?
There are young people who don't remember what the internet used to be like. They can't remember it because they were too young when it existed.
They don't know that it was for a time, for some people*, better. And they don't know how that better internet was quashed and never really reached them.
* If you have nostalgia for how, for example, google search used to work I think you need to grapple with the fact that only a small slice of the public ever experienced it in that way.
You are correct slop is a feature of #enshittification which is a broader problem in the development of mass software and business models that work through software.