I’d be fine with a small monument of him blowing Bill Clinton.

Thanks. I never needed to see Simon Cowell’s murderin’ face but I guess I’ve seen it now. That’s cool.

A long time ago, my then-scrum master pitched an idea to us: ID badges with little microphones. The microphones wouldn’t record anything, but they’d constantly monitor the ambient noise to see if we were having the kind of excited, buzzy conversations that signaled innovation. Once we had them, we could tune our days to maximize innovation.

I was brand new at the company but I told him that everyone was trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but nobody was willing to build a fucking battery. Then I told him the day we adopted that policy, I’d hand in my resignation. It never came up again.

Motherfuckers will try anything and they always have.

Or she’s in section 8 housing, which means the government is subsidizing WalMart in two ways. Or she had a better job when she applied for the apartment. There’s lots of explanations.

If they knock: a polite “I’ll be out in a moment”

If they bust in like some kind of shitting Kool-Aid man: a cheerful “HOWDY!” with sustained eye contact.

This, but tactile.

You know how sometimes you can watch a food ad and taste the food they’re selling? This is like that, but I can taste the bag they reheated it in.

I doubt it.

It’s weirdly close to Vonnegut’s drawing of a butthole so it’s the one that sticks in my mind.

Pssst. It’s the Claude logo.

Amazon, unfortunately.

My wife and I bought a TV on the internet. What brand? I have no idea but it’s the type they have in waiting rooms and restaurants. Zero internet. Zero apps. You push the button and it turns on. It’s the best fucking purchase we’ve made in the last five years.

Woke up to so many texts about it. This is one of them.

It’s not like you suggested something really classy, like Coors Banquet.

They cut him loose after season 1 and the show got better.

I do this, except for the part where they’re all identical.

A bag of locally roasted coffee is $12 and lasts me two weeks. It used to be $9, before the orange shithead but let’s ignore that. A pot of coffee takes about as long as it takes for water to boil. I’m clearly not the target demographic, but still. Nine fucking dollars for a cup?

Yeah they really shouldn’t have done the cross section.

Yeah, exactly. I get how the Mandela effect works psychologically, I just don’t love that a lot of them end with “corporation says no.”

Maybe instead of freaking out about the Mandela Effect, we should be freaking out with our willingness to just believe corporations at their word. Because that’s who seems to have the final word in all of these things, especially in situations where you can’t go back and check original artifacts. I’m guessing there’s still some old Berenstain Bears books at garage sales and vintage Pikachu merch is everywhere, but who’s holding onto 40 year-old underwear or peanut butter jars?

Here’s a recent example: Dairy Queen introduced a new Blizzard about ten years ago. It started with a solid chocolate core with ice cream around it. They called it the Fudge Tunnel Blizzard. It was there, on the drivethrough sign, and my friends and I had a field day with it. The branding lasted for a few weeks and then it completely disappeared.

I can’t find branding anywhere on the internet. I know it was there, my friends saw it was there. Nobody took a picture and it vanished. I can’t find it on google. It’s gone. Well, there’s some mention of them adding a “tunnel of fudge” to the Royal Blizzard in 2017, but there’s zero surviving marketing material for the original concept which definitely did not have a golden spoon. I know this because I ordered it. Repeatedly. To make the people behind the intercom say it back to me.

It makes sense that they’d want to scrub everything that ever mentioned eating a Fudge Tunnel at Dairy Queen. For the other stuff… who knows? Marketing departments churn, stuff gets lost, short-run logos get left out of the brand evolution. Yeah, some of this is Mandela effect but can we stop treating corporations as the ultimate authority?