❇️ Advanced Pattern Recognition

Diet Coke is having a moment.

Not sure what it means.

Stay tuned.

Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara is not the real world. 

After spending a week there, you can be tricked into thinking $2M for an 1100 square foot fixer-upper is a STEAL and you should do ABSOLUTELY whatever you need to do to move.

Sell everything, downsize and MOVE RIGHT NOW... because this is it. This is THE PLACE! 

We would NEVER go on vacation because we'll always BE ON VACATION! 

Don't you get it? We need to be HERE, NOW. That's what Ram Dass meant the whole time – he meant WE need to move to Santa Barbara! 

Let's look at some houses. F@#! it, call the Airbnb host and see if they'll sell us this house! 

No, they won't? Fine, let's go see some open houses! 

Wow, these are super small huh? Who cares! We're in Santa Barbara! 

...What do you mean you have to offer at least 15-20% over asking to have a shot at the 2 MILLION DOLLAR FIXER-UPPER? 15% of 2 million dollars is more money than we paid for our ENTIRE FIRST HOME... shit. 

Pack it up, we gotta go back to the snow desert. 

Saas Pro Shops Trucker Cap

🐠 SaaS 🐠 Pro 🐠 Shops 🐠 Trucker 🐠 Hat! 

72 Hours in Vegas

I spent the last 3-nights in Vegas. 72 hours is my absolute max – anything longer seems truly insane. The energy here has always been weird. But a post-COVID Vegas is even weirder. Darker. 

The entire strip feels like you are living within a social media feed that you didn't subscribe to. An endless scroll of advertisements for pleasures you DON'T want. Click nothing. Ever. But even if you don't click, the content just keeps getting served. It's so disorienting.

Bliss

By the end of my 3-days, I had convinced myself that the entire city was one big simulation and that the majority of the people on the strip were merely non-player characters (NPCs) in the game. 

I determined that the simulation must have started somewhere between 2005-2008 because Pauly D from Jersey Shore is a headlining DJ. Chris Angel is still a thing. Taxi Cabs are far easier than getting an Uber. And restaurants are somehow able to serve "steaks" for $5.99. COVID obviously never happened here. 

In other Jersey Shore news... Pauly D's close friend Vinnie is now stripping at Chippendales. Caabs are here!!!

🌎 Links

Saint Peter's Becomes The First 15 Seed To Make The Elite 8, Watch The Moment They Sealed The Deal
The celebration is better than the ending of the game, especially that wild 3 by Ivey.

Youth Sports Made Me a Shopaholic
This dad energy really connects me – I can't wait to spend hours in Sports Authority looking at basketball shoes, baseball gloves, and tennis racquets. 

Airline CEOs call for end to federal mask mandate in letter to Biden
The executives say the mask requirement should not be extended beyond April 18, when it is set to expire

Kids Are Learning History From Video Games Now
More students are being exposed to historical narratives through gameplay

Confessions of an Information Hoarder
What happens to our brains when we have an infinite memory?

.JPEGS

🌎 Links

Will Butler Says He’s Left Arcade Fire
Will Butler joined Arcade Fire in late 2003 when multi-instrumentalist Brendan Reed quit onstage during a show. He first appeared on Arcade Fire’s debut album, 2004’s Funeral, and has contributed to every album since then, including the band’s upcoming studio LP WE. Arcade Fire's new single, The Lightning I, II is VERY good – see link below:

🎶 NEW MUSIC

Arcade Fire – The Lightning I, II

Nobody complimented my B*red Ape hoodie
What do logo jawns tell us about coolness, desire, and where NFTs are headed? I'll go on record here... NFTs are corny as hell and those bored ape jpegs are the Von Dutch of blockchain. On a related note, 

SIR MIX-A-LOT CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF "BABY GOT BACK" WITH BIT BUTTS NFT FOR THE "COLORECTAL CANCER ALLIANCE (that's a real headline).

Creatives are moving: Where are they going and why?

70 percent of our survey respondents believe it will no longer be necessary for creatives to live in major cities in the future.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Y Control (Live on Letterman 2004)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs performed 'Y Control' (from their first album 'Fever To Tell') on The Late Show With David Letterman on July 21, 2004.

Apple Computer Gift Catalog (1983)

Vintage Apple merch and nostalgia via chipsetc.com:

The Apple gift catalog was a full-color, promotional gift catalog available for free to the general public by mail or through Official Apple retail computer dealers. Apple wanted to promote it's famous Apple rainbow logo further through the use of unique, custom made gift items. Some interesting (and now hard to find) items found in the catalog included an Apple II computer puzzle, an Apple brass belt buckle, an Apple rainbow logo latch hook kit or handmade wall hanging, various Apple rainbow logo jewelry - lapel pins, tie tacks & a gold necklace, an Apple brass cube paperweight, an Apple rainbow logo kite, and of course, those classic 1980's Apple logo T-shirts.

🌎 Links

"Pete Davidson Scores Free Seat on Jeff Bezos' Rocket"
We live in hell.

What is Brutalist Web Design?
The term brutalism is often associated with Brutalist Architecture, however, it can apply to other forms of construction, such as web design. This website explains how. 
[don.earth proudly adheres to brutalist web design principles about 90% of the time... the emojis are a needless decoration that gets in the way of the content... but YOLO!]

Music Video: Florence and The Machine – King

Perfectly executed music video (remember those?) – feels a bit like A24's Hereditary... Speaking of A24, they just scored a $225m equity investment at a $2.5b valuation.

Memento Millenial
Thoughts on the end of an era, its "main characters", web 2.0 & the real difference between Gen Z and Millenials – a couple of excerpts that are so cringingly accurate:

...the way millenials found cultural refuge and alternative spaces for identity formation was web 2.0 and the scenes it made possible. Shoutout to bloghouse, but I’ll forever eye roll at Twee. Millennials suddenly had access to tastemakers in major cities beyond where they lived. And it was a relief to discover everything the mainstream had so dedicatedly ignored had an avenue. Finally there was a sense of there being more out there for people who didn’t watch The Hills or care about teen sex comedies or thought all the flag waving was a bit too earnest. Is it any surprise then Millennials were so precious about “authenticity”? For them, aesthetic choices were relatively hardwon.

Millennials chose their “favorite fonts” and borrowed opinions about pour-over coffee and vinyl from the designers blogging online. They nurtured the types of niche interests that mumblecore and Wes Anderson characters/fans enjoy (but only when they can be observed doing so). It sounds like I’m judging their indulgence, but it was cool to have access to more information than the people before us did, and to be able to refine our tastes as a result. The people whose thoughts and opinions were sourced from other people were always going to do that; at least they were now able to copy people who knew what they were talking about.

...Watching older millennials buy “heritage brand” axes made by graphic designers in 2010, when they literally lived in a walk up in Williamsburg––all just to distinguish themselves from finance bros––was so cringe. Because guess what those finance bros do now? Go to axe-throwing bars. Everything Millennials clung to as a signifier of what made them more uniquely informed and sophisticated is finally being recognized as banal and unimportant.

"Merch" Update

I've been working on getting some merch out. Finalizing some of the packaging elements – sewing in labels, shipping tape, etc..