Category: living

Categories
food

Green Onion Chex Cereal, Awful or “…Too Mild”?

Apparently there was a contest in South Korea 16 years ago to determine which new Chex flavor to make, Chocolate or Green Onion and green onion won but the local Kellogg’s company determined that the voting was fraudulent and ran with the chocolate variant. People were sort-of upset about the situation, Sangmi Cha & Josh Smith for Reuters have the update:

It is being hailed as a major win for democracy in South Korea. After 16 years in exile, a president this week triumphantly returned to claim his rightful place – on the front of a box of green onion-flavoured cereal.

And that’s why there’s the ad above celebrating the product.

My favorite part of this story though is this review from Jamelle Bouie for Serious Eats. There’s no surprise that the cereal turned out to be offensive to Bouie’s pallet, but it is a very good review especially because it includes a video of an adult in the United States attempting to eat Green Onion Chex with milk and give it a serious review as a breakfast cereal.

But the end of the Reuters article includes a completely different review from someone in South Korea:

“I had adult-like taste in food since I was young, so I love local food with garlic, green onion or kimchi,” said food blogger Lee Soo-jeong, 24, who voted for Chaka as a child and was an early taster.

Her verdict on the long-awaited cereal?

“The green onion flavour is too mild.”

Which review is accurate? Both. I love this because it is a fantastic example of different cultures and their respective food palates, and different ways things are judged by different people. I must get a box of Green Onion Chex.

Categories
politics technology war

Microsoft Outfits Soldiers for AR Murder With Hololens

Lucas Matney writing for Tech Crunch:

Today, Microsoft announced that it has received a contract to outfit the United States Army with tens of thousands of augmented reality headsets based on the company’s HoloLens tech. This contract could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years, the company says.

Microsoft will be fulfilling an order for 120,000 AR headsets for the Army based on their Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) design. The modified design upgrades the capabilities of the HoloLens 2 for the needs of soldiers in the field.

Microsoft has a long history of working with the government to help murder people and their GitHub unit famously contracts with ICE and helps to cage children.

Categories
computers nature

“THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?”

This past week has apparently been a watershed moment for “cryptoart”, and the past few months have helped grow cryptocurrencies and Non-Fungible Tokens. Everest Pipkin:

The current ecological cost of cryptoart and cryptocurrency is very real and very large, and while steps can be taken to reign in some of that energy cost, the crypto- market is still based in a value system that fundamentally ties worth to spent physical resources.
There is no undoing that relationship, no matter how low the cost to mint tokens gets or what the percentage of green energy is in doing so.

A value system that understands itself only in terms of what, materially, has been burned so far to create investment and what, materially, will need to be burned tomorrow is one that is untenable to the future we have to build, one that has decoupled worth with waste, one where units of labor are not bought and sold for wage.

Don’t trust anyone who is accelerating the destruction of the planet so that fake copies of gifs can be bought and resold.

Categories
internet writing

What Happens When The Publisher is a Casino

Last year I was happy to receive a gifted subscription to The Athletic, a subscription-based sports outlet. It has some fine writers. Now they’ve partnered with a sports gambling company, BetMGM. Nando Di Fino:

From the day we started the fantasy sports section, I’ve gotten one question, repeatedly:
“Why Chris Vaccaro?”
But a close second is, “When is The Athletic going to get into sports betting?”
My friends, the answer is … “today.”

You might think that just means they’ll provide coverage targeted towards gambling, but no, it’s worse:

As you may have seen pretty much everywhere, we’ve partnered with BetMGM. This was not, by any means, a short process — I think it’s been about eight months in the making. I want to assure you that your overall experience on The Athletic will mostly remain unchanged. And in most cases, it’ll get much better and deliver way more value.

[…]

So whether you want to tinker with our models before you place a sizeable wager, read some columns and simply enjoy the insights because it makes you a smarter fan, or maybe you’re like me and want to try a $3 longshot parlay across a few sports that will pay back $213.10 — we’re here for you. And we’ll be here in the comment sections for your feedback, questions, concerns, or general razzing of bad advice. (Try as we might to avoid it, there will be bad advice. That I can promise.)

I don’t doubt that most, if not the majority, of money that funds publishing is corrupt because it is impossible to earn a dollar under capitalism without stepping on someone else, but it is difficult to imagine a more brazen hijacking of the process of reporting than explicitly joining, and thus foisting your readers directly into, gambling.

Incredible but maybe not entirely surprising for an outfit that was originally born out of the notoriously libertarian Y Combinator start-up program.

I’m very curious what writers for The Athletic who aren’t making bank on this deal think about the situation.

Categories
writing

The Plagiarizer

IGN recently fired an editor that covered Nintendo platforms and software, Filip Miucin, when it was discovered that he had plagiarized a review for Dead Cells from another video review.

This situation was awful enough, but IGN’s managers did a good job of resolving it quickly, and I thought it could be an opportunity for the journalist who plagiarized to grow and learn a valuable lesson. That isn’t at all what happened, he posted a video apology to YouTube and it is just completely insincere garbage that I won’t embed or link to. ResetEra has a transcript.
Portions are excerpted in this retort from another writer that Miucin plagiarized, Chris Scullion: