Who the hell puts butter on Pop-Tarts?
Who the hell puts butter on Pop-Tarts?
Also, I finally watched the original Super Mario Bros. movie! It was fine!
Hey friends, welcome back to Follow Friday! This week, we’re talking about pawpaws, Pop-Tarts, accidental bookmarks, and more. But first, here are some AI-generated ducks dressed as Mario and his brother … Green Mario.
💉 Reminder: Get your COVID booster!
My left arm is sore as I write this because this week, I got my annual flu shot and the newest COVID-19 vaccine for 2025. I remember how momentous getting the first shots in 2021 was: Just getting an appointment was an ordeal, and then I queued for at least 30 minutes outside the vaccine site, nervously checking my phone. What if they run out? etc.
That experience is hilarious in hindsight because getting my annual vaccine has become so easy. I rolled up to Walgreens, stood in no line, and was boosted & out of there in eight minutes. Consider this your reminder to get yours, too.
📰 What I’m reading
America’s forgotten fruit: “Today, wild pawpaws still grow in 26 states, from northern Florida to Pennsylvania and across the Midwest into Nebraska. But even though they appear in abundance each fall, few people are aware of the delicious treasures hiding nearby.”
Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake: “Legalization increases the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent, and increases debt delinquency. These problems seem to concentrate among young men living in low-income counties—further evidence that those most hurt by sports gambling are the least well-off.”
Understanding anti-woke tech bros: “These guys romanticize the idea of working with their hands, but it’s far more likely they spend their days typing on a laptop (or better yet, speaking into a podcast mic). Rather than a remote log cabin, they imagine escaping to their very own civilization on a corporate-owned self-governing city-state — er, ‘networked state.’ They’re not driving lifted trucks; they’re buying bulletproof hunks of metal that look like they came out of Cyberpunk 2077. Like Ron Swanson, they still love animal protein, but now they may be eating it literally raw.”
Hang on to your physical driver’s license: “No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do. Technical details of your digital ID aside, handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.”
Don’t give up on pronouncing someone’s name: “I cannot speak for everyone with a unique name, but in my opinion, I’d rather someone try to pronounce a name than just give up. Personally, I am not offended when either my first or last name is mispronounced but rather thankful someone took the effort to give my name dignity by attempting to say it — as I do theirs.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
Despite living in Northern California, I’m not a huge wine drinker. But I have made many daytrips to Napa and Sonoma counties, some of them on oppressively hot days. On this episode of Short Wave, Lauren Sommer answers a question I’ve thought about often: What is climate change doing to the grapes? Especially interesting is the impact on one specific, popular variety: Cabernet Sauvignon.
I wasn’t expecting a history of Pop-Tarts to have quite so many innuendos, but apparently that’s on brand for the On Brand podcast. There are also connections to World War II, dog food, and an ongoing debate about whether the Kellogg’s-made treat should be eaten with butter (absolutely not). Chemistry takes precedence over the breezy story here, which is wise because hosts Jon Glover and Marisa Pinson have a lot of it.
I’ve been celebrating the return of How to Destroy Everything, an exquisitely produced podcast about a narcissistic father named Richard Jacobs, which became an overnight hit last year — despite releasing only two full episodes. In the latest episode of the show, Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky explain how they were overwhelmed by their popularity, and why they took a year off before committing to a regular publishing schedule. But if you’re new to the show, you should definitely start with episode 1.
I edited this: On Lock and Code, David Ruiz interviews San Francisco’s City Attorney David Chiu about his lawsuit against several websites that make it easy to create deepfake pornography. Apparently, high schoolers and college students are using these sites to swap their classmates’ faces onto the bodies of sex workers and adult film stars, a depressing new low in the already-terrible genre of “revenge porn.” As if being a teenager wasn’t hard enough.
And I also edited this: On Grit, Joubin Mirzadegan interviewed former Ford CEO Mark Fields about spending decades in the auto business, the fallacy of “work/life balance,” and writing a new chapter after being fired from the company he gave most of his career to.
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💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week
is Cats of the Web, a sorely-needed IMDb for internet-famous felines. How did this not exist before?
🍿 What I’m watching
The Mask of Zorro (1998) - ★★★★ - I don’t know how they’re not still making one of these every 3 years. Fun dialogue, clever action choreography, and more sexual chemistry than you can swing a sword in the shape of a “Z” at. Enough time has passed that Antonio Banderas could pass the torch to another Zorro — is Pedro Pascal too old?
Super Mario Bros. (1993) - ★★ ½ - Is this a good movie? Not really, but not because of the awkward special effects or the extravagant … lack of fealty to the source material. Honestly, I love the fact that the colorful world of the early Mario video games was replaced here with a grimy, dystopian sci-fi city; it makes the moments of game-y silliness — like the super jump boots or the Bob-Omb — really feel special. I just wish the script was more consistently funny and the action was a little less coincidental. Gotta admire the audacity of the BTTF-esque ending though.
Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!
💀 What I’m TikTok-ing
Just a normal dog eating a pineapple
A very Septembery mashup (wear headphones)
A great laundry productivity hack
🦆 About the Ducks
Man, generative AI has gotten crazy impressive, but every time it fails to do something simple, it’s honestly a relief. Here’s the original prompt I gave ChatGPT and what it spat out:
draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of two ducks facing each other. both are wearing blue overalls, and one of them has a red shirt, black mustache, and a red hat with an "M" on it. The other has a green shirt, brown mustache, and green hat with the letter "L" on it. They are surrounded by red-and-white mushrooms
Pretty good, but there’s one obvious error: Luigi-duck’s hat.
So I said, the duck on the right should have an "L" on his hat instead of an "M”
We got the picture at the top, which I accepted because it’s less chaotic than this first output and, honestly, who cares? (sorry, Luigi stans).
It’s clear the AI knew what I was getting at because I didn’t even specify the color of the overalls’ buttons, or the fact that the initials on the hats should be encircled. But for whatever reason, generating an “L” wasn’t on the table. Weird!