Don’t worry, I don’t just spend every day complaining on the Internet, I went to a nice party this weekend my friend hosted. It was essentially the opposite of minimalism, the whole apartment was decorated, with flying chairs and other stuff. But it got me thinking.
This is something that first began to annoy me with a Dutch takeaway restaurant chain.
They went from this logo:
To this:
The top is a cheesy family restaurant. The bottom is a hardware store where you buy a new electric screwdriver. At least, that’s what my idea would be. But they just can’t accept it. They can’t accept that they’re a cheesy family restaurant, that this is their station in life, so they have to get the new logo and some complete soulless automaton at a marketing agency draws some lines to make a bear face and charges them a fortune and nobody in management dares to say the obvious thing. You’ll bankrupt the company like this.
But it’s everywhere now.
You can’t be weird. You can’t be retro. You can’t be extravagant. Everything has to adjust to the culture of ugly bald men with glasses who live in San Francisco and work for big tech.
The best example may be the colors of cars:
Pink cars, green cars, they’re gone. Entire species of car basically went extinct and nobody notices.
But you see it on the Internet too. People don’t have their own websites anymore, with their own colors, their own aesthetic. They have a medium, or a substack. There’s nothing left to discover on the Internet, nothing you have to search for, no hidden corners, unless you’re a pedophile.
Everything is homogenizing, converging on ugliness. On sterile, cold grey minimalism. Nobody dares to deviate from it, even the idea of deviating from it doesn’t occur to most of them. It’s this weird mix of hubris and humility. Hubris, in trying to appear like something you’re not. Humility, in being afraid of standing out. When people read my IgG4 article I got remarks that they were surprised there’s someone not using Substack.
Everyone wants to cultivate this aura of professionalism. I get it, because there’s big money to be made. Every article about MYOCARDITIS or TURBOCANCERS or IVERMECTIN or THE WEF or CLIMATE HYSTERIA or WOKE is going to earn you a buck. A weird Dutch guy calling you a low status white male and telling you to stop eating meat and posting about smoking salvia in between posts where he warns that you destroyed the population’s immune response to a SARS virus is not going to get rich off blogging.
I say, let your words speak for themselves. I was of course right. By now the studies are published arguing to stop the mRNA vaccine program based on the exact problem I pointed out and Novavax is putting out studies bragging they don’t induce an IgG4 antibody response, weird Dutch blog not on substack with a pink background or not. I was also right about serotype evolution and deletions in the immunogenic NTD loops, but let’s wait with that for tomorrow.
I’m not saying something new. People complain about refinement culture all the time. But they complain about it, on Twitter (now refined into X). They complain about it, on Substack. You’re the thing you’re criticizing! You’re choosing the easy route, you’re following the crowd, you’re converging on the grey, the monotonous, the slick, the sterile, the online, the modern.
You don’t have to do everything yourself, I don’t want to maintain a massive database and a comment form I’d have to protect against bots and SQL injections, I’m happy to let some bald men with glasses in San Francisco do that for me, I’d rather keep my hair. But you’re taking over their culture. You’re all starting to think, look, act and copy the taste of bald men with glasses in San Francisco.
I am proposing a complete minimalist genocide, a final solution to the bald men with glasses question, just massacres in the streets, a complete bloodbath. I am a modern day Pol Pot, who is simply going to order you to pull bald men with glasses out of their office, ask them whether they have a website that ends on .io and then just put a bullet through their heads. Oh that’s not professional?
You’re right. That’s not professional. This will ruin my retention rate! Sorry, I’ll do better.
- I am proposing a complete minimalist genocide, a final solution to the bald men with glasses question.
- It will be a complete bloodbath, with massacres in the streets.
- I am a modern day Pol Pot.
- I will order you to pull bald men with glasses out of their office, ask them whether they have a website that ends on .io and put a bullet through their head if they answer affirmatively.
That’s my elevator pitch. I’m looking for 25 million dollars, for a 20% stake. We’re not just pre-earnings, we’re pre-revenue, so the opportunities for future growth are limitless! Jump on this opportunity while you can!
I used to think “Twitter” was an annoying modernist, cutesy name. Now it is minimalized to “X”. Worse. I was a minimalist in respect to Covid strategy. Minimal infections and/or injections. Ideally one safe and effective injection during a more lethal strain, and then hope for minimal infections of a more mild strain, but without turning life upside down. So Novavax, the one US vax version that might be somewhat “safe and effective”, isn’t approved until after Delta is gone (if I have my timeline memory right) and after the country is multiply boosted with mRNA. Even the latest version of Novavax was not approved and ready until the few booster devotees had already received their latest mRNA booster. And J&J, which may have gotten the “effective” part somewhat right, at least duration wise, was thrown under the bus by our health authorities for safety reasons. Moderna/Pfizer safety concerns combined with short term efficacy issues: no problem. Just get boosted.
This is just not a virus you want to send antibodies after.
You have to keep in mind, we don’t really know exactly yet why the class switch to IgG4 (and IgG2 in some people) takes place. It could be part of a compensatory mechanism, with IgG antibodies simply inducing so much inflammation that the class switch takes place to avoid damage from excess inflammation. In other words, the alternative to the class switch may be worse.
The innate immune system will have to solve it. I will write a bit more about this in the future. I have covered a number of mechanisms the innate immune system uses before, but there are other aspects worth discussing too, aspects of innate immunity almost nobody knows about.
It’s interesting how much emphasis was placed on level or extent of antibody response when evaluating the vaccines. So even the non-vaccinal induced antibodies that the immune system eventually develops could be problematic? As far as I know, your knowledge of the relevant scientific fields is from self study and schooling that didn’t culminate in advanced degree and career. This makes independent thinking more fruitful and less susceptible to career and reputation pressures. Yeah, the immune system is amazing. Must be a good reason the “tolerating” antibody switch doesn’t seem to happen with response to infection and various non- mRNA vaccines.
>So even the non-vaccinal induced antibodies that the immune system eventually develops could be problematic?
This has already been established. Some people develop enhancing antibodies, even through natural infection. It seems to be less common though.
Some more examples:
The Uncle Ben’s rice brand changed their name to Ben’s Originals and got rid of the picture of the smiling black man in the wake of the Summer 2020 BLM/Antifa riots because their brand was being “criticised for perpetuating racial stereotypes”:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54269358
And here’s some logo changes over the years from a British watch company:
https://www.watchuseek.com/threads/poll-christopher-ward-new-logo-and-old-ones-updated-options.4567695/
Look at the pictures in the first post. The first two logo designs are nice (especially the second one) but then look at the third design, aptly described as “New IKEA catalog font”. Not only does the logo itself look atrocious, but they decided to put it at 9 o’clock instead of 12 o’clock, completely messing up the symmetry of the dial. WTF were they thinking?
Yeah any logo with a black person from before 1990 or so ends up falling victim to this.
Same thing happened to Aunt Jemima:
These logos have a combination of dignity with some humility. Dignity always requires some humility.
Unfortunately that’s just unacceptable in today’s environment, due to movements like BLM that are about having zero humility. So now you just get black erasure.
The only black people who fit today’s cultural environment are overweight grumpy lonely lesbians, like the lead character in the Netflix Painkiller series.
But those images are just going to make people think negatively of black people.
A funny example from the U.S. was Land O’Lakes butter. The old packaging featured an American Indian maiden in a verdant landscape, kneeling and offering us the very butter she was featured on, in theoretically infinite regress. The new packaging has gotten rid of the Indian but kept the land. Some things never change!
I think the simplified logos cited by RR are instances of graphics being redesigned by computers to make them more appealing to other computers. We’ve just been removed from the loop.
Notwithstanding that, however, are you sure that new Captain Morgan is real? Could be a spoof?
Also, young guys learned from peers that you could cut into part of the picture, then fold up the knees back and thru the new opening, and voila, the knees become luscious breasts, in exactly the right place. We thought that was so cool.
Thank you for the bullet points. More of that, pls
I have 50 websites but none end with .io
Should I be also executed as colors were never my strong suit (check out algebra.com)
Nah, you get to live.
> Nah, you get to live.
Loool!
> Should I be also executed as colors were never my strong suit (check out algebra.com)
Igor, you should do a website about learning Maths by building small video games!
+ + +
I think the whole go-digital process is affecting the general aesthetics.. I am guessing people will come back to more traditional, analog-feel logos.. Nostalgia is very strong. It might have to do with mid-life crisis, and ‘memento mori’..
Cars are bad, but so are homes. The new fashion is to paint everything white, including the wood. They look awful. I would much rather by a fixer-upper that hasn’t been desecrated, than spend my money on an awful-looking new home that has.
Life was better in the 70s needs to be added to the list of LSWMisms.
Yes! As a LSWM i hang out in various retro groups. Old computers, old buses, old buildings…
With very few exceptions, post-70s cars are ugly…
The design, the materials, the colors, they all look the same.
Also, because cars are now so widespread, we’re probably sick and tired of them.
The abundance kills the desire.
It’s even worse here, Hobgoblin beer is 5% alcohol. In fact, it’s almost impossible to get 5.2% beer in the UK. It happened in 2007, the Labour Gov at the time put a massive tax on alcohol to encourage the alcohol companies to lower the percentage of alcohol in their products and beer got hit the hardest. I remember when loads of beer here was 5.2% or above; Stella Artois (nickname was ‘wife beater’) was 5.2% and is now 4.8%! Nobody says “a pint of wife beater please” anymore lol Everything is so sanitised.
Yea the grey thing is everywhere. It’s weird. My Mum’s house is completely grey and full of mirrors. I hate it.
On the vaccines, how long do you reckon people with an Igg4 response can live for? From what I’ve read on AIDS it’s like 3-5 years before they die. Some can live a bit longer with clean living and vitamins.
Sorry, it’s ‘Rob’ not ‘Rov.’
Yes, I’m wrecked. Just discovered Pregabalin.
Rad, you must be sick today to have written a whole article without blaming brown people for this genocide.
From that perspective, I can only hope that you remain sick until you get a grip of what is actually going on in the world, and who is behind it.
Why can’t we have the sixties forever?