Hi, friends!
I hope your week is going well.
Tonight’s topic is basic shit that makes you doubt your intelligence.
I bought a box of Honey Nut Cheerios at the grocery store a few days ago. I don’t buy cereal often, but I was already buying milk for the mashed potatoes I made the other day.
Anyways.
The box is promotional crap for the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie. It’s got pictures of one of the characters on it, and says “Collect All 6” but there’s no other text on the box about it. Collect all 6 what? Stickers? Temporary tattoos? Crazy straws? What’s in the box???
I think those douchebags just printed 6 different boxes and the “collector item” is a fucking Cheerios box. If I were a kid, I’d expect “Collect all 6” on the front of the box to mean there was actually something in the box for me!
Schrödinger’s Cat(s)?
This press release just says
https://www.pennlive.com/food/2023/04/guardians-of-the-galaxy-inspires-out-of-this-world-cereal-groot-gurt-and-cereal-bar-packages.html
So I guess that’s it? There’s also some kind of “kit” you can buy at Walmart that comes with pins and cereal, but that sounds like it’s separate from the regular cereal.
That’s fucking stupid.
You’re not supposed to damage packaging on “collectibles” yet food is meant to be consumed.
Whoever planned this ad campaign drinks fancy smoothies for breakfast.
I’m old enough to remember when you could get actual toys in cereal boxes. I had a nearly complete set of Winnie-the-Pooh figures, for example. I don’t remember what cereal they came from. At some point licensing fees must have become a factor, because I remember getting figures based on the cereal (Lucky the Leprechaun, Frankenberry, Count Chocula, etc.) which presumably didn’t trigger a payment to Disney. I also remember getting figures of sea life, too. I know I had a whale and an octopus.
Don’t judge me. There were five of us eating that stuff.
Right! I remember things like crazy straws. Small plastic toys. And if it was a promotional tie in, it would be things like color-change plastic Lion King spoons to eat my cereal with.
i live in a country where chocolate eggs with toys in them are common and considered safe…but guns arent
crazy right?
the news make me question my intelligence most days…. american news makes me wonder if maybe im still tripping
I think I’ve seen this before and it’s just about the stupidest collectible I’ve ever heard of.
When they say “collect all six” what they really mean is “buy all six”.
I feel like search engines are getting to be more and more of a black box in terms of what they spit out.
For several years, people have been complaining about even precise searches where you put quotes around terms don’t give precise results. For example,
https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/108355502/is-google-results-page-no-longer-showing-the-exact-term-searched
When I type in “honey nut cheerios” “guardians of the galaxy” I get only 21 results shown, remove the quotes I get only 25, but if I add reddit to the string (because there are subreddits for everything) I get more, even though more search terms should yield fewer results.
It seems like there are more and more back end assumptions being built into Google and less and less capacity for users to override them. And while I realize there is somewhat more finetuning available via advanced search, even that seems to be messed with.
Duckduckgo and Bing don’t seem any better. I get the value of a search engine being able to take vague inputs and try to offer some options, but I feel like results for unstructured and structured searches are still getting worse and worse.
I just assumed it was a reflection of various pages paying for “SEO optimization”
Off topic. I’m surprised and more than a little disappointed that Canada has the exact same security theater that the US does. O Canada, our expectations were so much higher.
My recollection is that Canada was more relaxed, but I will admit I haven’t been there since something like 2014. I would be happy to learn how I’m wrong.
All the same bullshit, with taking off the shoes and going through the scanner that spits out false positives left and right, etc, etc.
“We need you to remove your fillings, sir, and put them in this plastic bin where 1,000 other people have put their fillings, then step back through the metal detector.”
From a contractor’s perspective, the great thing about airport security is you can sell a $100 million unicorn detector, and when you never catch a unicorn, you can claim a 100% success rate. And then use that to sell more unicorn detectors to other airports.
Sometimes it’s a hard world for the little things.
When I was growing up, everyone used to get a plastic bag delivered called “Publisac” once a week (translated: publication or public bag). It was filled with coupons and flyers and occasionally a small cereal box or toy. My siblings and I used to wait for the mail carrier to drop it off and then fight over it. Eventually they stopped including the cereals and toys but like Pavlov’s dogs we kept waiting for the bag and fighting over it once it was delivered. For years. It’s a whole thing.
https://ilovemypublisac.ca/news/