Granting corporations personhood worked out really well.

Turning around in a drive-thru is a bold move.

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It’s been forever on account of them closing down almost all their stores. The rate of expansion circa 1996 was absurd. We were cannibalizing our own customer base by opening up a new one a few miles away. There’s only so much demand for rotisserie chicken when you’re charging twice what Costco does.

I worked at Boston Market back in the '90s, and we would endlessly steal the precooked bacon from the sandwich station, usually crouching behind it to avoid management noticing.

The Spanish Inquisition.

Look: I’m not going to claim I agree with him on everything. Though there are a satisfying number of "fuck"s.

But he does research so I don’t have to, and I enjoy that.

One thing Ed does is use my cadence, so it comes across as very natural. It’s kinda like how dogs sniff each other and feel comfortable.

He was right.

Yeah, a good writer will reduce things to this size of a sentence. Now, this requires skill … three random monosyllabic words and a period gets you nowhere. It’s a bit like comedy in that the setup is required for the punchline.

I mean, yeah, he sounds like he’s yelling at clouds, but he brings the receipts.

My ex had an uncle with exactly my voice. Cadence, accent, inflection … it was uncanny.

This was infuriating to me when I started college as a CS major. I dropped out after Intro because they weren’t giving us anything worth remembering.

I’m going to disagree here. It must have two wheels. I get the reference, but you didn’t nail the landing.

Nah, the crosswalk ones are still worse.

The push to re-physicalize interfaces has even led to an unexpected side gig for Dr. Plotnick, the academic authority on buttons. Companies are tapping her to consult on how to improve their physical controls.

Well played.

It was my first reporting job. Yeah, at 44. And short of a few interviews, I was just rewriting shit.

I’ve been an editor for decades and have had to deal with plagiarism (thankfully, nothing too significant), so as a guardrail, it made sense. Editors approach writing with a far more critical eye than a recent J-school grad.

Honestly, I found value in asking an LLM to paraphrase press releases I was rewriting. It just saved me from accidentally plagiarizing. It was pretty grueling, as I quickly learned that feeding in a full story yields wildly inappropriate results, so I reverted to a graf at a time. Within that scope, one can check against errors; asking it to paraphrase entire DOE releases was worse than an abject failure.

It’s a tool. You aren’t using a hammer for a situation that calls for a screwdriver. People are being stupid about this basic understanding.

Popular? I mean, really? Quark wasn’t even popular, but at least you could get shit done with it. Then, of course, InDesign swooped in (Adobe gave us free copies at the 2003 SND conference … they weren’t fucking around with trying to change the software we used). But no one liked Quark to start, and it was expensive as fuck, so everyone was like “let’s switch to a different monopoly, as it will be better.”

What puzzles me is why MS made Publisher in the first place. It was less capable than fucking Aldus PageMaker, arrived at the wrong time and was never widely adopted. This is more like putting your dog down after it started running into walls.

Don’t geographyshame!

That’s a wildly incomplete list. I guess if you’re out east, that might feel like a full list, but if you’ve ever lived somewhere with arroyos, you’ve never experienced brooks or runs. I mean, short of Mel Brooks and having diarrhea.

There’s an old joke about growing up in Phoenix: That one does not associate rivers or bridges with water.

Oh, that isn’t remotely why we had the baseball bat.