It is easy to forget how recent the phenomenon of the modern grocery store actually is - it only dates back to 1916, when the first Piggly Wiggly was opened in Memphis, Tennessee. Before that, grocers operated as “over the counter”, as in you would walk up to the counter at the front of the store, and ask the clerk to retrieve whatever quantity of items you actually needed, instead of wander around the store with a basket and select what you wanted from the shelves.
Entries Tagged - "essay"
I’d like to take you on a journey through the world of scams, laundry, and search engines. In 2016, Foldimate, a California based startup, showed the world a laundry folding robot - it was the size of a washing machine, with a slot in the top for garments that would be mechanically folded and then passed down into a tidy stack at the bottom. I watched Foldimate with great interest, for you see, of all the daily chores of life that one must accomplish, folding laundry is the one I hate the most, put off the longest, and have tried to - mostly failing - hack my way out of for decades.
In the early days of Google and Yahoo the best hack for getting your website to the top of rankings was Keyword Stuffing. You’d make the font blend in with the background and jam in as many relevant (or in many cases completely irrelevant, depending on your intent) keywords as you possibly could. Your users couldn’t see them, but search engines could, and they’d push you up the rankings, since with so many keywords the website in question must be super relevant to what you’re looking for.
Have you ever really sat down and thought about Batman? I had a surplus of spare time on my hands recently, so I went back and played through Batman: Arkham City. When it originally came out, people consistently told me it was good, but I never got around to playing it because I just never cared about superhero comics or any other type of cape media. It’s a middling game - lot’s of time wasting minigames - but I’m not here to elaborate on the game much further, just use it as a tool to examine how weird Batman is as a character.