Don't make 'em like they used to
This one is about how I know things change but also I still think about a soda flavour from seven years ago.
A big thing going on right now is how payment processors are censoring works on places like Steam, Itchio, and more. The always wonderful St. John breaks it down in his latest newsletter. The whole situation is some right bullshit and folks are doing some good work to fight back against it, learn more on how to stop payment processors from deciding what adults do with their money at yellat.money and stop-paypros.neocities.org.
I don't know if you've ever had the (non) pleasure of having a favourite type of something and then finding that it will no longer be made. Myself, I've been on the receiving end of it a bit, working in retail. The vagaries of suppliers and brands are arcane nonsense even if you have to deal with them daily. To a person who just liked "when they made this like that," they mean less than nothing.
Mostly, I've been safe from encountering this myself. A cereal changes its texture: well there's plenty of cereal out there that I like as much. They've stopped making the particular flavour of deodorant I enjoy: what a nice opportunity to try something new. I'm adaptable! I understand that things change!
Mostly.
My first real encounter with the pre-emptive feeling of loss one has when a favourite product has been slated to be retired was with a limited edition soda flavour. Which is wild for several reasons. I knew, first off, that this was limited edition. Like a flower whose bloom only lasts a season, my cinnamon flavoured cola was destined for only a brief time on this earth. Secondly, I am not a soda drinker. We weren't allowed soda (or carbonation, really) growing up, so this weird spicy liquid everyone is very used to is not something I super enjoy. It takes me like three days to drink a can of soda and I am so grateful for it going flat once opened. I understand this is full creep behaviour, that's fine.
Despite not being a soda drinker I was intrigued by the concept of this one! I do enjoy cola flavours, just not their texture. So, I gave it a sip and immediately fell in love. "That's fine," I thought. "I can enjoy it while it lasts." And I did! But, because I lived in a kind of rural area and shopped at weird places, we kept finding bottles of it, falsely extending my limited time with hot cinnamon cola to an unseemly degree, though our findings grew more infrequent. We started playing around with melting red hots into a syrup that could be mixed with cola, to see if we could recreate it at home.
The last time we were able to find it was when we stopped at a gas station surrounded by fields, on the way back from the coast. We were moving soon, and we'd been trying to get as much of the lovely nothingness in as we could.
I can't remember who spotted the bottles, but when all was said and done we walked out with around a dozen, their caps dusty. It was, by this point, months and months since the flavour had last been seen on shelves. They were saved for special occasions and when we moved I took four bottles with me to a different state, I shit you not.
The second time I learned something I loved was discontinued, I was fully shocked. Lip Smacker had held a collab with Dr. Pepper since 1975. It was a cornerstone of their selection. Then one day, it was no longer available. Marie Lodi wrote a great history and ode to the lip balm at Allure: The Obituary Dr Pepper Lip Smacker Deserves. The rise and fall of the flavour and changes to the blend were all something I'd had no concept of until I started digging for dupes. I'd become a fan of the faintly tinted, cherry-cola-something sweet balm late in life. I had nothing to compare the latest formulation against.
Because I am a big "buy a lot and have spares" person, I didn't even realise that the stuff was gone-gone until I'd reached the end of the half-dozen I always bought at once, direct from the Lip Smacker themself, and went to go make a new order. By then, they'd been quietly disappeared for so long that everyone had already mourned, moved on, and that there was a worthy-enough dupe readily available. It was weird, like emerging from a no-tech camping trip to find the world had shifted just slightly since you'd gone under the trees.
The dupe itself is: fine! It does the job as reliable lip balm and the flavour is close enough. It's not the same and I absolutely still have one (or two) unopened packs of the old Lip Smacker Dr. Pepper squirrelled away. Not saving for a special occasion, just like an "open in case of emergency" object to be deployed in case I need to sink back into a type of comfort and nostalgia.
I'm currently in the midst of another "favourite item extinction-level event". We mostly buy groceries at a sort of outlet. It's a dumping ground for all the other grocery stores to send their unpopular, weirdly packaged, or short-dated goods. It's fun, like random loot drops but instead of a cool sword you learn about a type of non-dairy cheese you love that you'd've never tried otherwise. Sometimes it is a item that you will never pay $15 for in the wild, but will happily enjoy for $3 and then never think of again.
I say "we" buy groceries there, but really this is my partner's domain. Years ago when we were only going into shops alone, to reduce exposure (obvi, we still mask all the time, but I'm talking early days), this was his shop. I did the Big Store because I'm a machine designed to efficiently map and gather shopping lists, and Chase's domain was the outlet. They ended up befriending several clerks there, and I became enamoured of hearing their stories while we did the grocery show (when the person who did the shopping pulls each item from the bag with a flourish, creating a sense of narrative tension--why did they get cream cheese if they assert there were "no good bagels?"). We may do the shops together once more, but I've left this one for Chase alone. I feel like I'd spoil it, and my impression of it, if I joined him shopping.
So, it was a surprise to me one day when they unveiled a little pint of mint ice cream, branded for a TV show. I was intrigued, I love a novelty gimmick (did you know that a perfume sample place has a collab with the new I Know What You Did Last Summer film??!), I was curious about the ice cream, which didn't seem to match up with the flavours available on the little temp site that existed for it. I learned later that the site I'd found was for the European promotion, which had completely different flavours available.
Please note, by the time I was seeing this pint of ice cream, it had been at least a year since the cross-promotion had ended.
On my first bite I knew I was ruined. This is, no joke, possibly the best mint ice cream I've had. It has mix ins, jimmies and chocolate chunks, in just the right proportions. The mint is clean and fresh. We kept buying it as long as the outlet was stocking it. One day I opened the last pint that Chase had been able to find on the shelves and I knew I would have to say goodbye far sooner than I'd have liked. This was sometime near the start of the year.
And then, a couple of weeks ago. Chase came home and triumphantly unloaded five pints of my beloved ice cream onto the counter. It was like a reprieve. I figure, the show this ice cream promo is attached to is returning soon, so whoever was cooking up the stuff probably turned the tap back on to make some dollars off of folk's anticipation. Who cares, I get a little more of an ice cream I thought I'd never see again.
Lost forever, died but came back different, and "just one last job". It feels like a joke, but also on brand that my encounters with discontinued products fit some of my favourite story tropes.
Things change, and that's the beauty of life, but I suppose if we didn't remember what we loved about old stuff then we wouldn't be people with fond memories, would we? Mind you, I also fondly remember how specific plastic toys smelled and nothing smells like that now, but they've also removed quite a lot of things from plastics that weren't great for one's health that were probably large components of that nostalgic scent. Life is wild.
I recently finished the last book here and realised that this set of three non-fiction make for a very satisfying journey about seeing the world. Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.
- Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller, truly this is what it says on the tin (subtitle).The world defies order and yet we desire it so. Definitely check the content warnings on Storygraph, although I think the painful topics mentioned are handled deftly, it's good to know ahead of time. I recently listened to the audiobook version too and it's charming.
- The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think by Jennifer Ackerman, it's birds! So much cool stuff about birds and their rich little lives. I don't know if you, dear reader, think about birds much but I think maybe you should. What weird and wonderful little guys who can do so much that we're only just realising.
- The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger, this one really just confirmed some feelings I'd had a long time. It's wild how much perception changes, both personal and that of the wider world. Plants do so dang much and it's a joy to learn to appreciate them.
This is maybe a strange group of pictures, but the idea of lost places sort of came to mind while writing and where I used to live this was easy to do: you just left a building in nature long enough and the plants took care of it.
Image description: A photograph, blurry with motion as if taken from a moving car. Sharp in the dead centre is the shadowed bulk of what is left of a barn or shed, a tangle of vines and brush rolling toward it and beginning to engulf the structure. In the path of the green are planks and posts from a building that has already fallen. End ID.
Image description: A photograph of overwhelming green, taken of a forested floor thick with ferns and assorted plants. In the foreground is a crumpled swath of riveted metal, rusting and bent. It forms the edge of a leaf-clogged pool. End ID.
Image description: A photograph of a clothesline stretching from the right of the image into the nothingness of sunlight-filtering leaves on the left. It is stacked with clothespins whose wood has turned dusty-dry with time abandoned. End ID.
I was so certain I'd already shared some of these but I haven't! Not here anyway.
- Consider the Horse Game over at How To Market A Game is a nice intro to The Mane Quest and the fascinating work Ruppert does. I'm not a horse or horse game person but I really love learning about something through the eyes of someone who loves it.
- This is a short and sweet story, Where Are You Right Now? by Rodrigo Culagovski, from Translunar Travelers Lounge.
- Ever curious about that specific era of fantasy movies starring body builders? Pumping Gold: How a Decade of Bodybuilding and Terrorism Started a Wave of Cheap Fantasy Movies by Christopher Luis-Jorge at Typebar goes into the very specific series of events that made it happen.
- The Animal Photo Reference Repository may theoretically be for artists, but I say: if you like looking at pictures of animals, this is a goldmine. Also! There're galleries of art created from these references, which are just as fun.
If you've thought of donating eSims, this guide was very helpful, and Crips for eSims for Gaza is a good option if you can't easily manage topping them up. There are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders. If you prefer giving directly to families, Gaza Funds is a nice resource that facilitates finding campaigns.