let's break out of this, we've been constipated too long

new prozd food review video in which he eats 30 kinds of pocky and pretz (which are the savory form of pocky, i had no idea). i don't even love pocky that much but i'm intrigued by his surprise favorite (caramel pocky) and also a trippy pretz that doesn't have its own flavor but instead through some chemical magic brings out different notes in other pretz flavors.

we bought a pint of what was for a long time our favorite supermarket ice cream (talenti peanut butter gelato) (it has since been transcended by tillamook toasted coconut fudge, except they didn't have that at the store last time) and over the course of several nights of eating it i kept feeling disappointed, like, "wow they changed the formula and really lost something, this is a shadow of its former self" and then last night i didn't even want to finish it and i passed it to deborah and she was surprised and i was telling her about my disappointment and how the ice cream had gotten worse and she informed me that i had accidentally bought and eaten half of an entirely different flavor of ice cream than i thought i had (their salted caramel, which is just not that good; d said and i agree that caramel needs other flavors to play off of in order to excel).

(not being able to find the word "shadow" as the start of that expression but googling "of former self" and getting it from the search results)

the @teenmillennial instagram account, which is by (seemingly) an actual high school junior who is into millennial culture. i learned about it from claire and strikes such a strange funny tone and aesthetic that i have enjoyed having in the feed.

try not to laugh challenge videos, which we watched several of last night (we laughed every time, which is what we wanted); i think it's so interesting to have content that's designed to elicit a specific physical reaction (i guess that's also true of certain kinds of music and of porn).

we were watching the episode of the office where dwight fakes a dentist appointment so he can try to overthrow michael and when he's lying about how long the appointment will take michael says "have fun" and d said "no one has fun at the dentist" and then i countered "except people who have a dentist fetish" and then i started thinking about if it would be possible to fetishize the things that give me anxiety to reframe them, like "my to-do list is getting overwhelming fetish" and "ambiguous never-ending slack conversation that yields nothing concrete fetish" and " "customer is being mean to me fetish" and maybe influenced by milk fed i feel like i want to write erotica about these scenarios.

learning about the iphone virtual trackpad, which is so helpful.

the documentary never-ending man which is on hbo max and profiles hayao miyazaki after he "retires" from studio ghibli and promptly starts a new animation project in which he explores CG for the first time. it's such a good portrait of creative practice as compulsion/addiction (also because he constantly has a lit or unlit cigarette in his hands or mouth makes me once again jealous of people who are smokers for all the oral and mental and hand things you get to do if you're a smoker even though that's not worth the other stuff to me!) and there's a particularly great moment where he has been reviewing and reviewing the team's take on the protagonist caterpillar character and they keep getting the movement and the style of the character so wrong and he can't seem to coach them out of it and he's feeling despair and then he has the idea, let's stop focusing on this caterpillar character and work on filling out the background world around it. i'm thankful that this ends up working (to a degree) to unblock the team and for his exact (translated) phrase, which is "let's break out of this, we've been constipated too long"