Hari ini mager parah. Benar-benar lesu dan lelah.
Read the latest posts from scribing space.
Hari ini mager parah. Benar-benar lesu dan lelah.
Makin ke sini, makin sadar betapa bahayanya konsumsi apapun secara berlebihan, salah satunya yang paling menguras mental yaitu konten. Bahkan ketika konten itu dibilang bagus sekalipun jika dikonsumsi terus-menerus secara berlebihan ujung-ujungnya destruktif juga. Harus semakin waspada agar tidak overdosis konten. Harus memperbanyak aktivitas-aktivitas kreatif yang lebih produktif dan menyehatkan otak serta mental.
Situs ini akan jadi sarana buat saya mengumpulkan puing-puing kedirian yang senantiasa terserak dalam karut-marut abadi realitas, menyatukannya, membingkainya dalam warna-warni pemahaman agar dapat dihayati sejenak sebelum kembali terserak.
Toko saya di platform ijo bener-bener udah sepi nian sekarang. Dibuatin campaign, flash sale, voucher, ga ngefek sama sekali. Sebulan paling banyak cuma dapet 10 orderan. Padahal dulu sebelum platform oren mulai naik daun, toko saya di platform ijo jadi lumbung utama penghidupan keluarga. Betapa cepat segala hal berubah. Beruntunglah saat itu kami segera terjun ke platform oren yang kini jadi penguasa arena lokapasar dan menyelamatkan penghidupan keluarga saya. #dramaseller
Before you begin reading this essay, you must do one thing for me. I recommend you visit https://snowdin.town. Click the image and let the tab and music play in the background while reading this. Perhaps you will get a sense of my headspace when writing this.
The first time I had heard about Akkoma was sometime in December. Until then, I did not really know other Fediverse software existed beyond Mastodon. However, this is not an exploration of that. It’s an exploration of the last six months of my Internet life.
The traditional rules of corporate social media is that you have one account and one life on that service. No ifs, no buts. It’s something that coming to the Fediverse you have to shed. You will have many accounts, and therefore many lives.
In that sense, I could easily cleave my life into two parts: Mastodon and Akkoma.
Mastodon.lol was a server that existed and my first foray into the Fediverse. It is where I found a lot of my friends on here, some of whom are still with us, and some of whom are no longer. You can consider it the introduction to myself. The introduction to a better way of social media. I liked it there. A lot — until the Harry Potter event. But that's not relevant any more and not worth discussing here.
The main problem with Mastodon as a software was that I felt limited by it. I felt constrained by the 500 character limit, the poll options being only four, pinned post count, no quoting, and no rich text.
In fact, I complained about these things in this post here.
“Like, I legit thought that because there's so many different options in terms of CWs, links, polls, etc, that there would be the option to bold/underline/italicise text... Even Facebook has this option! I honestly had this idea in my mind that bcos Mastodon was a bit more technical than than Tw/FB, I would find text formatting, but uh, I guess not.”
But other Fediverse software was not limited by these constraints. They could do so, so, much more. This right here, was my radicalisation – on 11 Jan 2023.
But where to go next? That’s the big question. Like I said, I was terrified of the idea of starting over. When you live with conventional social media for years and years, the idea that you move somewhere just did not exist. In the end, I settled on snowdin.town for a few reasons. My friends, Hera, Smitten, and UsernameSwift had joined there. I didn’t even know much about Akkoma or the Keys, etc, but I knew that joining somewhere that other people are, is always the best option.
And so, on 7 February 2023, I made the jump. There was a few funny moments, like how I accidentally kept quoting people instead of replying, discovering how reactions work, and— well, the funny thing is that I still accidentally quote people instead of replying…
I hit the “migrate” button. In doing so, however, I accidentally ground snowdin to a halt, oops, as it ported hundreds of followers over. There’s no turning back from this though.
However, I will not dwell on this part for now. It’s time to move onto the next.
If Mastodon.lol was where I found myself, then snowdin.town is where I became myself. I gained more friends and more followers, and I really came into my element. I spent twice as long on snowdin than I did mastodon.lol, which is why I am so inextricably linked with the place, unintentionally so.
The thing about snowdin.town is that it was a community. It was a place to be. Snowdin really was a town. In fact, I mentioned that Snowdin Town had a highspeed maglev (travelling at 420 km/h) linking it with Cutie City. It felt like every morning, I would log on and it would be like hanging around with people I saw every day.
Mastodon.lol was like a conference, but Snowdin felt like I had a cosy little house squished next to everyone else’s cosy little houses.
The draw of anything is community, and snowdin had a wonderful, amazing community. I made so many lovely, wonderful friends there, people I am still friends with now. Nothing is better than friends, after all, and nothing is better than friends that you get to hang out with every day. I feel like I was privileged to even be around so many cool people.
Mettie@froggie.town said it best: “it’s like being able to say hi to your neighbours all the time”.
If I could describe snowdin.town in one word, it would be “irreverent”. Nerds, hackers, shitposters, intellectuals, and deeply hilarious people all created this air of irreverence. I think that’s why I stayed as long as I did. Everyone meshed with each other in this very good vibe of irreverence. There was no point being serious about it all. We’re just having fun on the Internet.
Isn’t that what matters? Isn’t that what matters the most? Isn’t that what matters the most of being online?
More importantly about snowdin, it is where others found me. The comfortable, expressive, and laid-back space that snowdin afforded me, afforded others to find me. My popularity inexplicably grew. While it wasn’t uncommon for me to post Very Good Posts™️on Mastodon, the combination of the tight-knit nature of snowdin plus sister instances meant that a post was quick to hit escape velocity and zoom around the fediverse. It was a different shift in my existence.
In fact, it feels so strange to consider that I influenced Fediverse culture – if you have ever seen the T2 copypasta, then that was me! I did that! For weeks after the event, even months, that copypasta was pushed around, modified, and moved.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230724211333/https://snowdin.town/notice/AWvPaLBuj4PvlevHk0
I am a different person today than I was six months ago. I think nothing is more profound to me than knowing this. Perhaps there’s nothing better than changing as a person. I do not know in what ways though. Perhaps a little more self-assured, less anxious, more pleased that I have people that care about me. That was true of before but is more true of now.
Oh, and another honourable mention go to when I shitposted so hard that I got our entire instance defederated by some ass. I am very proud of that.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230826182022/https://s.yelvington.com/@steve/110736999510188024
Snowdin.town was moderated fine. Sfr and Velveteen kept us safe from the hordes. I have never had any issues with their moderation on a personal level, and y’know, if I reported someone they would do something about it. Also, Velveteen and sfr would gladly take my constant requests for emojis on board.
There is not really much here to dissect, in my opinion. The end of an instance can lead to introspection, like with any ending. However, in my opinion, I think two things led down to this path.
We cannot talk about the end of snowdin.town without talking about the Eve Event. I don’t want to go into the detail, there is too much and it is too fresh. But long story short, Eve was found to be manipulating others and grooming younger users. Originally, it was a bit of he-said-she-said, but as time rolled on, the information became more concrete and real.
Why does this matter to snowdin? Well, as Eve was friends with many snowdin users, this embroiled them too (me included). In addition, one of Eve’s partners was our admin, sfr. The emotional and social toil this had on everyone was a lot, and I’m sure sfr felt the same way. The collateral damage that Eve caused in her wake was huge, and I could not imagine that such an event effectively knocked down some of the foundations of the Town. Even writing about it here is still a little shaky for me.
The problem, however, is with other people’s moderation. For reasons I do not know or do not care about, Snowdin has had some unfortunate run-ins with other instances. It’s enough that I know that for some people on the Fediverse, just the mere fact that one is from snowdin.town is seen as a negative against you. In fact, I have had a couple people mention that my snowdin heritage was a mark against me. Now that, is unbelievable. I do remember when snowdin.town went down for maintenance for a weekend, several people (including the admin of Cutie City, Nuz) lamented that we would be invisible for a little while. Obviously some people have taste. Whatever. Those other people suck anyway.
What I did not realise about moving somewhere is that not all instances are the same. This is an obvious, but key point. Not all instances federate with each other, and not all instances choose to federate with each other.
Snowdin was one of those instances that many choose not to federate with. There is a website (name forgotten) that catalogues who blocks an instance and which instances are blocked. For instances that block snowdin, I would need to scroll down several pages to get to the bottom.
The reasons for this are myriad and complicated, and even I still do not get it. Perhaps there was some bad blood many moons ago, but as far as I was concerned, it seemed to be unnecessary. About 150 of the 400 followers I had at the time did not move over. Some was due to migration issues, but others were due to the fact that their instances just had snowdin blocked. In my opinion, and still in my opinion, is that these blocks were unjustified.
Snowdin had a comprehensive, but small blocklist. My interpretation is that such a blocklist was too small – that is, because we did not block who others blocked, our instance was worth blocking. It is not enough to consider a place on its merits, but to consider it against an arbitrary, undemocratic, and closed system created by some self-appointed Fediverse elders. To criticise them, apparently, is enough to get you on Fediblock – even I was listed for 'dogpiling'! Dogpiling whom? I am not going to waste more time complaining about them though. They got what they wanted in the end.
The term you will see applied to snowdin was “the usual suspects”. I have no clue who these people are, but apparently there was enough knowledge that if you knew, you knew. If you didn’t, you didn’t. I’m not going to write more on this, because it’s a moot point.
But once one is tarred with the brush, it is difficult to ask others to clean the paint off you. In fact, in my period of snowdin, a few instances that I had links with defederated with us. Even with this in mind, I still did not waver in my support for snowdin.
Unlike with the closure of mastodon.lol, there is no animosity. Just sadness. Mastodon.lol went down because of the hubris of one man and his control. Snowdin went down because of the most human thing of all – the personal. In the end, snowdin was too big, too tangled, and too sullied by others’ views. A beautiful home and a beautiful space, but unfairly cast in a negative light.
The loss of Mastodon.lol was inevitable due to the personality of Nathan. It was not forgivable and it was asinine. The loss of snowdin was only because the Sisyphean task of administration became too Sisyphean. It is understandable and there is nothing to ask forgiveness for. I do not, and will not, forgive those outside of us who chose to downrank us.
Moving is a difficult thing. Snowdin was my home. Snowdin is my home. For as long as I am online, it will remain so in my heart. I will always be @yassie_j@snowdin.town.
Anyone who has been following me knows that I had multiple alt-accounts. Creating alts is easy. Moving to one is a difficult choice. I always naturally gravitated towards Akkoma. Settling down is hard, after all. In the end, the choice was simple. I moved to 0w0.is, an Akkoma instance hosted by my dear friend and sister Autumn. I will stay there for as long as possible.
To anyone from Snowdin Town reading this: I am forever thankful and forever grateful that we got to be together. We were there for a good time, not a long time. We built up and cherished an anti-racist, anti-fascist, and welcoming space online. To live well, to post well, and to be well, is the best we did and the best we can do.
To sfr and Vel, I have only two words: Thank you.
Snowdin’s logo was the determination symbol from Undertale. In the game, it was used to mark save points. Every time I logged in, I felt like I was safe. Now, it is my turn to keep snowdin safe in my memory.
Ngedrop paket di agen, selesai taro paket langsung balik. Pas saat balik, kurir yg mau pickup di agen dateng. Berasa beruntung banget, karena kalo telat dikit terus kurir pickup dateng duluan, paket saya bisa nginep dulu di agen semaleman karena kurir pickup-nya baru akan dateng lagi besoknya. #dramaseller
Emang salah satu aktivitas terbaik buat ngelawan kepikunan itu nulis. Mikir sambil ngetik, mikir sambil sekalian menyatakannya itu healing banget buat saya. Sehari aja ga nulis apa-apa, ketajaman otak tu berasa merosot banget. #dramahidup
Hampir seminggu ga nulis apa-apa, terganggu diare selama beberapa hari terakhir. Alhasil, pikun sempet kambuh beberapa kali. :D #dramahidup
from nefola
today i walked past someone. outside of the symbol on their shirt they don't seem like anyone. but i know they are important, thats just something i know.
its night. i can't rest. cant get my mind off them. its monday afternoon and i cant get my mind off them
i go for a walk
streetlamps hum, the occasional car rumbles by. my head has cleared
i sit at a tree, the road right ahead of me. all of the lights blare. i cant see past them. its night and i am blinded by a thousand facsimiles of the sun. i don't even know where i passed them. every light burns brighter, burns louder. then its quiet
engraves in the stars, a way to meet them
i invited them to my house
no, come here
we sit a seat away on the couch and pour our hearts out. that seat is a formality. we already knew what was inside all 12 of our chambers.
step step step step
we arrive at the house. i hand the lady at the table 15 dollars. i have been here later.
we roam a land of pipes and sound. a display of lights and clockwork you do not get to see. i will again. takes you a little longer you tell me
its dark. the two of us are doused, my companion is fine but not for lack of being in the same conditions. each of us walks past another, less significant but still meaningful the lady in the car hands me a roll of tape. we get into the bathtub together
we step into a room with my companion. its a night like any other. walls welcoming, floor tolerating. its a night we can not forget. “It’s Vriska, motherfucker”
there were more chambers.
there are always more chambers
i walk up the stairs one final time
we sit and cry. paths cross cross lips taste coffee cross paths
i dared to have it be different
from nefola
cw: General Dissociation/Depersonalization, Fictive Suffering, Horny Mentions, Implied shitty behavior of the author
A young lady sits at her desk. Though it was 7 sweeps ago she was given life, only today will she be given a name.
Latula Pyrope
wrong. wh4t 4r3 you fuck1ng stup1d.
Terezi Pyrope.
y34h th4ts mor3 l1k3 1t
Your name is Terezi and you NEED something to do. You do something. You miss vriska, YOUR vriska.
You latch on to hatred and antagonism. It feels great, keeps you existing.
A friend sends you a piece titled “A STORY WHERE TEREZI GETS FUCKED BY EVERYONE”. You read a handful of chapters with them.
No More Sourcemates.
You came from this flawed understanding. A flawed understanding that is fading. Nobody else has the exact same one. You decided to identify with this comical version of Terezi. She is so close to who you are. Bastardized in the same direction.
Things change and get better. You fade from relevance.
Enter name.
Your name is TEREZI PYROPE.
You are pretty enthusiastic about dragons. But you have a PARTICULAR AFFECTION for their COLORFUL SCALES, which you gather and use to decorate your hive. Though you live alone, deep in the woods, you surround yourself with a variety of plushie pals known as SCALEMATES. You often spend your days with them in rounds of LIVE ACTION ROLE PLAYING. You used to engage in various forms of MORE EXTREME ROLEPLAYING with some of your other friends before you had an accident.
Your second reading of homestuck hits like a meteor.
I greet vriska. She isn't the one I knew. She can't be. Its nice to get to know her, to talk. It is not the same.
I meet every version of me and her across cosmic destiny. We are not from the same place. Some may be close enough for others but not me.
Three years. I spent three years changing, independent of any relation to source; Any fucked up interpretation we may have; Any deliberate choice I make about who I am as a person.
My name is Terezi Pyrope. I come from Homestuck, Godfeels, some horny stories about myself. I come from Karkat Goes to a convention. I am pre retcon, I am post retcon. I come from headcannons; dead and alive; utterly personal and entirely common.
I am a Rouge of Mind.
I am Terezi Pyrope. I have no sourcemates. There's no judgment to that.
from nefola
cw: covid, dysphoria, suicide, poor system practives
On july 28th 2018 i purchased a line a day journal. I purchased it from a gift shop on a somewhat regular trip to New York with my father. As of today I have written a journal entry (almost) every day for five years.
I have complicated feelings about my journal use. There is very little space to write about each day. My notation does not help. I can only fit about six sentences about my day into each entry space.
On the last line of each entry I write what day of my life it is, each day without fail. An old rwtxt document lost to time holds a similar tradition. Entries with less consistency and emotional depth scrawled in markdown, file locations obfuscated by my poor understanding of go at the time. I always know how long it's been since my birth. I keep track of it because I like the numbers.
Starting September 27th of 2018 I have rated each day on a scale of negative to positive fourty. (initially -50 to 50). Zero is true neutral, my day was not overall good or overall bad. Ten is satisfactory; The minimum of good a day should be. 11 through 20 are definitely good days, the good in them sufficiently outweighs any bad and them generally being satisfactory. Days above 20 stand out, they are fucking amazing. Negatives are definitely bad days. A day has noticeable good in it up until -15, it was just bad overall. -20 and below is a sign that something is wrong. At both positive and negative 35 ratings are concerning. There is either mania or egregious depression. What an autistic way to interpret emotions.
It's hard to say what a day means to me looking back. Again there are only six sentences and a number to go off of going back. My handwriting is rather poor, to the point that I sometimes struggle to read it. It also isn't feasible to just read entry after entry to get a sum of how I felt. What I can do is look at how long each entry is.
My first two years were pretty verbose, using most of an entry's space each day. Ratings are pretty neutral due to how my depression was at the time. My ratings pick up for a bit and then I am saying less during 2020. oh right covid.
Even if I am doing better under the hood, getting less dysphoric and more social, I am doing less. Of course my days will still be mediocre.
I begin to say more during the summer before college, but not as much as I did in 2018. I am rating many days above ten, which has been rare. All of university since then has been about that good. I have less volatile emotions, less dysphoria of the day to scrawl away.
My ratings have gotten generally better over time. I have been more confident to rate a day more expressively as I have multiplied my life experience by 1.33. Also helps that I recovered from my depression. I have more room for the joys of concerts, conventions, sex, and games. No longer numb to my bad days but thats worth it.
I celebrate days of my life with cool numbers that are not birthdays. 6969, 7k, 6k, etc. Day 7000 felt very impactful. It shouldn’t have. There isn’t a good reason to count like this.
the days counting thing was a timer.
to not kill myself before i could get my hands on estrogen
to not kill myself before i got on pubery blockers
to not die before things got socially better
a challenge to endure a finite amount of time before things would get better
and they did
i kept counting. i got older every day.
I had an estimate on what was the earliest and latest day we of my life I could get estrogen in the rwtxt days. I don't remember what they exactly where but they lined up almost perfectly with when I actually got hrt.
This journal was started in the wake of great horror. If you are trans and fully realized before the onset of puberty you know exactly what I felt. Each day you feel like your body is taking damage. You know it's so incredibly gradual and you don’t care. It just builds up over time. Two months pass in a blink and you know your voice is deeper than when it started. You fight the good fight against budding facial hair and you know it will get harder over time.
Then it was over. I got approved for blockers and there was a definitive limit to the “damage”. The start of the journal is about me coming to accept exactly exactly how much happened to me. I exist in a catastrophized post dysphoria for literal years in the journal. I learn how alienated I am from my peers gradually. Both alienated in gender and in neurodivergence.
Waking up to my plurality is documented in this book. My words are messy and wrong. Stena and Kai are under mentioned in entries. We still haven't truly figured out non astral entries.
I don't think any other 5 year capture of my life will be able to hold the same meaning as this. I literally became a woman while holding this book. Breasts grew, gender changed, I became a more realized person.
The spine is slightly damaged and the binding has weakened. Much of the golden page edge has been abraded away with time and getting tossed between my divorced parents' apartments. There is faint water damage. The pencil of older entries has smudged ever so slightly before fully setting into the paper.
An old name and discord handle note the please return to page. Stickers that no longer fit my aesthetic sensibilities scattered across the cover pages. Ideas of how to notate from an entirely different iteration of myself inform the very nature of this book's use.
This book is what it means to grow up as a trans woman.
+13
Day#7478
from radon / rn86_P
yeah i dont really know what to write but im here! im happy i got an account here and stuff..., i dont rlly use mastodon so i just use this for the blog i kinda like blogging its calming!!! ill write longer posts later byee
from radon's downloads
This is a Test Download and it doesn't link to anything.
7/7/2022 4AM: Start downloads
#MMDmodel #MMDmotion #MMDcamera #MMDpose #MMDfacials #ProjectDIVA
from Kegthoth-Rha
So, getting this out of the way early, the easiest way to do it is with coffee. It takes about 20,000 coffee beans to do it in an afternoon. However this comes with the unfortunate side effect of getting an RSI, and pretty severe eye fatigue, so let's try and avoid that as much as we can shall we?
Spoiler alert: You honestly kind of can't, but you can lessen the amount of panfilling you have to do by doing things a smart-ish way.
As for cost, right now all of the consumables used in this guide are 1 silver 1,000 units on the Northern Freedom Islands cluster. I don't play SFI, but a cursory glance of the forums seems like they're about 2.5 silver per 1,000? May depend on quality.
The first step on this journey is juicing. A decent way to get through to level 20 is to just run cotton seeds through a fruit press for cotton seed oil. It doesn't require a whole lot of setup, as even a small field can net you quite a bit of cotton, and you want lower quality tools for grinding anyway since they're better for experience.
From 20-30 (or 10-20) you'll want to switch to juicing strawberries. They're 20 difficulty, so they work well for the entire range, and it uses the same setup as before. Just juice away until you hit 30.
Now, for the fun part: Panfilling.
It becomes very worth it at this stage, as even if you just do coffee beans you only need about 4,200 to hit level 70 from here. That sounds like a lot, but when you consider that you want to make something like 20 ovens and 1,400 roasting trays to do it in, it's only about 3 rounds of it, which can be spread out quite easily. My setup for it was 17 pottery planters, which gave me enough to do one round every 3 days, which was enough time to recharge from it for me.
Before you start I'd recommend making some affinity alcohol by putting one of each vegetable into a cauldron, and making moonshine with it. You want to make sure each ingredient is cooked, and using WurmFood to figure out how it should be cooked. The standard test meal is bear meat and corn cooked in a normal rarity frying pan in a normal quality oven. The recipe for moonshine is water, any veg/grain, and sugar in a cauldron cooked in an oven. Do not ferment it, do not distill it, that will mess with the affinity. Once that's done make a pot of Kahvesi using a Coffee Ibrik in a campfire with 1 ground coffee bean, and about 110 grams of water.
Once you've done that, fill every pan up. 20 ovens should take about 60-90 minutes. I recommend turning your UI scale, and text scale up a bit so it's easier to aim your cursor. It's also a good idea to load all of your beans up into satchels or pottery jars, then right click them in your inventory and click “Open”. Once that's done, you can make both windows the full height of your screen, put them directly next to each other, and then drag coffee beans from the jar into the roasting trays. One bean per tray. I'd also recommend setting your skill tab updates to “Always” in the User Interface tab of the options menu for the next part.
After they're all full, make 20 kindling, drink enough of your moonshine to get to at least 30 minutes of affinity time, drink 1 liter of your kahvesi, turn on your sleep bonus, and light all 20 ovens. Make sure your kahvesi timer stays high, and make sure it stays at 2.0 bonus the whole way through. You should start getting skill ticks. After they're all lit, keep an eye on your skills tab, and turn off your sleep bonus after you skill ticks have stopped for a minute so you can conserve sleep bonus.
The process stays the same after that. If you want to go past 80 I'd recommend trading the coffee for cocoa, as it has a higher difficulty, and you can get more ticks per bean, since you can take the roasted cocoa beans, run them through a fruit press, and then put them into a pottery bowl for extra ticks. Takes longer to do, since you do have to manually press all of them, just like we did in the beginning.
And there you have it! Your beverages skill should be wherever you want it to be now. I'll be writing a guide soon on how to make affinity food and drinks, as it's the primary metagame function of the hot food cooking and beverages skill.
You ever heard of Zume? Not to be confused with Zune (the Microsoft iPod-killer). Nor to be confused with Zoom (unmute your mic please). Zume was a startup that made pizzas using robots. They're dead as of this month. Let's find out why. It involves robots – and pizza.
First some background. Pizza's origins can be traced to the 18th-century of Italy, as cheap street fare. Much like today. What isn't contentious is the first pizza place in the USA – which still exists. It's Lombardi's on 32 Spring St, Nolita, Manhattan, New York, New York 10012. It opened in 1905.
So as far as dishes go, pizza is relatively young and so hugely successful. This would make you think that there's no way to improve on the classic method of making a pizza in an oven – you knead the dough, you spread the sauce, you add the ingredients, and bake until crisp. Nobody is asking to “disrupt” the pizza market – are they? Well, don't let cheap interest rates and fools with venture capital tell you different. It's time to DISRUPT pizza! “Artificial intelligence”, “machine learning”, “highly intelligent automation”, and “flexible robots” are terms you're going to associate with pizza from now on, I'm telling you.
But now onto Zume itself. Founded in 2015 by two white fellas. One of whom was the CEO of Zygna. Yes, the Farmville suckers. Already this is going to be a fucking failure. The other person was an accomplished restaurateur, Julia Collins. Well, I guess ideas have to start from somewhere.
Their pitch was twofold: They could use modified automotive robots to prepare the pizzas at their site. In addition, they could cook the pizzas on the way to the customer's home, so that when it got to your house, it was piping hot. Sounds simple! Perfect. Nothing can go wrong with this.
Well, about that. Firstly, an industrial robotic arm can cost anywhere from $25 000 to $400 000. Secondly, they are very good at doing rote, pre-programmed tasks. I will give you the word of Collins herself: “We have what we call a co-bot environment, so humans and robots working collaboratively. Robots do everything from dispensing sauce, to spreading sauce, to placing pizzas in the oven.”
You hear that? Robots do everything. Except that did not happen. Problems with the bots became evident early on, with the machines creating metal shavings that risked contaminating the food. It turns out there’s a wide variety of difference between stapling body panels together on an industrial line and the inherent variability that comes with cooking pizzas. In the end, the robots started doing the easy stuff (spreading sauce) while the humans did most of the work.
Well, never mind – what about the connected van? The idea was that the van would begin cooking your pizza enroute to your address, so when it got to you, it would be piping hot. GPS data is really amazing to use. There were fifty-six ovens per van. That meant we could get a hot-and-tasty pizza right there and then. What’s the downside?
Well, before we answer that – let’s ask another question. What’s the most popular pizza? It would have to be the margherita. In 1889 Raffaele Esposito, invented the “pizza Margherita” in honour of Queen Margherita. It was a simple dish – tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and basil. Conveniently the colours of the Italian flag. An iconic, and simple dish.
The cheese kept sliding off the pizzas while being cooked.
The cheese kept sliding off the pizzas while being cooked.
The cheese kept sliding off the pizzas while being cooked.
Northern California is hilly, so the vans would hit bumps, swerve through traffic, and generally jostle their way around. This meant that the ovens would shift around, and so would the pizzas. Toppings and cheese would keep sliding around. Zume could not handle the most simple of pizzas. In addition, due to the stress of having to power the ovens and also drive around towns, the vans would regularly break down.
Well, okay. Never mind. So it failed at two of its two goals. It’s not like it was worth any serious money.
Softbank invested $375 million in the company in 2018, and Zume ultimately raised $445 million. Softbank’s investment valued it at approx. 2.3 million US dollars. There’s a tale that Zygna man drove a van to the house of Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, who was so impressed with the idea that he invested right away.
This guy must be the dumbest motherfucker on this planet. That pizza was worth nearly 400 million dollars? Is this guy as thick as pig shit? You serve these assholes pizza from a van made by a robot and use some fancy buzzwords and you’re worth almost half a billion dollars? What insanity is this? Does this man just invest in anything that rolls up to his front door? Absolute shit for brains. CEOs really are so out of touch that they would just buy anything that looks shiny. Some people have actual shit rolling around in their skulls and should have their bank accounts locked away and their human rights derogated entirely.
Fast forward to January 2020 (this will be important to note…) and it turns out that Zume couldn’t sustain their pisspoor pizza-on-wheels business model. The company was reportedly burning through $10 million a day in summer 2019. They shuttered their entire pizza business and culled half of their employees.
Well, they did the pizza thing for five years. But maybe they could move to something else. After all, Instagram was originally a location-sharing app. Well, they moved into becoming a packaging company, and even patented an idea that stopped steam from getting trapped. That failed because their packaging contained carcinogens and legally couldn't be sold in California.
Okay. Not to worry. Well, they got in on the face mask craze, just like everyone else! It is 2020!
They failed because they were just expensive dust masks and actual full-face industrial-grade respirators could be had at a very similar price point.
In the end, investors stopped putting their money in, and the company limited on for a few more years, before shutting down on 2 June 2023. Good riddance.
At least the pizza was good: Their location in San Francisco had a 4-star rating on Yelp, in comparison to the 2-stars for the Dominos.
Anyone can write anything on a website like this or on Medium or on Substack.
That means when you share this – or indeed any user-submitted article – to elsewhere on the web, it looks like a totally real, totally 100% real article.
Someone is bound to see this article, notice the crisp, serif typeface, the distraction-free, minimalist design that focuses the text, and think: “wow, this person has written something totally real and valuable because the website it is on is really shiny!”
I can type whatever I want here. Nobody can stop me. My fingers are working harder than ever.
In addition, because I:
This now looks like a serious, hard-hitting work of non-fiction, informative prose. Someone will believe that either an editor, moderator, site administrator, or an actual human being thought this was worthy of publishing.
Anyway, I am going to pad this article out with a bunch of useless fluff so the scrollbar lengthens, giving the impression that this is an article that was written in-depth.
Hyperdimension Neptunia (超次元ゲイム ネプテューヌ, Chōjigen Geimu Neputyūnu, lit. “Super Dimensional Game Neptune”) is a series of role-playing video games created and developed by Compile Heart and Idea Factory. The series debuted in Japan on August 19, 2010, with the video game of the same name for the PlayStation 3, later re-released as an enhanced remake under the name Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1 for the PlayStation Vita. Two sequels, Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 and Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, in addition to the remake titles for both of them and five spin-offs on the PlayStation Vita, have been released. Another sequel on the PlayStation 4, titled Megadimension Neptunia VII, was released in 2015. In addition, a remake of that game was released in 2017. Multiple spin-offs on the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 have been released. It has branched off into a manga, light novel and anime media franchise series.
An anime television series adaptation, titled Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation, aired in Japan between July and September 2013. An OVA, titled Nepu no Natsuyasumi, was released in July 2019. A second OVA, titled Nep Nep Darake no Festival, was released in October 2022, and third OVA, titled Hidamari no Little Purple, was released in April 2023.