Comment by lofatdairy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lofatdairy | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the title prepared me for this. I saw the first page and thought "oh, that's a terrible graphic, why are you moving away from the future". the mona lisa and taijitsu symbol seemed a bit over blown but still sorta grounded. I literally burst out laughing when I saw the contour lines and energy fields. Definitely was not prepared for "Pepsi Universe", either. I assume that by that point in the presentation the energy in the board room must be fever pitch for no one to point out how stupid that looks.

Edit: Upon further reading about the guy who's behind this, Peter Arnell, it turns out he's possibly the harvey weinstein of the marketing business[^1]. It's a huge shame that neither this pseudointellectual bullshit, nor his string of workplace abuses, ruined his career. A consolation is that in 2011 his company got bought out and he got sacked.

[^1]: The Newsweek article is a good read here: https://www.newsweek.com/crazy-genius-brand-guru-peter-arnel.... There's also a Gawker piece that gives a pretty clear idea of how big of a piece of shit this guy is if you can stand the fact that it's Gawker: https://www.gawker.com/244608/new-yorks-worst-bosses-peter-a...

And he called this work for Pepsi "BS"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-the-firing-of-weird-design-...

> In pre-publicity for Shift, Arnell reveals that his habit of eating up to 50 oranges a day has left his hands bright orange in color.

Bullshit. You'd be in a permanent sugar rush until your pancreas went on fire.

I don't know about Arnell's case, but it's actually possible to turn orange by eating orange things. Although I think it's more common with carrots and young children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carotenosis

Not even that difficult.

My ex had a few excessive habits when she was 21, but one was eating lots of carrots (like a bag a day?) and her palms turned a distinct orange.

That’s how flamingos turn pink.

Humans occasionally turn permanently blue by being pranked into eating colloidal silver.

No problem they'll just drink bleach to correct it.

I’ve eaten heaps of young children and I haven’t turned orange. /JK

There's no such thing as a "sugar rush".

> if you can stand the fact that it's Gawker

That's a tall order. How about I just take your word for it?

And how is that site still I existence?

Gawker being terrible is a given, but they actually produced some good longform stuff for a while; so it's probably a good read.

Gawker was bought during bankruptcy. I don’t think there was any new content for many years.

Since Weinstein was mentioned, I have to admit I read Gawker and therefore was not surprised when hearing the allegations against him in the broader media because Gawker had been writing about him for years. They made some big, obviously embarrassing decisions (especially Denton’s stance on outing people), but imo got it right much more often than they got things wrong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/business/media/gawker-ret...

>Once he freaked out in a meeting because a CD did not work in the CD player, so he took the CD out and smashed it in to pieces on the conference room table. The IT guy , who was standing behind him, ended up going to the hospital because the shards from the CD flew into his eyes

Did the author of this article ever try breaking a CD? They don't shatter like that and the shards certainly aren't gonna fly far enough to hit the guy behind you. I guess this is what happens when you report exclusively on gossip.

I sense ambiguity in the sentence: "a CD did not work in the CD player, so he took the CD out and smashed it in to pieces"

Did he smash the CD or the CD player? What was "it"?

Having once found myself in a room with a hard tile floor, sound-dampening paneling, and a very large stack of old CD-ROMs that were to be thrown away, I can assure you that if you work on your technique over a few dozen iterations, you can reliably get them to shatter very nicely into little bitty shards.

The whole CD doesn't shatter, but the edges of the break do. To see this effect on steroids, put a CD through a shredder: a common security procedure. You're playing Russian Roulette with your eyeballs if you don't wear eye protection when doing this.

What on earth are you doing that's causing this? I've never seen a shredded do anything other than chop a CD into little strips.

I personally broke many CDs, it's kinda hard to do but when they snap small bits from broken edges fly off everywhere. I even saw CD that broke inside of drive. Granted it was put in with a crack in the middle but still it broke. Maybe it's just my feeling but I think that CDs back in the days was made out of a bit less flexible, ticker and more brittle plastic. Those produced today I can bend in half and they don't snap as easily as 20 years ago

I used to break cds into a plastic bag because of all the little pieces that go flying around and difficult to clean up.

> try breaking a CD? They don't shatter like that and the shards certainly aren't gonna fly far

We once tried to bend a CD. It took a fair amount of effort but the opposite outer edges almost touched. Lots of small cracks appeared and there was ominous creaking… When pushed a little further, I think the edges did touch first, but for a fraction of a second before ¡CRACK!, the disk did shatter - there were two large parts (the outer quarters by width, approximately) remaining, a few other chunks, and the rest was a cloud of small parts liberally sprayed around the room. We were finding them for months afterwards, and some were sharply pointed. Even without a sharp point such a fragment would cause significant irritation if in contact with the eye just like any large particulate, and I certainly wouldn't want bits hitting the eye at the speed they must have been moving to spread as far as they did.

While the smashing-CD-on-the-table is very obviously apocryphal, perhaps holding one side on the edge of the desk and impacting the other with significant momentum (with a hammer?), or perhaps wedging it in place & kicking, could result in a snap what would also spray matter like this?

Also, if that sentence is meaning he smashed the CD player on the desk rather than the disk then I can certainly imagine small parts flying around, if only bits from the plastic casing.

It sounds like you, and the people replying to you, haven’t broken enough different CDs in different ways to be aware that there are many different ways they can shatter. Some are more rigid than others and will shatter hard and you can absolutely lose an eye.

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