im ranting to avoid vacuuming

so life has settled to its predictable ways. and i dont say that in a bad way. theres the struggles with a random dishwasher problem, the discussions about whether we should have a magnetic notice board on the fridge, what should we eat for dinner, why is our only plant looking so dire, should i buy a new blanket soon, and so forth. wondering if that odd feeling in my stomach is heartburn oe the cancer thats finally caught up with me thanks to drinking sweetened drinks for 30 years, and trying to find the perfect grey wall hooks for the bathroom. which can be incredibly difficult! and i moan about it with all the passion of a privileged first worlder. i wish i could use the shoulder-shrugging emoticon here.

we needed some wifi help, despite not being a big flat, our bedroom was not getting consistent connection and it annoyed the f**k out of us. we looked into repeaters and all these things, and a part of me was like okay, if we fix it 90% with like 25£, its good enough, but then doctor pushed on for a "perfect" fix and i kind of got on board and looked into mesh networks and found Eero. certainly not cheap (around 200£ for the 2 Eero's on Amazon) but the wifi is fixed and there are no issues with network names or anything like that (as we mightve with the other solutions). warmly recommended. just learned that it was named after Eero Saarinen! i was wondering about it actually, seemed like such a coincidence that it has a finnish name.

i did look into Google mesh too but actually Eero did really well according to reviews and while i appreciate Google very much, and Amazon is known to have its issues as a company (...), i just felt better going with Eero.

random

another random

and a view from our window some saturday night, when the street should be bustling the bars open... but this was before july 4th and the opening. eerily quiet.

 

ok so im feeling a bit ranty. i just hate how difficult it seems to find any sensible content on the internet. its especially difficult with cosmetics/beauty related stuff. its all just articles on beauty mags that are more like sponsored advertising (okay this was always a problem, nothing new) but now its also "influencers" doing the same thing. how do you find any real factual or honest information anymore? opinions areopinions of course, but you cant trust those either anymore when everyones paid to praise. Il Makiage has been aggressively advertising their foundation in social media for like 6 months now, maybe longer. i tried to google it a bit. found of course youtube videos by influencers, which im not going to watch, then Cosmo type of articles of which i tried to read a few. there were gems about how the foundation is the brands absolute best selling product, suggesting that means its great. but i mean, they advertise it like hell, of course it is? its the flagship product they are pushing. its not like an established brand where consumers would be familiar with a product line and over the years one foundation became more popular than another? also, they actually only have one foundation, so, we are comparing foundation sales to blush sales now? and while the 'journalist' applauds Il Makiage's foundation quiz where they ask about your skin type and what type of coverage you want, they then add that indeed they only have one foundation and kind of pass it off with a shrug. right, very cool quiz, where your choices only feel like choices, in the end there is just one product. one article also hailed how the quiz AI matches you with the perfect shade, and the more people take the quiz, the better tha AI gets. like, how? the algorithm (yeah, lets not call every little thing AI, please) will match a user with a shade, but that doesnt mean the shade is right. so if i do the quiz and get shade 001, im not sure how its suddenly any smarter for that, the shade might not suite me at all. and no, i dont think they feed info on returns into their "AI". so how is it learning anything, really? so this applauded quiz has like dozens of questions, but the only ones that have an effect on the end result is the ones about your skin colour as that is the only variable. and even then, because they reportedly have 50 shades, yet show you dozens of skin tone pictures to choose from, you can choose slightly different pictures and still get the same result. the many picture variations shown create hundred if not thousands of combinations, but as said, you're actually limited to 50.

so for fun i took the quiz twice. im not goint to list all the things they ask for, but just a selected few things to prove my point. 

quiz 1: balanced skin, blending foundation with fingers, wanting medium coverage, semi-natural finish, wear foundation 2-4 days a week, prep with nothing, skin concern: dryness

quiz 2: dry skin, blending foundation with a brush, wanting full coverage, matte finish, wear foundation 5-7 days a week, prep with moisturiser and oil, skin concern: acne

tadaa! same exact thing. i then took the quiz a few more times (obviously ingocnito browser etc) varying age and the other things, and having some fun with the skin colour pics choosing light and medium a bit randomly. i kind of started enjoying it, not sure why, maybe just for knowing the result in advance? i mean, its asking what foundation brand i currently use, how often do i use foundation, how long have i been using the current brand, what do i use to blend my make up. i mean besides making the product feel like its hiiighly customised, i guess they can use the info they collect in their marketing - like if they learn that 60% of people use a brush to blend foundation, they can push that marketing angle. 

btw that number of reviews seen in the screen caps 137 957 vs 137 993 - up by 36 in just about 5 minutes, wow. and hundreds of thousands of reviews?! im just rolling my eyes here. when u click the link, reviews come up but trying to browse them is impossible. the first review up on the list is from March (the sorting default is "rating: all"). either there really are 130K reviews and their system is unable to process the amount of data, or theyve made it slow so no one would quickly click through to see that there definitely isnt hundredreds of thousands of reviews although u could just have your fancy "AI"create fake reviews so i dont see why they wouldnt have them. someone on the internet said they delete negative reviews, which i fully believe, would be right on sync with the ethics in general.