2016-09-02 at

A Little Profile

Every woman wants to be worshiped. And every man seeks idols of uncalming affection. These forces are not true of every individual, certainly not in their consciousness, but seething in their genes. Men, women, false idols of popular religions. People are programs of affection. We just browse the code and watch the machines play their parts. She, was she? Or was he? Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine. Which movie? So many questions. What is love? How do you know when you feel it? Are we miming, or is this real? Do we get to decide? Fresh faced. A morsel of flesh, dangling in front of the CCTV. A mindful of madness, and heartful of joy, do you, she asked, know what any of it means? And we rode long into the openness, naked before the teaming dramaturges and ogling spies, as we studied the fashions of our peers. On guard, an untrustable being! Excuses, she vanishes into spaces we already agreed not to go to. Awks.

2016-08-31 at

Notes on the Origin of Visual Identity

Since we're briefing out first professionally engaged photographer, I figured I should write this down.

Because my influences in fashion are limited to whatever one ex was watching on ANTM, here's the sort of work I'd refer to as inspiration for Sudo Brew's initial colour palette.

The market for hipster cafes was predominantly "black out", or "wood and steel" rustic, so I wanted to go full white-out, but there was within the same six months a whole slew of white-out F&B (46 Gibraltar, Nara's, etc. etc.) so I went with technicolour, finally.



I mean, I set out with this direction in mind, but we haven't moved interior decorations much beyond the primary colours for the most part as of a year into operations. (Most recently I’ve been thinking about putting black & white photography over the RGB pastel walls in order to provide farther contrast.)

Also to complete the brand's visual identify origins:

  • the black on white logo was conceived at the stage twhen I wanted to white-out the colour scheme (minimalist yes, but there's too much black stuff in the world already, plus to some degree perhaps... the girl I was dating at the time at a thing for white)
  • the font is Helvetica Narrow Bold, which is from MUJI 無印良品生活研究所's font (Sudo's market positioning follows Muji's to a certain degree)
  • the Sudo Brew and Sudo Coffee logos are modeled after Star War's logo and Japanese written symbols (SW is itself a clone of Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress)... because our first target market were computer geeks who are typically into this sort of literature




2016-08-30 at

Memory Dump Before Bed


As the sun rose, blooming over suburbia, the giant Harambe fell, from the great wall, which towered over the malls and condominiums, crushing twelve vehicles at once, in the traffic below. Towards the wreckage and mangled flesh, writhing without consciousness, the frocked heroine strode meekly towards dead cars, and the great, accidented, body that had saved her. Gradually, the automobiles regained their composure, picked themselves up, and walked away. Then she knelt down upon the throbbing fur, and cried. A growl thundered in a larynx below, and she, whip smart, calm as a bomb, and loud in her bed at night, whispered only the words of every known farewell. "It is your last day," as the dragonite steeds crisscrossed beneath the clouds above her, she said, "thank you for all your help," as selfie-sticks and duck-lips roared towards the canvas like a sea wave, she said, "the world is small, so we must meet, again," and the creature's lifecycle was complete, as blood sprayed out from its chest and a wormlike creature emerged, only to scuttle away beneath some rubble, "inevitably."

2016-08-28 at

Announcing GrabAss

A little satire on the GrabGas CTO blow up.

My dearest friends in the Facebook family, today I need to tell you that I will be founding GrabAss, a new startup, dedicated to righting a number of wrongs that we face in the world today. This startup will be focused on developing a specific permutation of morphemes from the largest natural language network on Earth.

Firstly, Uber and the other Grabsomething company may be helping to reduce logistical problems but they fail to acknowledge that the humble donkey and its relatives in the subgenus Asinus occupy a unique niche in the product space that is on our radar. Don't grab a car. Why grab some stupid taxi - when you can Grab an Ass, to get you to your destination.

Secondly, given the number of follies that we witness in the startup scene daily, GrabAss is built from the ground up to give back to our community by identifying high-grade moronia hidden in plain sight within our pools of business and engineering talent. Our open-sourced framework NoobsNDevils is under active development, and has recently entered open beta. If you see an asshole, Grab that Asshole, and submit him (or her, or it) via our API endpoints, using the documentation provided on our developer website. Not a developer? No worries. Just Grab that Asshole by the arm, ear, neck scruff, collar, (or asshole) and drag him (or her, or it) to one our conveniently located pickup depots, at every 7-Eleven, McDonalds, Starbucks, and KFC in your current country (we're in every country that has one of these branded outlets). We have locked-in these strategic partnership to ensure that the asshole you have identified will be bagged, tagged, and shipped back to its original location, with minimal inconvenience to yourselves.

Perhaps you would prefer that the asshole you would like to identify is picked up from your private residence instead - we have an app for that also - it's a hardware app, the best Christmas (Hanukkah, Lunar New Year, or other festive) present you could give your loved ones this year. We call it the AssGrabber, and you only have to yell, "hey Asshole," to turn it on.

Beyond these first two proofs of concept, we believe that numerous other semantic networks can be derived from GrabAss's latent morphology. We believe in our vision, and we look forward to your ongoing support and participation in the GrabAss vision - summed up by our motto: "If there's an ass out there, someone's gonna grab it."

We're actively hiring (we give equity to early employees) and we're sincerely looking forward to having you join us as a shareholder today. We don't have any job descriptions yet, but we're sure that you'll figure it out for yourselves along the way.

Don't hesitate. Grab your ass, and get it over here, right now.