some other things are a pepsi

there is a commercial i think about and quote all the time, and i happened to be quoting it tonight when i realized i couldn't remember what beverage it was for.  i thought maybe this made it a bad commercial.  if you can remember everything about a commercial except the product, then isn't it a failure?

but no.  it doesn't matter what commercials are for.  what matters is how they enrich your life.  and this commercial makes me want to be a better man.

as you can see, it turns out it was for diet pepsi, and that the expiration date on the bottom of the can was exactly 25 years ago tonight.  so here we are a quarter century later and this commercial refuses to stop bringing magic into my life.  cheers to a piece of television history.

i'm not sure if i've ever had a diet pepsi.  i don't love a diet soda.  i've had coke zero and diet coke, and i learned recently that diet coke owes its existence to diet pepsi.

originally, coca-cola never wanted to put their brand name on a diet cola, so when they put one out in 1963, they called it tab.  pepsi wasn't precious about their brand name, so they just went ahead and released diet pepsi in 1964.  diet cola became more popular over the years, especially going into the image-obsessed and (no pun intended) coked-out 80s, so coca-cola finally decided to put out a proper diet coke in 1982.

but they didn't just make a sugar-free version of coca-cola.  they invented a completely new formula that mimicked the sweeter notes of pepsi.  the resulting diet coke formula was so popular, its sales actually came close to regular coca-cola and pepsi levels.

everyone was like holy shit.

and coca-cola sales had been dropping anyway, not just because of the diet cola craze, but because pepsi was taking away the younger demographics.  because coca-cola was old-fashioned and wholesome and pepsi was edgy and dangerous.  coca-cola was the lost generation, the greatest generation, the silent generation, and the baby boomers, but pepsi was generation x and there was nothing coca-cola could do about it.  so they decided to take this hot new diet coke formula and reverse engineer it into a regular soda.

a new coke.

new coke came out in 1985, replacing regular coca-cola, and everyone always says that it sucked, but i don't think that's true.  new coke was good.  it was like a combination of coca-cola and pepsi.  like an obscene three-way of ambrosial delights.  but what's new coke in a world without regular coca-cola?  hedonistic sweetness is fine every once in a while, but we need to know we can come back home to the elegant red lady we first fell in love with.

79 days later, coca-cola announced they were switching it back.  the old formula came back as coca-cola classic and new coke later became coke ii, idling in fading obscurity until finally vanishing in 2002.  some people thought the whole thing was a gimmick to boost sales and that coca-cola always intended on switching back.  the president of coca-cola's response to this was, "we're not that dumb, and we're not that smart."

i tasted new coke for the first time last summer, when it was brought back for a limited time as a promotion for stranger things 3, which takes place in 1985.  and they didn't make it easy.  you had to order like a $20 gift box just to get two cans of the stuff.  it was worth it to finally be able to pour the time-displaced nectar down my mouth and into my body, but i wish they would have just put it in stores like a normal god damn beverage.  no one is dazzled by this manufactured scarcity.  it's not like you just found a small reserve of new coke in the bermuda triangle.  anyway, that's when i read about all this stuff.

i also found out about the flaw of the "pepsi challenge."  pepsi wins in blind taste tests because when it's just a sip, people prefer the sweeter taste.  but when you drink a whole entire can, that's too sweet.  that's when people prefer coca-cola classic, and that explains why new coke was a short-sighted, deranged idea.

my favorite is crystal pepsi.  this one i did taste when it was originally out in 1992, and i never forgot what a magical experience it was to drink it.  it was clear and tasted exactly like pepsi.  so when they finally brought it back in 2016 for a few limited waves, i got as much as i could and savored every drop.  now i stay up every night, my eyes searching the dark blue horizon, waiting for crystal to return.  and i don't care how long it takes.

one day, we'll be together again

and they're not posting the relieved denzel

the ongoing global pandemic of 2020 (and beyond?), in participation with the grotesque demon currently in the white house, has been knocking people off their hamster wheels left and right and making us look around, and i mean like really look around, like really look around, in real life.

it was in this state of mind that i revisited the net (1995), which reminded me what the internet was like when it was new.  it was a real, magical place.  specifically what i wrote down while watching was:

in 1995, the internet was simple and colorful and beautiful. a place where people could come together to share information and love, with nothing but hope for the future. in 2020, the internet is a toxic wasteland of lies and hate, designed to suck all the money from your veins while destabilizing the free world

i thought about the websites and blogs i used to write, and how nice it was to have a solid home on the internet.  i think geocities even used to have virtual neighborhoods, with like street addresses for each website.

now everyone's on social media like facebook, twitter, and instagram, where the point is for little bite-sized pieces of content to float by and disappear down a surging river of disposable memes.  the apotheosis of this is the "stories" section, where instead of posting something that scrolls past people's feeds for a second and then quietly settles in the dirty drains of your profile for pretty much no one to ever look at again, a "stories" post is actually self-destructing.  it flashes in front of your followers for five seconds and then later that night, the app deletes it so it's like it never existed.

like you never existed.

that bums me out.  i think it's nice to be able to visit the things people have spent time creating for the internet.  so i finally decided to make a new blog (this one).  a thousand years from now, this will be here on the web.  can we say that about facebook and twitter?  look at myspace.  myspace was built of precious comments and blogs and events and photos from our lives.  it all got nuked and now it's a chernobyl of scraps and broken links.

for the past two years, i was doing movie brackets on facebook.  every day, i posted four new games pitting ranked and seeded movies against each other until we narrowed it down to the big winner, with categories like best vampire movie (interview with the vampire), best tom cruise movie (also interview with the vampire), and even the best joan or john cusack movie (it was being john malkovich, as if no one has seen in & out).  sometimes there were even fun discussions in the comments.  but the archive of a facebook page is impossible to explore.  you just have to scroll forever or know what you're searching for, and maybe you'll find it but probably not.  and when people delete their profiles, their votes and comments all go with them.  they erase themselves entirely from your past.

facebook is switching to a new design in september, and part of this renovation included taking away the polls.  so the brackets are done.  we were right in the middle of a las vegas bracket.  we'll never know for sure now that the best las vegas movie is showgirls, although i do know it, in my bones, to be true.

but this is simply the latest float in a long, sad parade of reasons why facebook is a deeply flawed way to connect with friends.  another big one is the fact that all major social media hubs have been hijacked by malicious trolls and bots whose sole purpose is to stir the pot until we destroy ourselves.  and it's working really well!  most facebook threads i see on public pages tend to devolve into rote, bitter exchanges of gifs, emojis, and memes.

no joke, at least half of twitter is trolls and bots.  and although they only exist to artificially inflate the far right, they're also known to pretend to be on the left so they can rile up both sides at once to create more conflict and chaos.  and they don't always just say the political thing outright.  frequently, they talk in code.

so for example, if you want to attack the left, you can condemn star wars: the last jedi, and if you want to glorify the right, you can praise any zack snyder movie.  i've seen many twitter accounts made up entirely of comic book movie flamebait.  most of those are not real people.  but what's worse is that some of them are.

i was 13 when i first surfed the world wide web, and the information superhighway i explored was pure and good-hearted.  it was nothing like the hellscape of today.  today's kids are being invited into a bad faith hate machine, and they end up happily feeding themselves into it, because they think that’s what the internet is supposed to be.

the real dream of the internet is something far more extraordinary.

we should all have blogs, where we communicate thoughtfully and honestly, and we should all visit each other's blogs and leave comments.  i think that would engender more substantive interactions between friends, better insights into each other as people, and i think it would even make it more difficult for foreign governments to fill your feed with radicalizing propaganda that convinces your grandma that hillary clinton is eating pizza made by a deep state cabal of pedophiles trafficking abducted child sex slaves.

when really it's just probably regular normal pizza