Meet Sanrio’s latest character, Aggretsuko

Like a lot of people I know, my introduction to Sanrio was through Hello Kitty sometime in the early ’90s. She was on office supplies, in coloring books—a precious white cat who baked treats and gardened. Inexplicably, her one pet was also a white cat (they could not speak to each other). After that initial foray, I wasn’t really aware of the company again until 2013 when they debuted a new character named Gudetama. He’s a lethargic egg who constantly employs the ellipsis while saying #relatable things like, “Meh…” or, “The future… I can’t.”

It’s like they said, “How can we make Garfield but not get sued?” so they made an egg—and Gude was a huge hit for them! He has hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, his YouTube videos are driving most of their channel’s traffic, and I found myself loving his little yolk butt despite myself.

So for their latest character, which debuted this week, Sanrio seems to have taken things one step further on the #relatability spectrum: “What does every girl on the internet picture herself as in three traits or less?” Their answer is a red panda named Aggretsuko, which translates literally to “aggressive rage-girl.” Like the rest of us gals in the big city, Aggretsuko has an unfulfilling job and a secret karaoke persona:

“Despite her cute appearance, something deep within her is… Aggretsuko,” explains the trailer. Pissed is the new cute. And they’re kind of right.

Again, despite myself, I cannot overcome the fact that every translated quote ends up being a perfect “it me.”

Needless to say, my interest has been piqued. I’m especially interested to see how the Director Gorilla and Secretary Bird end up playing into the whole plot here. Are they, too, pissed? If they can detect “over it” better than the men can, will Aggretsuko be able to maybe start a metal band and tour the world? This is turning into fanfic.

I just think it’s cool that depictions of masculinity in the Sanrio world continue to devolve and deconstruct using the same oversimplification I saw in the ’90s, but femininity in that same world is suddenly… fucking wild. And I’m here for it (even if it is pandering).

Resolve to Be the Kind of Person Who Doesn’t Give Up Right Away

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“I’ve already given up on my New Year’s Resolution. Does that make me a bad person?” — Quitting Quentin

It doesn’t make you a bad person, pal. But it does make you shaky in a time when we ought to strive to be resolute and powerful. I don’t wanna be a snow-filled blanket. And normally I’d be very equivocal about the promises we make ourselves make. But it’s not even 10 days in! You’ve got to motor forward!

Forget January 1st. Just start over. Whatever you resolved to do. Start now. Try again. Fail better. And then fail worse. And then maybe succeed a little. New Year’s Resolutions are about as lame as Year-End Best-of lists. But the beginnings of new years do give us a chance to make a change in our lives that might possibly be meaningful. Don’t give up on yourself yet! I give up on myself every day in all the little ways and I would not recommend it.

I joined a gym two years ago. And I wave to it every time I walk by it in Journal Square here in Jersey City. I pay like $15 a month and I’ve only been inside to get my membership card. I’m not entirely sure what I would do inside of a gym. Rowing, I imagine. I feel pangs of guilt. I kick myself for not having any discipline whatsoever. I kind of like being a bit puffy. Tubby people are jolly, I tell myself. When I got very thin for VH1’s “Can’t Get a Date” I looked like a sharpened pencil. Cheekbones and tiny arms. I looked hungry, not jolly.

But I also live my broken dreams. I would not wish that upon you, dear readers.

The time is coming, late next week, when we will have to be strong not just for ourselves, but our fellow thoughtful Americans. The Visigoths shall descend upon the National Mall. And bless our passage across the River Styx. Come sail away, Reason and Decency! Come sail away with us!

And we will need to not just bear it for as long as it all lasts (weeks, months, hours). We will need to emerge on the other side as resolute. Steadfast in the face of Relentless Stupidity. Chipper against a non-stop wave of Ridiculousness. Are you prepared? No one is. What’s the best way to prepare? By trying to stop smoking! By giving better head in bed! Or whatever your damned resolution was.

This was a test and we all failed. My New Year’s Resolution was sufficiently vague, so that it’s not clear whether I’ve given up on it or accomplished it already. And, sure, I only protest when the weather is nice. Although Santa Claus did once stay up all night and sweep Zuccotti Park in the rain. I’m a disappointment to myself. But you are not disappointing at all to me. You’d be fine without New Year’s resolutions! I like you the way you are. Unless you’re one of those Trump people.

I want us all to feel better! To live as long as we can so that we can never let the people who voted for Trump off in our lifetimes (which will be longer if we don’t smoke, eat vegan, ride a stationary bike, etc). Let’s resolve to fight them together. On sea, on land, on rowing machines. Let us keep the most important promise to ourselves. That we will never quit! And therefore, they will never win!

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City. He is trying out for the new WFMU Morning Show timeslot on 2/9 and 2/10 6–9 AM.

The year’s worst day is where you find it.

January is a big time for news (and “news”) organizations to run “worst day of the year” or “year’s most depressing day” dispatches because a) January is pretty fucking horrible and b) no one really wants to go back to work yet and this is an easy story to write. That said, you should bear the following in mind as you come across these pieces over the next few weeks: However terrible whatever day you are hearing about is, the next day is going to be worse, and this year it will continue to be true even once the weather grows warm and the sun shines again well into the evening. From now on every day will be slightly worse than the one before it and we will come to look back at these first few weeks of January as the final days of what were, in retrospect, a pleasant period of ominous dread rather than the grim procession of certainty and confirmation throughout which we will suffer for the foreseeable future, possibly until we no longer have a future to foresee.

Now that we have that cleared up, here’s some music. Enjoy.

★★★★ A screaming, ruddy child was heading down the sidewalk in the opposite direction of the Park, accompanied by an adult carrying a plastic saucer sled. The nearest pavement had been clear but before far there were slush puddles and brown stretches of snow in transition to slush. The five-year-old, having been switched from his sneakers to rubber boots on his second foray outdoors, lost his footing on the wet train floor and fell. People boarding the Second Avenue line had unmelted snow on their shoes. After the tempered air of the brand-new stations, the chill down on the old Times Square platform was grim. A brief, startling new snow shower fell through the strong afternoon sunlight.

Let’s stop looking and just listen.

If you’ve been reading the same Internet that I have today you are probably of the opinion that everything is even more terrible than usual and on this matter I cannot disagree, so let me give you a little more music to maybe make up for it. This is one of my favorite things that Robyn has ever been a part of, and she’s been a part of a lot of great things, so that is indeed praise. Enjoy. [Via]

What’s sweet and poison?

You know what’s bad?

Is sugar the world’s most popular drug? | Gary Taubes

Sugar is bad.

The Sugar Wars

Seriously, it’s bad.

Sugar: A Matter of Life and Death

There’s practically no avoiding it. You can try, but it’s really hard, plus you become one of those people who constantly talks about how there’s sugar in everything and it’s so bad for you and why did you stop eating sugar?

A Month Without Sugar

You know what, though? Sugar is poison. It’s impossible to deny. Yes, we live in a world where LSD is good now if you are an urban professional, so things always change, but we can all pretty much safely say that sugar is poison. People have been saying it for years.

The sugar conspiracy | Ian Leslie

If you can only do one of these pieces take the Taubes thing at the top, but it’s not terrible to read them all, because you will at the very least reinforce the fear and aversion to sugar that we should all have. There is a counterpoint to be made that we are all going to die, and probably soon, anyway, so why not have fun, but if that is the attitude that is going to inform your choices you might as well smoke, because it is much more enjoyable than sugar and takes weight off rather than putting on. (Cigarettes, as at least one and possibly all of these articles note, contain sugar, so you are still doing your part for the sucrose-industrial complex.) For more information about cutting sugar from your diet just find the really annoying people on Twitter, they will tell you more, without you even having to ask.

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck is a New Yorker cartoonist. She is also on Instagram.

That’s not bokeh, it’s fingerprints.

If you are like me, you have some social media apps on your phone. Which means that you may have noticed about five years ago, they figured out that people react to faces and photos in their feeds much more than they react to anything else, so now every platform is also a photo sharing service. This means our phones come equipped with cameras three times more powerful than my first point-and-shoot digital camera built right into them at a fraction of the size, and it also means that, suddenly, everyone is an amateur photographer.

On the whole, this is tight. I love looking at pictures online—I learn a lot about both what my friends and the teens are up to that way. However, there is something I often find myself sighing about in private that I’d like to mention in a more proactive context now: everyone needs to be cleaning their lenses more often.

If your selfie looks like it was taken through a haze of Vaseline, or your landscape pic came out grainy and dull, it’s probably because your phone has been in your pocket all day and there are fingerprints or crumbs or some other schmutz on its one beautiful eyeball. And in the current state of my feed, most people are choosing to shoot photos through the schmutz and then overcorrecting any flaws with some wild filtering choices. As an alternate route, though, I would love to present the following system of steps for taking a phone picture:

1. pull your sleeve down so that it’s covering your fingers
2. in the opposite hand, hold your phone
3. take your sleeve, and using one of your fingers (I’m a thumb girl myself), rub the crap off of your camera lens
4. snap a photo

See how clear that thing is? 12 megapixels of extremely powerful, automatically calibrated light-understanding technology, capturing the same things your eyes are seeing to the best of their ability. Suddenly your sweaters might look more fibrous. The sidewalk, more textural. Who knew the sheen of fluorescent light off of pepperoni grease could seem so… poetic? I don’t know what you’re taking pics of in your free time, I just know they’ll look better and more whole the more information you allow your camera to take in. It’s like a brain that way.

And that’s it, really. Now that I’ve pointed it out maybe you’ll notice it in your own feed and find a not-obnoxious way to pay the pointer forward and we can all be taking crisper, more beautiful recreational photographs in 2017.

Cause nine times out of ten it’s not bokeh, dog. It’s your dirty camera.

Maybe the bees are trying to tell us something.

Nearly a year ago, I became aware of The Tipping Bee Truck Catastrophe, an ostensibly common occurrence the name itself describes. Spotting article after article about tipped-over bee-carrying trucks at a somewhat alarming rate, I gleaned that American truck drivers were being irresponsible as hell with our Precious Bees, either driving too quickly or turning too sharply, flinging themselves and their cargo onto their side, and releasing, according to my careful calculations, no fewer than 100 million bees in the past few years. Hi Seamless, America would like a billion EpiPens, thanks.

Typically, semi-trucks that transport bees share a similar purpose and straightforward trajectory: Stop by a honey or bee purveyor, load up to millions of honey bees by the hive in the truck, and transport them (often across state lines and often in the Western US) to pollinate farms of anything from Hass avocado trees to almond groves to donut peach trees. Because you shouldn’t stop driving your bee truck in the middle of the day when it’s hot out, lest you want to simulate hell-like conditions in your cargo and send the bees into delirium, a smart transporter will start this procedure early in the morning, according to Modern Farmer.

Bee Convoy: Shipping Interstate Apiaries – Modern Farmer

The first incident I noted was one in Delaware in 2014, when a truck tipped over on an on-ramp to I-95, unleashing an estimated 16 to 20 million bees near the small city of Newark. According to USA Today, the state police had a specific “bee swarm removal procedure” to enact, though a local sergeant was quoted saying that he believed “this [was] the first time [they had] actually activated the plan.” Though lucky to have not died upon tipping over, the three men in the truck were each stung by an estimated 50 to 100 bees, which almost definitely felt like dying, but very slowly. A witness “saw one of the younger men ‘running in traffic, ripping his shirt off and smacking himself,’ as cars swerved to avoid him,” according to the article.

Millions of bees swarm Del. highway after wreck

It kept happening. In 2015, 13 million honey bees broke free from a turned-over truck in Washington state, and as many as “gillions and gillions” found a new home off I-35 in Oklahoma, according to local reports. During the Bad Year, Wyoming, North Carolina, and Missouri all witnessed bee truck tips. There has unfortunately not been any follow-up regarding the number of consequential bee stings suffered.

• Truck carrying millions of bees tips over on highway
• Watch: Honey bees swarm deputy’s patrol car while stuck inside
• Semi carrying bees rolls over
• Truck carrying bees, tractor trailers crash on I-85, cause major delays
• Northland is abuzz after semi carrying millions of bees overturns

I called Andy Sievers, a trucking safety expert, to find out why semi-trucks in general may tip over. Basically, it has to do with centrifugal force, and the higher the truck’s center of gravity, the more likely it will tip. It’s why so many semi-trucks — and the above bee-carrying trucks — tip over while getting on or off exit ramps.

“You’re turning the wheels and the cargo wants to go straight,” Sievers said. However, he also said that because bee-carrying trucks aren’t particularly tall, they shouldn’t have an exceptionally high tipping risk. Instead, he blamed the portrayal of the “trend” on everyone’s favorite ne’er do well: the media. “I think the reason those stories are published is because they’re about bees,” he said. “Paper rolls trucks also tip over and nobody really cares.”

I also spoke to the president of the American Honey Producers Association, Darren Cox, who, when asked if he was aware of The Tipping Bee Truck Catastrophe, said yes. He did not elaborate. I interrogated further into why he thought the trucks kept tipping over, he echoed Siever’s sentiments, saying “certainly if a load of bees gets in a wreck, it will get in all the news in comparison to lumber or anything else.” I was disappointed. Maybe this trend was not so much a trend, but more of an affirmation of our propensity for drama and the absurd.

However, in a spilled bee truck article from the Seattle Times in 2015, a professor of entomology at Washington State University throws out a speculation that could undermine all speculations. The unintentional agitator, who goes by the name Walter Sheppard, “[said] a couple of trucks carrying honeybees crash each year, but it doesn’t make as much of a buzz [ed. note: eyeroll] unless it’s near a city or major roadway.” So maybe the media disproportionately covers semi-truck accidents when bees are involved — but maybe mainstream media also disproportionately covers accidents with a closer proximity to larger cities. Maybe there are hundreds of bee trucks tipping over in tiny American towns and we don’t ever hear about it.

14 million spilled bees on I-5: ‘Everybody’s been stung’

All of this is to say that I have little more insight, except that you definitely shouldn’t trust anyone! Except for maybe bees, considering they continue to provide us avocados and almonds and blueberries and all the foods that we’ve pushed to the edge of extinction, including the bees themselves, because we’re reckless as hell. Maybe this is how the bees have reportedly recovered from their apocalyptic-sounding colony collapse — by escaping the trucks for a better life. Maybe we deserve to tip over our bee trucks and free the fuzzy insects from the claws of consumerism.

Amanda Arnold is yet another writer living in Brooklyn with bylines at Broadly, The Hairpin, Racked, Lit Hub, and SAVEUR.

You know what would be so cool?

This being online, I may not be the first person who’s alerted you to the fact that Bright Lights, HBO’s documentary about legendary Hollywood mother-daughter pair Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, premiered this weekend. If I am the first person to alert you, it’s streaming on HBOGo. The film was originally scheduled to be released in March, but following the stars’ devastating back-to-back deaths between Christmas and New Year’s the network bumped the date up.

If you have ever had a mom, watched a movie, or thought, “Damn, mental health is wild,” there is probably something for you in here. It tracks Reynolds’ struggle to retire when her body needs her to slow down but her brain still wants her to do live comedy. It tracks Fisher’s journey of being a bipolar person before bipolar was a diagnosis that doctors could give. It also provides a really beautiful look at how two people were able to grow and evolve, bonsai-like, together—somehow both in spite and because of their separately massive careers.

There are many quotes in the film that are charming, but my favorite comes from a scene where Fisher is watching TV alone in her living room late at night. After telling the film crew a story in her typical fashion—gesticulating and going off on tangents—Fisher pauses and says she wants to be quiet for a little bit. Talking that way has made her self-conscious.

Then she sort of sighs and addresses the crew directly again. She says:

What a nice fantasy.