Hey, everybody! Why not put your body in these smart, one-of-kind t-shirts, hoodies and other apparel?
But here's the key to this Existential Garnish drop: it's just a taste of what members get. Truly, it's a drop in the planet-sized bucket of all that is and will be offered here to members. For just a buck a month (or less than $10 for a year) you can access what is poised to be one of the Internet's largest repositories of buyable, human-originated thought, art and design.
So enjoy the sampling offered here. Then consider a membership. It's your instant ticket out of the world's Sea of Sameness and an invitation into the deep end of Originality Ocean.
Ready to dive in?
I feel like Keyrock.
He's also known as Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer: the main character in the 90s SNL skit featuring a caveman, frozen for millennia, thawed out by 1990s scientists, then, in an obvious next step, graduates from law school. In every episode, Keyrock's closing (always winning) courtroom argument hinges on his feigned frightened perplexity over the modern world.
Only in my case, it's not feigned.
In other words, I'm a troglodyte dumbass. Still, like every other armchair techie out there, I can't resist offering my thoughts on AI. If the title of this post is any hint, the thoughts aren't happy ones.
We’ve all seen the Will Smith spaghetti video and the astounding leaps we've made in just a couple of years from that spastic visual onslaught. Extrapolate a decade, and you have full-fledged AI entertainment studios. Then AI creating limitless AI entertainment studios. Given the virtually no-cost nature of producing this boundless content feed, nearly everything on our screens and in our ears will be largely AI generated: one thousand Scorsese-level movies a day, and Beatles-level music, and Shakespeare-topping sonnets, and on and on.
Those who soothe themselves with phrases like "AI slop" and "enshitification" are merely wishing the future away as a fad. But AI today is Pong. It is the telegraph. It is cave paintings. Its tomorrow is infinite.
AI will indeed beat our brains out.
And as much as imminent future doom at the robotic hands of a technologically superior species makes one glum, it's the looking back at the ten-thousand-year human oeuvre through this new "we are not alone" lens that's the real cause of my acute melancholy. The heaving corpus of human thought and expression through the ages was, pre-2020, a monumental given. While culturally and geographically the museums in our minds may have housed different catalogs of treasures, they were all collectively ours as humans, and ours alone: mine, a celebration of Western culture from Chaucer to Chaplin to Costanza ... maybe yours featuring the Asian, African, Latin canons. Ball it all into a symphony of, well, "us" and how can it stand against what AI will crank out in some not-too-distant afternoon? As we revel today in our collective artistic accomplishments, AI looks over our shoulder and smugly snickers: "How quaint."
Quaint, indeed. Here we sit with our now-quaint little squishy brains.
You, of course, are welcome to react and act how you see fit. Personally, I commit to do my small part to keep the quaint alive.
To that end, I'll do what I usually do, and create a brand around it (several, in fact). The first Garnish Drop of Quaint Brain™ will be an exploration of what my quaint brain can muster, a roast at AI's expense and a celebration of wild and wondrous humanness.
From one human to another, I hope you'll join me.
I can think of one hundred reasons for you to leave this site right now, and only one for you to stay: originality. I don't do been done. So, naturally, if you're looking for done-to-death, Existential Garnish is likely not for you.
If you're still with me, then welcome to the one and only online resource built to garnish your existence: things to wear, stuff to relish, pieces to read, art to contemplate. And, I suppose, if you're the giving kind, stuff to garnish others' existences too. Like the tagline says, it's Everything You Can Imagine. But didn't.
Luckily I did. And will continue to. And you'll find it all here. Eventually. Building the ship as it sails, as it were.
Memberships Pack a Lot ... for a Little
While you'll find a limited selection of my ever-growing output in the Garnish Sampler, the wealth of all that is ExGarn is revealed with a membership ... yet you don't need wealth to get it. A one-dollar-a-month membership unlocks nearly everything on the site and kicks in a 10% discount on everything you buy. Put in a decent sized order any time over the next year and it pays for itself. Same with the $4-membership tier that bumps up the discount to 20%. To experience the "full Garnish," Tier Three at $9 a month gives you access to everything in the lower tiers, plus a monthly exclusive Garnish Drop with goods only available to members at this top tier.
Thir...tieth Time's the Charm
While the creations here at Existential Garnish did (and will) indeed all originate from my brain, the many past attempts to offer those creations are strewn like a wake across the far reaches of the Internet. So if you see something offered here that you've seen elsewhere, no I didn't "steal" the idea from somewhere else. It was mine to begin with. Just bringing it all under one roof. So, sure, you can still shop some of those stores, but please consider joining and buying here, because this is where I'll be offering anything new.
Hop Aboard the Membership
This will be the last public post for a while, I'd imagine. I hope to see you in the next members-only post. At just a buck a month, I don't see why I wouldn't.
