One name? Who are you, Seal?
In our team meeting yesterday we had a convo about which professions we preferred to date and which were dealbreakers. So I’ll pose the same question to the group: would you date a chef?
All the girlies are thirsting for Carmy in The Bear, but if it came down to it, would you go all in on the toxic kitchen lifestyle? My answer is yes, but only if he was a wealthy Michelin chef or had family money — I gravitate towards people who work long hours so I don’t have to be around them that much.
Rough Cut
Movie review, TV binges, etc.
This week, Hulu quietly dropped a full season of a new “dating” show called Hotties. I watched the first episode, and it exceeded my expectations for how bad television can be.
The logline: In a Nailed It meets Hot Ones meets Next menage a toir, Hotties challenges two pairs of attractive people to compete in a cooking competition / hot sauce eating contest / blind date, for the chance to win $2,500.
The f*ck?!: It truly makes no sense, and not even in a fun way. Basically, the partners are assigned to make a dish, like homemade sausage (wink), in an RV kitchen in the middle of the desert. But the actual cooking is pretty irrelevant to the rest of the proceedings.
The primary obstacle is the three checkpoints that happen during the cook, where the contestants have to complete a spicy food challenge, like drinking a habanero-infused milkshake. I had a coughing fit after eating one bite of my roommate’s extra spicy Pad See Ew from the Thai place down the street, so I would not be set up for success on this show.
The food got up to one million Scovilles, which is the equivalent of like the final hot sauce on Hot Ones. So while they’re supposed to be flirting and batting their eyelashes at their date, they spend most of their time crying, wheezing, vomiting, or dunking their head in an inflatable pool.
After the 75 minute cooking / makeout sesh ends, each duo presents their dish to the host (Jade from The Soup), who picks a winner based on either which dish is better, or whose date was better — she just sort of decides in the moment.
The winning pair can choose to take $2,500 to put towards a luxe second date, or they can “promise to never see each other again” and split the money to pay for more CrossFit classes and hair extensions.
The yasses:
The only thing I liked was when one of the contestants compared himself to a Capybara. This is one of my favorite animals — when I worked at a grocery store in college this lady came in and told me and my coworkers she was thinking about getting a Capybara as a pet, so then every time she came in for the rest of the summer I’d yell “Capppybarraaaaa” at her. She never got one, it seems like they are a big commitment!
The nasses:
Some shows that are this ridiculous get away with it because they find a good balance of chaos and comedy, but Hotties mostly relies on cheap bathroom humor that makes you feel embarrassed for the contestants and for yourself. The show tries to be clever with the editing and the sardonic jabs from the host to create that element of “being in on the joke,” but because these fall flat, it almost makes it worse, since they aren’t in on the fact that they aren’t in on it.
Closing thoughts: I had to force myself to watch a second episode so I’d enough context to write this. The people who agreed to go on this show have to have been the horniest people in the world, because $1,250 won’t even cover a month’s rent in top DMAs, and an appearance definitely won’t lead to more Instagram followers. Which means the most you can hope for is a quickie in the kiddie pool.
★☆☆☆☆
Viral Bible
Internet wormholes, celeb deep dives, etc.
If you know me, you know that I’m always paying close attention the markets and the stocks — theWall Street Gazette is appointment reading for me.
That’s why I was interested to learn more about a new app called Locket which raised $12.5M in funding earlier this month.
Upon a first look on the App Store, it looks a little jank for 12.5 mil. Maybe they can put some of that towards a design team, because the little mustard yellow icon was not inviting and made me question if I was accidentally signing up for a sneaky link app instead.
The premise is similar to BeReal (if you’re still not familiar, you can read my trial of it which I published a day before the Times #scooped), where you share casual photos with an intimate group of friends. But unlike BeReal, Locket caps you at 10 besties.
Much of the activity takes place on a Widget on your phone’s home screen, outside of the app itself. For my over 30 crowd that doesn’t know what Widgets are, please feel free to reference this Apple Support article like you do every time you try to use BlueTooth.
Throughout your day or week, you can take photos on the camera within the app and send them to your friends — they’ll appear on your friends’ home screens, and theirs on yours. It’s sort of like those twin bracelets that light up when you tap them so that your best friend / long-distance lover knows that you’re thinking of them.
None of my contacts were current users, so I recruited three of my least busy friends to download the app — which honestly, is kind of a big ask on my end given the fact that you need to rearrange your home screen to make room for the widget.
My biggest gripe with the UX is that you have to take a picture within Locket in order to share it. This is super limiting for a lot of (two) reasons:
You have to remember to pull up Locket and capture something that’s happening in real time. A normal person would take a picture of a deer they encountered in the wilderness with their Apple camera, not their Locket camera. So then you can’t share your deer photo.
You can’t get creative and share memes that made you think of your friends, inside jokes, throwback pics, or Paul Giamatti’s headshot, which would just be more fun.
Another question I have is, if you’re only allowed 10 friends, what happens when you need to demote someone? The app is in its early phases, so you’re likely to be more cavalier with your friend choices, but if it ever gets popular, you’d have to rethink your list to make room for friendship VIPs.
I was eating Gerber applesauce when MySpace Top 8 was a thing, so maybe there’s already a social protocol here that I’m not aware of, but either way this seems like it could create irrevocable chasms in our fragile social ecosystems.
TLDR: Getting Lockets from my friends gave me a teaspoon of extra serotonin during the day, but I sort of see this only taking off with couples in the honeymoon phase, or maybe Meghan Trainor and her husband based on what we discussed last week. I don’t think I can use this to add that much brightness to my friends’ lives unless I like, ran into John Oliver on the street and got a Locket App selfie with him. Otherwise, you can already get boring pictures of my salad or computer screen on my BeReal.
Skinny Soundbites
Half-baked mini thoughts
Celebrity college choices are fascinating. They can go anywhere in the world and they pick. . .Purdue? That’s where Millie Bobby Brown is heading this fall (for online classes, she still needs time to be a movie star and text Drake). They have a 67% acceptance rate and I’m not gonna be an elitist prick and say that means it’s a bad school, but if you can have your pick of the lot, wouldn’t you go to Oxford or something? But maybe she and her publicist agreed that this move makes her look “of the people.”
33-year-old Simu Liu confirmed this week that he’s dating literal child Jade Bender (24). She’s been in like two movies, so you can’t even make the argument that Hollywood aged her prematurely, like a president when their term ends. This grosses me out — he could’ve dated skinny legend and age-appropriate Chrishell from Selling Sunset who was all over him when she was selling him houses!!
But another cradle-robbing relaysh just came to an end — Florence Pugh finally dumped Zach Braff. I mean, she was in a Marvel movie. Time to cut the fat.
And coming up right behind them, Alexis Bledel and Pete from Mad Men also split. He’s hotter in real life than his character was, but still.
Lastly, on an unrelated note, The Girl Scouts of America announced a new cookie hitting the streets in 2023 — Raspberry Rally. It’s a sister cookie to the Thin Mint, so it uses the same crunchy chocolate base but is infused with raspberry instead. I’d like to know if any market research informed this choice, since fruity desserts are historically polarizing.
Prekend Wrapped
What the fuck is a prekend?
Watching: Old Nathan For You episodes, because I need something in between The Rehearsal drops.
Listening: Emails I Can’t Send by Sabrina Carpenter — I saw a TikTok that said if Ariana released these songs everyone would like them and I agree!
Reading: Meet The Coffee-Shop People (The New Yorker) — please enjoy these cartoons from my BFF Zoé who was casually published in The New Fucking Yorker for the second time this summer. She is super cool now, but I was friends with her in the fourth grade when she was wearing dragon cargo pants.
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Unless the chef was Anthony Bourdain, no.
Hotties sounds like a hilarious hot mess.
OMG I made prekend wrapped :') can't believe you'd reveal my dragon cargo pants era but I still have a crush on you