Tattoos Are Bad Now, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: Google image search is the bane of tattoo culture, Instagram inspires people to live in vans and Silicon Valley produces the most useless juicer.
The Internet Is Turning Tattoo Artists Into Tracers
It happened to you. You saw your friend with that cool, simple tattoo and now you're thinking you could pull one off too. Nothing too crazy. Just something smallish and meaningful. Full of inspiration you whip out your phone and start flipping through the #ink tag on Instagram.
This, Racked's Rachelle Bergstein finds, is what is ruining the tattoo. People go online, find exactly what they want, find an artist with an acceptable Yelp review score, and then get them to copy it.
Sure, it's leading to more business for tattoo artists, but it's also causing a massive influx of trendy, Pinterest-inspired ink that's arguably watering down the trade and turning talented artists into human tracing machines. It's not that the internet created the bad tattoo, it's just creating more of them.
[Racked]
The Rubber Tramp Is Back
Next to Christopher McCandless, the most tragic characters in Sean Penn's 2007 drama Into The Wild, are two aging hippies, Rainey and Jan. At some point during their decades of travel across the country in their aging RV, what was once their ticket to freedom became their prison.
This week, the New Yorker profiled two disciples of #Vanlife, Emily King and Corey Smith. As you might expect, they're part of a larger movement of people breaking free of the day job to just live life, man.
This go-round, however, now that we have smartphones and Instagram, means that these neo-rubber tramps are using their lifestyle to just become another brand of influencer — trading carefully-composed looks into their life in exchange for something no one can escape: money.
There's An Easier Way To Make Juice Than The Juicero
Bloomberg's look into Juicero, a venture capital-backed end-to-end juice dispensing system, is a near-perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with Silicon Valley. In short: a man took three years to over-engineer a $400 juice press that squeezes pre-packaged juice packs which you can actually just squeeze with your hands.
The worst, or perhaps best, part about this whole sham is how delusional everyone is. Juicero isn't a cynical cash grab by the Goop-set. It's an earnest man who truly thought he was out to change the cold-pressed juice world and no one along the way told him no.
The Bay Area Has The Best Craft Beer
You can look at this tightly-designed interactive map of the best craft beer cities and feel proud that, in a nation of macrobrew guzzlers, craft beer's tendrils are still extending to just about every part of the country. That would be a valid way to interpret this.
Another interpretation is that eventually these spheres of influence are going to start to overlap, spurring competition and consolidation, and eventually turning into the thing that craft beer lovers hate.
If you have strong feelings either way, it's probably time to crack open a cold one and take a deep breath.
Previously on What We Learned This Week
It's Strange That We Can't Look At The Sun
For more Internet distillations like this, check out our back catalog of Digg Roundups. And for more stuff from Digg, check out our Originals archive.
