Guy Fieri's "Root Beer Float" and a long, unrelated tangent
I cannot express enough gratitude to the flavortown dude, his team and the team at waterloo for putting this together. Holy shit. I never thought essenced sparkling water could taste like this.
You can pound like 4 of these with like no adverse health effects. I don't care how they essenced these. (I'm taking the "trust me bro" route on the process they use with their flavor essences lol). And you're want to pound 4 because, as an aromatic flavor, these taste better the faster you drink them. The bubbles are a big part of this.
I'd give anything to have a 24 hour cafe kinda thing, like a late night water bar, with cool people and cool shit, and to be able to buy slightly upcharged but already chilled seltzers. Like just have a row of fridges with different limited edition seltzers. Then put a table and some chairs where people can play DnD. Boom. You're done - you have the most low effort hangout place and, because your drinks are 0 cal essenced, aromatic kinda drinks that incentivize people people to drink them fast. You'd sell a shit ton of drinks. You could even turn those fridges into vending machines and run it like a laundry mat. Probably depends on how you're securing these drinks and what you're going for.
Sorta related: I'm excited to try a bunch of new flavored seasonings on celery and cucumbers. There's such huge potential. Everything bagel stuff and seasoning salt sprinkled on celery works so damn well. It's like a chip with hardly any downsides, low sod, low or no sugar. I literally cannot wait at all to try some freeze dried strawberry powder on one. Same for the holiday seasoning mix. For me, these are on the same food hack level as sparkling essenced water. There's so many variations. But what if these same water shops... hgmmm... (ok, I'm not sober at all, prbly not a secret this far into the post) ALSO sold seasoned cukes and seasoned celerey and chili lime soaked sliced jicama? I just seems right. Everything there would be a snack without health benefits... or detriments - a nutritionally neutral (trending positive) snack shop and hangout spot.
Oh yea, I've gotta put out some shit about normalizing steam deck docks in public spaces. Not counting the monitors, you could get the right dock, cords, ect for well under $100. Having a place where randos could just plug in their usb c devices, plug in controllers and just bring up shit on screens attached to coffee tables, seems like it should be more common. So now you have people gaming and watching pirated sporting events with their own equipment (none of your business), and buying water and spiced savory/sweet veggies. If business doesn't improve, try hooking up a chromebook with fbneo on it and invest $20 into some knock off 360 controllers. Idk who I'm writing this for lol. Maybe me.. later?
Theory crafting aside, I plan to have a full booklet write up about this to pitch to people. It shouldn't be this hard to make welcoming, health conscious third spaces in a time where people are starting to get weird in a way that kind of scares me. Like, I'm supposed to be the weird shut in. The normal person part of gen pop disappearing ruins the balance. I can't have them blowing up my spot, adopting shut in in culture and shit. This is coming from someone who, at some point, spent 5 years as a hiki. So, yes, part of my plan is to draw normal people outside. They can go rebuild society with their neurotypicality and make life more livable while I return to my comfy NEETdom to solve dumb problems that I like solving for fun. I just wanna make toys, and funnies, and schemes all day. Also, no one is gonna start fucking unless we have bars. So here's a better, cheaper bar-like model with more shit to do for free and a wider range of people from all income brackets hanging.
So there's a whole shop full of coffee tables with deck docks and flexible arm monitors. I guess you could also have some sort of mechanical video switching system where you have an extra hdmi for each dock prepped to where you'd mirror select tables on one of the shop's bigger screens, like during tournaments. Maybe add some VGA CRT monitors for special deck dock setups? Idk. There's a lot of possibilities from an AV perspective, all the different ways you could highlight people's gameplay. ..And would streaming even be allowed? God, that's a terrible thing to put out into the ether. The 24 hour deck dock water cafe would probably be better off never turning into a impromptu streamer house... unless that's where the money is. Are streaming and non-streaming sections of restaurants going to be the new "smoking" and "non-smoking" sections lol?
Sorry, I swear I don't usually write this sloppy. This is in between getting the kanji drill print outs ready, starting over on SaruJin (not happy with it). A lot. Don't mean to "me, me, me" either. Just have a lot that I'm excited to externalize. There are so many positive changes people can make rn.
