The Brunch round-up: The week and how it made us feel
This week we celebrate pop-culture franchises dedicated to women’s pleasure, mourn the loss of MAC Cosmetics’s recycling programme, are in awe of Mumbai’s real estate, and done with Chat GPT
We’re crying through waterproof mascara because Mac Cosmetics is discontinuing Back2Mac, its recycling programme, after more than 30 years. Fans of the brand have a history of saving empty plastic cosmetics containers and putting six of them into a special recycling bin in exchange for a free lipstick. The incentive ends March 31. Scrounge around and swap the last of your empties before that. Then, wait and watch. They’ll probably launch a more sustainable scheme.
We hope we don’t step on the drool. How many pop-culture franchises are dedicated to women’s pleasure? How many of them have spawned three movies, a live show at Las Vegas and an active tour? How many of them have had Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer and Donald Glover dancing shirtless? Magic Mike’s Last Dance, out now, is a terrible film. But so easy on the eyes!
We’ve had enough of Chat GPT. Explainer videos, competing listicles, user guides, opinion pieces about the future of technology, search engines, Turing tests, fears that robots will take over, fears that robots won’t take over. Remember all that brouhaha over NFTs a few months ago and how our obsession turned to dust? Let’s give new tech time to settle in before we make up our minds.
We felt a little poor. You would be too when you hear that in Worli, Mumbai, a single apartment (ok, a 30,000-sqft penthouse) sold for ₹230 crore last week. Acquired by Oberoi Realty, it isn’t even the most eye-popping sale in the upcoming Three Sixty West. A few days ago, D Mart owner Radhakishan Damani, his family, and close associates purchased 28 units in the same building for ₹1,238 crore. That’s un-real estate.
We’re kicking ourselves for not having discovered the Start With This podcast earlier. Why did nobody tell us? Each episode of the show is aimed at honing your half-formed creative ideas into proper geeky works of fiction. You’re prompted to do some world building, craft opening lines, throw in conflicts and see how characters shape up. Such a great guide for that book or script you have floating about inside you. The podcast ended in 2021, but hey, prompts are forever.
From HT Brunch, February 18, 2023
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