Bold of the the mulleted human View-Master to assume there’s only one thing.

Most of them.

Yeah, Vegas is nuts. My wife and I eloped down there and spent one too many days: by the last night we just stationed ourselves in the hotel room, watched MASH reruns, and drank the prosecco we scored on the flight down.

Stuff about Vegas: everything costs money. It’s hard to exist somewhere hospitable for free. I started thinking about it in terms of renting air conditioning with the price of a margarita. Also, people will approach you immediately and try to sell you cheap shows. Tell them to go away; once an initial person hits you up, the rest seem to know and stay away. Don’t worry about being an asshole; sometimes being an asshole is the correct course of action.

We had one guy in an official vest walk up and tell us he had to detain us… because we were allowing the lovely ladies with us to walk right past his bar. I fucking unloaded on him and he disappeared. Nobody bugged us in that area after that.

If you find yourself on a casino floor, get a drink and tell everyone that every table you walk up to starts losing immediately. They’ll leave you alone. On the upside, you can smoke cigarettes pretty much anywhere, inside or out.

We stayed on Fremont, which is kind of insane but also kind of fun. You’ll see a lot of people dressed up like… I dunno wookies or hunter thompson or whatever. Don’t randomly take their pictures: if you do, you’ll have to pay them. Once you get beyond Fremont or the Strip, it’s just like any other town. Library sounds like an awesome idea.

In-laws took the family to a fancy resort. It’s beautiful but also autistic hell. Everyone turns and greets you when you walk past. I think it’s in their contract. There are never not people in your periphery trying to engage.

The only place to hide is the room, and even then they text your father-in-law worried about the situation and wonder when they could possibly come in to remake the bed. Nothing costs less than $25. I’m hyper-aware of the huge markup and it bothers me, even if the in-laws are picking up the tab for most of it. Actually, especially because they’re picking up the tab for it.

It all came to a head in the fancy restaurant last night. I was buttering some bread for my daughter and knocked a cocktail over on my lap. Was immediately surrounded by four people with napkins and all I wanted to do was crawl under the table. So I made it their problem.

“I’ll get you another cocktail immediately”

“Ya sure? You saw what I did with the last one.”

The head waiter offered to pour the gravy on my main course and I told him it was best for the safety and well-being of the table if he did just that. I asked him if any of the desserts were on fire and what kind of fire safety equipment they had. Stuff like that.

Internally I was mortified and just wanted to go back to the room but apparently my inner Marx brother took over and I don’t want to go anywhere this morning.

Anyway we’re going to be on a boat and I’ve already been informed that they’ll take my shoes. What a neat experience. Trying to just go with it and I’m aware of how awful I sound. I just want to hide for the rest of the week

The more I look at the picture the more I don’t like it.

Protip: if you ask how they’re doing you have to talk less.

Yeah they really shouldn’t have done the cross section.

Yeah, exactly. I get how the Mandela effect works psychologically, I just don’t love that a lot of them end with “corporation says no.”

Maybe instead of freaking out about the Mandela Effect, we should be freaking out with our willingness to just believe corporations at their word. Because that’s who seems to have the final word in all of these things, especially in situations where you can’t go back and check original artifacts. I’m guessing there’s still some old Berenstain Bears books at garage sales and vintage Pikachu merch is everywhere, but who’s holding onto 40 year-old underwear or peanut butter jars?

Here’s a recent example: Dairy Queen introduced a new Blizzard about ten years ago. It started with a solid chocolate core with ice cream around it. They called it the Fudge Tunnel Blizzard. It was there, on the drivethrough sign, and my friends and I had a field day with it. The branding lasted for a few weeks and then it completely disappeared.

I can’t find branding anywhere on the internet. I know it was there, my friends saw it was there. Nobody took a picture and it vanished. I can’t find it on google. It’s gone. Well, there’s some mention of them adding a “tunnel of fudge” to the Royal Blizzard in 2017, but there’s zero surviving marketing material for the original concept which definitely did not have a golden spoon. I know this because I ordered it. Repeatedly. To make the people behind the intercom say it back to me.

It makes sense that they’d want to scrub everything that ever mentioned eating a Fudge Tunnel at Dairy Queen. For the other stuff… who knows? Marketing departments churn, stuff gets lost, short-run logos get left out of the brand evolution. Yeah, some of this is Mandela effect but can we stop treating corporations as the ultimate authority?

I’ve gambled twice in my life. The first time was sitting in a gas station casino because my buddy’s car overheated on the pass. Put $20 into a keno machine, lost about half of it, realized I could have gotten several beers instead. Got annoyed with myself and cashed out.

The second time was in Vegas. Same buddy gave me a massive hit on a vape pen and dragged me over to a blackjack table. He dumped some chips in front of me things happened, the table was a lot of fun to look at, the dealer cleared her throat in a really annoyed way because I was grooving on the pattern on the back of the cards instead of playing. I handed the chips back to my buddy and told the entire casino I was too high for this shit.

I guess I don’t have the gene. I’ve got an addictive personality in general and that’s been fun to deal with, but I’m glad it doesn’t extend to gambling.