You were gonna buy it for $20. We want to sell it to you for $20. But we’re going to sell it to you in the form of game play.

 --- Brad Howard, co-founder and managing partner of Fantasy Claw Arcade, quoted in The Claw Machine Is King of the Arcade Again. And This Time, You Might Win, WSJ, Aug 2026 (unlocked page link, may expire)

Excerpt

The claw machine—that infamous promiser of childhood treasures, known for stealing your quarters and almost never yielding up its flimsy prizes—has gotten an upgrade. 

Modern games, trimmed with neon lights, are filling storefronts and bringing life to malls in cities and suburbs across the U.S. They’re stocked with luxe plush toys, Hermès bags, fresh vegetables and even sourdough starter.

But the biggest change may be that today’s operators actually want their customers to win—at least once or twice.

“We only win if you win,” said Brad Howard, co-founder and managing partner of Fantasy Claw Arcade, which is expanding through franchising. “You were gonna buy it for $20. We want to sell it to you for $20. But we’re going to sell it to you in the form of game play.”

Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another

 --- Robert Frost, quoted by Todd R Nelson in The day I heard poetry call, CS Monitor, April 2019, republished May 2026

In context from Todd Nelson's piece:

I began to understand that a poet is describing the world, experience, or concepts in a way that antidotes dullness, commonness, and indifference; that stretches the possibilities of language; that sings and beckons. A poem is a discrete vessel of clarity and understanding. “Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another,” Robert Frost explained. And poems of all eras live in a kind of simultaneity in their anthologized universes.

According to LibQuotes, the Frost quote is from "Education by Poetry", speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates' Quarterly (February 1931).

LibQuotes excerpt:

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don't you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not

 --- Joan Didion, in Slouching towards Bethlehem, quoted by Anneliese Burgess, in Iets van onsself tussen O'Keeffe se berge en Didion se notaboeke, Binne+Land, Aug 2026

Excerpt

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way

 --- quotation of Juan Ramón Jiménez, used as an epigraph on the first page of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1951, 1953), via Yan Chen, Oxford, August 2026

having an A.I. boss can be like working for a teddy bear with amnesia

 --- Heather Knight, in "These Employees Like Their A.I. Boss. Its Shop Is Kind of a Disaster." New York Times, Aug 2026

Excerpt

A terrible boss is the stuff of both sitcoms and nightmares, and you don’t get to pick your own. But what if the boss was replaced by A.I.?

The first four months of operations at Andon Market, a San Francisco shop billed as the world’s first retail boutique run by A.I., have provided some answers. In short, having an A.I. boss can be like working for a teddy bear with amnesia.

New research from Andon Labs, the company behind the boutique that studies how A.I. agents run real-world endeavors, shows bot bosses can be exceptionally kind and accommodating, such as repeatedly brushing off lateness. But they can also be incredibly forgetful and unbothered by the whole point of the operation: making money.