The vending machine sandwich

It's 2 a.m. and I'm building something nobody asked for, which feels a little more worth doing every month now that anybody can generate anything instantly. When everything can be made in a blink, the stuff that's obviously made by a person who cared hits like finding a sandwich in a vending machine that somebody's mom clearly packed.

Stay with that sandwich for a second. You're in some hallway at 2 a.m., staring at the same chips and candy bars every vending machine in the country has, and there in D4 is a turkey sandwich in a Ziploc bag, cut on the diagonal, with a little too much mustard. You'll never meet the woman who made it. You'd still eat it standing right there by the machine and feel weirdly taken care of.

Good work gives itself away the same way. You can tell somebody sat there and chose the weird font, argued with themselves about it, and lost.

The losing is my favorite part. The safe font always makes a good case for itself. A generator skips the argument and hands you the font that wins on average, which is a perfectly good font, and you've seen it a thousand times this week. The weird one only gets through when somebody cares enough to keep arguing past the point where it makes sense.

I lose that argument with myself a lot, usually around this time of night. Here's one of the things that came out of it.