Apr 12, 2025
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why is the kiddie still like 3 scoops everywhere
most of the time i just want a liiiil bit of ice cream
Sep 30, 2024
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My grandparents owned an ice cream shop for 35 years. In the early days they sold sandwiches too, before moving to just ice cream. At one point when my dad was an adolescent, they actually lived above their shop. My grandma would dream up flavors and my grandpa would make them — he's lactose intolerant, he never really even reaped the one benefit of owning an ice cream shop. My grandparents, dad, aunt, great aunts and uncles, second cousins, and even my mom all worked fairs and festivals scooping ice cream. It was a family business, my grandma and grandpa were the core. They had to change locations twice. They "retired" at least once before actually retiring. This ice cream shop was an institution.
For me though it was the place where we would have Thanksgiving. Closed for the season, the shop was the only space big enough for all of us. I had birthday parties there as a baby. It was our first stop after a five hour drive across state lines to see family. That's the place where, at my grandpa's insistence, I wrote my initials into the wet cement he had laid down for a bike rack. They are still there.
When I was 16, I worked at the shop over the summer. You don't realize how tough it is. Decades of dipping had made my grandpa particular. I didn't have the wrist strength or the speed necessary when there were customers out the door, all of them hungry and agitated by the stifling heat. I was terrified of giving someone back the wrong amount of change. Becoming almost paralyzed by the responsibility of being behind the cash register — it was their livelihood after all. That was my grandma's responsibility. I was in charge of the milkshakes and malts. I decorated sundaes with hot fudge, wet walnuts, sprinkles, and cherries. I packed the shaved ice into paper cones and doused the evenly shaped mounds with syrup. I doled out the frozen lemonade into styrofoam cups. My hands became raw from all the cleaning. I'm now particular about hygiene in the kitchen and always tip.
My grandparents still own the building, renting it out to a dentist and coincidentally, an ice cream shop. It's so strange now to go there. Everything is entirely different while being exactly the same. They painted the chairs a different color, but they are still those heart-shaped wrought iron, poorly cushioned chairs I know from childhood. Some of the flavors have remained. But it's not the same. Maybe they're buying their heavy cream from a different supplier. Or the high schoolers who work behind the counter aren't as precise with the measurements. I can try, skipping the artisanal flavors for the ones I grew up eating, but it will never be the same as it was.
And that's alright. They're softer now, my grandparents; the anxieties and stress of those decades having melted away. These days, ice cream is just ice cream.
Dec 30, 2024
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Jan 30, 2024
Top Recs from @royallmonarch
5d ago
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I consume a lot of music regularly, and a huge part of keeping a fresh diet of new listens going is having enough sources of recommendations that aren’t an algorithm that either 1) reinforces your existing listening patterns, keeping you stagnant in your tastes, or 2) platforms whoever paid enough to push their product to the top, serving you something that may not inherently be of inferior quality, but may not align with your tastes, may not be exciting beyond just being a new release, and realigns your current listening habits to be more in line with what the average user on the platform is also listening to — which socially might have benefits but which creates a homogeneity of consumption that can become bland since you’re listening to something really just because it’s the next product on the assembly line to have its public moment and not because anything about the music actually captured your attention. the current landscape of streaming is designed to keep you at an all you can eat buffet where you take what’s served to you, and as a result a lot of us have forgotten how to look at a menu and order.
so what does taking a more active role in your own music curation look like? for me, it’s meant not using streaming as a primary listening platform. I mostly use my local Apple Music library on my phone that I curate with the vestigial iTunes Library framework that’s still a part of Apple Music on my laptop. probably going to find an alternative soon since apple seems to be cutting integration progressively. I like this method because it forces me to choose what to sync to the limited storage space I have, forcing me to take inventory of what I actually listen to and what I can offload. the files I get are mostly from Bandcamp or Soulseek depending on whether it’s available for purchase or entirely unavailable online (as is the case for a lot of electronic music that was on vinyl only, which is where soulseek comes in clutch). I also have freedom here to change the ID3 tags to better sort and organize, rate, change track info, and track my own listening data.
Bandcamp and other music purchasing platforms are great because 1) it reshapes my relationship to music away from consumerism and back towards curation. I have to pay actual money for this thing now if I want to use it, so i’m forced to consider its value (usually i’ll stream a release first to gauge my interest). 2) having to spend money helps me to course out my meals so to speak, as i’ll buy a few releases i’ve accumulated in my cart over the month and cash out on Bandcamp Friday when 100% of my money is actually getting to the artist (TOMORROW IS BANDCAMP FRIDAY BTW!!!), and between purchases I can actually chew and savor and digest my last orders, they don’t get swept up in the deluge of new releases. my plate is full until i’m done and then I order more. also for the times of the year like now when new music isn’t coming out as regularly I take time to find older music that I would normally overlook while keeping up with new drops. currently very into early 80s/late 70s music with early digital production, kinda stuff that would evolve into synthpop and dance music.
so how do you know what to order? for me, I’m getting recs through trusted curation platforms. whether it’s bandcamp daily, y’all lovely folks here on PI.FYI, friends, or most importantly musicians who I follow on socials that share their tastes through posts, stories, playlists on steaming, interviews, etc. I like this last one especially because it’s kind of like a musical game of telephone. if I like an artist and they share their interests and influences it’s like every layer in this process is stretching my palate further from the sound that I was originally interested in and into a new territory that has some shared DNA but would never have been recommended to me by an algo because there’s no shared category or label between them, only the musical influence and interpretation of it made by the artist. as an example, I was a huge Skrillex stan, he signed KOAN Sound to his label, they collab with Asa who collabs with Sorrow, Sorrow takes huge influence from Burial, Burial makes some ambient adjacent stuff and takes huge influence from 90s rave music and drum and bass and 2000s rnb, now i’m listening to Brandy - All in Me, William Basinski, Aphex Twin, none on whom would get recommended by Spotify to me from Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.
LAST thing i’ll say — because in yappin about this i’m realizing how actually passionate about this subject I am: MAKE LISTS! playlists are cool, but they can flatten your music into vague categories of “vibes” and “aesthetics” and encourage picking one-off songs from artists that you never form an active audience relationship with. I make a practice of making my own year end lists of top 25 albums (plus some honorable recs and top individual songs) and keeping them in a notes doc that I regularly update and rearrange over the course of the year. this forces me to consider the actual relationship i’m forming with what i’ve ordered for myself. did I like it in the moment but it didn’t have staying power? is it slowly growing on me? it also encourages taking albums as a whole. maybe I liked one or two tracks a lot but the rest wasn't resonating. that’s ok! maybe I rank it lower but now i’ve actually taken time to consider it, it’s in my library, and maybe (quite a few cases for me) something I ranked like bottom 5 albums becomes a retroactive favorite from that year as my tastes evolve. also 25 albums to take with me from each year is really more than you'd think, i struggle sometimes to even find 25 that I formed a true connection with. I think the biggest thing the itunes era ruined that led into now is the single-ification of music, the ability to separate the hits from the deep cuts. albums are meant to be taken as a whole, and then once you've really sat with the whole you can find what actually stuck. even then I like to keep the whole around because soooo often i’ll write off a track that yeeeears later I come to love. trust the artist, they made it like they did for a reason.
aaannyyyywayy TLDR: get recs organically, be more active in deciding your listening patterns, fr*cken pay artists yall, trust the artist embrace the album, really consider what you consume
Feb 29, 2024
3d ago