i *redacted* my boyfriend for buying me a yeti instead of a stanley cup for christmas
whoa! old school sam newsletter alert!

hello dear readers, i don’t know or really care if talking about stanley cups is so last week or whatever, i want to talk about them!
for those not in the know (my baby boomer readers, most likely), the stanley cup i’m talking about isn’t the hockey trophy, but rather a literal cup. these started getting a lot of popularity on social media with the rise of watertok. basically they’re just insulated travel mugs, and the popular models are the massive 30oz or 40oz cups with a straw. obviously nobody cleans theirs properly (because who reads cleaning manuals anymore?) and they’re all slowly getting mold poisoning.
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the most recent frenzy over the stanley cup has to do with the release of the starbucks collaboration with stanley being sold at target. people went fucking feral trying to get these tacky cups, some of those videos looked like the black friday stampede videos of yore.
the stanley cup fixation has been both surprising and unsurprising in many ways for me. on one hand, obviously people are going to go nuts over something and collect it as part of a trend. if growing up in a capitalist hellworld has taught me anything, it’s that we’re all suckers for whatever everyone is obsessed with. and the stanley cup’s relation to mormon women also further solidifies the inevitability of its popularity: mormons love to do shit that other mormons are doing, and the entrepreneurial spirit is built into the fabric of mormonism.
but once you see this trend breaching containment of circles of identically blonde mormon women, it starts to make a little less sense. yes, mormons are great at selling americans on things. but do americans lack critical thinking skills? i guess i’m stupid for asking that.
the point of a stanley cup is to be a reusable travel mug, a sustainable option to reduce garbage in landfill and reduce carbon emissions. reusable cup manufacturing does have an environmental impact from the raw materials, factory processes, and shipping, but they’re supposed to be net better than using disposable cups on a daily basis, since you’re only manufacturing them for the consumer to buy one or very few of them. so once people start collecting reusable cups and hoarding them, it begins to defeat the purpose. not to mention once these cups are no longer trendy, they’ll end up in landfills and thrift stores, likely never to be used again.
it’s not like collecting is a crazy thing to do, humans love to collect things! according to dr. shirley mueller in psychology today, we collect for a wide range of reasons like rarity, novelty, history, the love of organizing, and anticipation of getting more, and all of these reasons give people a sense of reward. collecting things can be a really wonderful hobby and i have nothing against it, i love hearing about people’s collections. i personally collect cool rocks and finding any old iconic american apparel clothing in a thrift store makes me go feral. i think the problem starts when the thing you’re collecting is motivated by a trend and has the potential to make a negative environmental impact. it’s totally okay to buy a stanley cup that you’re going to use and love, i just think it becomes a problem when you’re going to be putting them to waste or just collect them as a status symbol. just be normaler guys!
track of the week
i’m still on my sonic youth shit. i’ve been listening to their 1987 record sister, i think it’s a really good example of the way they leaned into the noise pop sound, as opposed to their more avant-garde origins. their previous record EVOL was the start of this evolution, and they really refined it on sister.
this track, stereo sanctity, is my favourite track on the record. it reminds me a lot of some later sonic youth songs, it has a more traditional structure than their old stuff, but it still retains some of the artsy qualities of earlier the sonic youth i know and i love. if you’re a fan of daydream nation, goo, or dirty, give this one a listen.
the signs as collections
aries - pogs
taurus - vintage glassware
gemini - maps
cancer - beanie babies
leo - vintage coats
virgo - coins
libra - receipts
scorpio - knives
sagittarius - boarding passes
capricorn - national geographic
aquarius - bugs
pisces - sea glass
you guys are lucky i didn’t give anyone stanley cups or funko pops…
what a great piece! the stanley cup situation is such a clear example of blind consumerism since it not only highlights the incessant need to buy things just because they’re status symbols (and they feed into this clean-girl, soft-girl DISEASE that’s all over tiktok right now) but it also highlights how people will ignore the morals of a company when it benefits them. it’s almost common knowledge that starbucks is one of the brands that people should be boycotting right now in support of the Palestinian people and this sentiment has been really expressed on apps such as TikTok... it’s crazy that so many people conveniently forgot that once the Stanley Cup x Starbucks collab went live.