It's just another case of this generally awful trend. Here's the thing about the boiling frog: it's not true. Slowly heating a frog will not make it die peacefully. It still reacts when the temperature gets too high.
An awful lot of people I've talked to in real life (including me) are not happy about the encroaching minimal trend in design taking over everything. If it was just Cracker Barrel, it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal. But it is like the fall of Constantinople to the app icons. We're already cursed with hideous buildings and logos everywhere, so when the nostalgia was drained from the restaurant built on nostalgia people reacted.
And for whatever reason I saw people trying to make it a culture war issue, accusing anyone who objected of being right-wing. Thankfully a number of prominent Democrats spoke up, too, because it was never about "woke" or whatever.
> Here's the thing about the boiling frog: it's not true.
That whole thing stems from a 19th century German scientist (Dr Fruedrich Goltz) who wanted to know if the impulse to jump out was from the brain or further down the nervous system. From his experiments, an intact frog freaks out when the water gets too hot. When he destroyed the brain of the frog, it sits their until it dies of exposure.
There was actually quite a lot of experimenting in the late 19th century with "reflex frogs" (i.e. brain dead but still alive). W. T. Sedgwick wrote a decent review of it in 1888 titled, "ON VARIATIONS OF REFLEX-EXCITABILITY IN THE FROG, INDUCED BY CHANGES OF TEMPERATURE."
> And for whatever reason I saw people trying to make it a culture war issue, accusing anyone who objected of being right-wing. Thankfully a number of prominent Democrats spoke up, too, because it was never about "woke" or whatever.
People who said it was about woke or whatever included a Republican member of Congress, a Trump campaign adviser, a prominent right wing pundit, and a prominent right wing activist recently added to Meta's AI advisory board.[1][2][3][4] Someone speaking for a right wing college said the new logo had the same energy as vandalism of a George Washington statue.[5] This list is far from complete.
I saw several comments which observed the attention given to this issue was dominated by right wing outrage. I saw none which implied no other objection was conceivable.
An awful lot of people I've talked to in real life (including me) are not happy about the encroaching minimal trend in design taking over everything. If it was just Cracker Barrel, it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal. But it is like the fall of Constantinople to the app icons. We're already cursed with hideous buildings and logos everywhere, so when the nostalgia was drained from the restaurant built on nostalgia people reacted.
And for whatever reason I saw people trying to make it a culture war issue, accusing anyone who objected of being right-wing. Thankfully a number of prominent Democrats spoke up, too, because it was never about "woke" or whatever.