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Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

It mentions cutting, but very little detail. Trigger warning for ana/mia/self harm.

I remember losing 15 pounds in two weeks, only afterwards  I didn’t feel any lighter: just pale and flighty and sad and I was flunking math and then after that I was flunking everything except english and I was 15 pounds lighter and less living and when I walked I felt sick and dizzy. 

For most of my life I’ve let sadness cling to me and sometimes I glow: sometimes it's electricity running through my veins making me beautiful;  coughing up blood and art in unison. I’ve clung desperately to cynicism, feeling proud and witty.  I’ve felt brave. I’ve thought no one could save me. But for most of my life I’ve been alone on a sinking sailboat pretending I was going for a swim. There is no grace in this.