a comment from just over two weeks ago:

I think that is awfully presumptuous of you, but I suppose you know you better than I do.

I didn’t need proof that March Madness is as boring as any other start and stop start and stop 3 hour regulation-choked sponsor-stricken modern sport exhibition, but the fact that these red and white lumps of rubber are more exciting by a considerable margin was nonetheless revealed to me. Oh yes and there are shoes, also.

There is a video for it. I have not watched the video. I do not want to know more about it. I do not have room in my brain to accommodate all the other ways this and its marketing is screwed up.
Anybody who uses the phrase “pause live tv” is already beyond reason, and is testing to see if you also are. Once you PAUSE a broadcast, it is no longer live. I thought that was obvious but I have heard it used in sales pitches for years. Maybe it is still CLOSE to live if you de-pause within a certain period but the fact of the matter is that words are supposed to have meanings, and when somebody trying to sell you a product can alter those meanings and not get called out on it, they know they are free to insult your intelligence in other ways. Just like the Disney corporation can literally non-euphemistically state that its theme parks are made out of magic. Hence shoes that order pizza.

i cannot imagine a scenario in which it is easier to press a button on a shoe than just about any other object in your house. Nor can I conceive of any occasion in which i would wear a shoe which looked like that or would eat a Pizza Hut brand pizza, much less pay for the privilege of wearing that shoe and not being able to order another kind of pizza with it and all but assuring I get myself permanently placed on every twit-targeted marketing mailing list for the rest of my life. The amount of laziness necessary for this to make sense is at odds with the sort of person who wears shoes indoors. When will they come out with an ugly black t-shirt that orders pizza? A long time ago my father wore shoes indoors. They were not sneaker shoes, much less bright red ones, and he did not eat pizza. And if he ate pizza it wouldn’t be this pizza. And he already had a biological handicap against being able to identify an edible pizza on account of being English.

But consider that this is made for people who already pay whatever cable companies tell them to for dumb exclusive sport packages and whatever Best Buy tells to them for whatever latest imperceptible buzzword type of “hi def” that came out this week –that no programming actually broadcasts in EXCEPT the sports that collude with tv companies to insist is necessary and ensure is economically viable to put into production– but think they need to save money by purchasing/ pledging their lives to cut rate pizza. This is for slobs who think they haven’t done enough to lower other peoples’ opinion of them. As much as i personally like the idea of dressing like Ronald McDonald and eating a competitor’s product, I don’t see pizza hut offering the yellow jump suit.

Yikes I remember when this kind of shoe was implied to be crucial for athletic performance. Now that playing video games is considered athletic competition, companies are looking for ways to market exclusive designer slobwear. Not that eating pizza, even a good one, is conducive to operating a control device with both hands, but maybe next year there will be a shoe with a button that tells your live-in nurse to shove a slice of pizza in your mouth. And then the next year there will be a shoe with a button that pumps power diarrhea directly into your toilet.
I stole that from an old Late Night With Conan O’Brien “in the year 2000” line but it is fine since that one was about Taco Bell.

the article does say that only 50 sets of shoes are being made and no price is set, which means this is not a product realistically marketed at consumers. This is something for human-shaped sewage golems like Jared Fogle and Martin Shkreli to buy before they get sent to prison. This is something used to get Pizza Hut and NCAA free publicity in the form of “tech” websites reporting on the moronic audacity of it but pretending they are neutral by not saying so, thereby indicating approval of the system from whence it came. This article is literally an advertisement for multinational corporations just in and of themselves, openly admitting in the first line that it is a “publicity stunt,” and also that this is not the first time this specific publicity stunt was stunted, and it is disgusting that any website will accept money to cover it, and probably even worse if they do it for free.

oh oh yes we geeks are so wonderfully weird in the way we get total garbage marketed at us and then we buy it and tell other people to buy it because we’re so quirky and new and not mainstream in our utter empty spineless ventriloquist dummy normalcy. I don’t know how you can have “opinionated apple buying guide”s in the plural because you can accomplish that in one word: “don’t.” If you call yourself a “geek” and your only gripe about this shoe story is that it implies you watch sports then congratulations, I am sure life is very comfortable for you apart from that because The Matrix is real and really lame.

our basic homo sapien dignity isn’t a product, right?

In the end it doesn’t matter if you think pizza shoes are stupid or a good idea unless you can afford them. On a grander scale it doesn’t matter if you think ANYTHING is stupid if you can’t afford these stupid hideous foot-cocoons to honor orange slop on a disk of glue. And the megabillion dollar college sport associations that don’t pay any of their players want you to remember that, and that is why we will go extinct ages before the earth crashes into the sun. No price is too high to flaunt your ability to pay any price for objects of no worth.