So July 2021 will go down in history as the beginning of the billionaire space race, whereupon two white male boomers spent a few harrowing but exhilarating minutes in space, returning to enjoy the literal worship at their feet of their feats.

Jeff Bezos managed to one-up Richard Branson (of course), by clocking in two extra world records (like anyone’s counting) by flying the youngest AND the oldest white person into space — may I refer you to his rocket design for overcompensating jokes… Yup, Slate went so far as to ask Daniel Ramspacher, an actual rocket scientist why the cock rocket, to be told, “most rockets are quite phallic…this is probably the most phallic-looking spacecraft you’re going to see if I had to guess.” I CAN’T EVEN.

Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.

In other tech news, Apple announced they’re nixing their September return-to-office plan till October at the earliest (to chicken sh*t to say 2022) so prepare for Google et al to follow suit and Hawaii vacay rentals to implode in short order. ┏༼ ◉ ╭╮ ◉༽┓ Uber magnanimously authorized employees two Mondays of meeting free work this summer, with the caveat that “essential” meetings could still occur, which is soooo Uber. All mouth, no trousers.

Staying in that (no-pun-intended) vein, this July, “Two Truths and a Lie: The Silicon Valley Startup Edition,” takes an X-rated twist, because we gotta blow off steam, somehow, amirite?

Out of the following three apps which one is the fake one?

• An app that provides an Uber for Strippers?
• An app that records hookup data, including name, positions tried, and the number of orgasms achieved.
• An app that delivers users a lingerie-clad nurse to vaccinate them(male and female).

(Scroll to the bottom for the answers.)

Know of some ridic stuff happening in tech? Email, DM, or tweet me to include it in next month’s edition.

Meet Postdates: the Postmates for Your Breakup ‘Stuff’

Question: what sucks more than dipping into the vast unwashed gloop of the dating pool? Easy: Breakups. As someone who’s been through my fair share, they’re NEVER as clean as you’d like them to be, whether it's Facebook stalking their local haunts, or “forgetting” that all-important work folder at their house. Meet cute becomes meet shoot. Enter Postdates, the parody-but-real solution for getting back your crap sans FaceTime, reports Katie Way in VICE.

The Postdates setup is straightforward; you fill out a form that sends a courier to your ex-bae’s place (available in LA and NYC only) and for the low cost of $29.99 — can you put a price on emotional health? — they’ll collect “almost* anything that fits in a large grocery bag” and wing it back to you, with some heart-shaped stickers attached. You select this service by type of ex — options include “lived together,” “casually dated,” “one-night stand,” “went back to your ex,” and more. The main difference here being the “suggested” items (you can also write your own) for return vary based on relationship; laptop charger and sunnies for casually dated, Xbox and dog bowls for living together, and so on.

( ⚈̥̥̥̥̥́⌢⚈̥̥̥̥̥̀)Wah Wah. There’s a $3.99 fee for “emotional labor” added to their rate because everything has its price, yah. Sure, your ex has to be non-assh**** enough to actually have kept your sh*t in an OK (meaning, non burned, non-urinated) condition, and be chill enough to let some stranger collect it and handle their pitying, judging eyes as they do so. But hey, people might need this. Dating.com (always a reliable source, jk) called 2020 the “year of the breakup,” reporting that 67% of their users whatever their other half, compared to 34% in 2019.

Add this to the disgusting amount of cash people burned on Postmates and their equivalents (those DoorDash folks know how to party, right?), their flat-rate seems *relatively* reasonable. This just shows how skewed and f***d up the world is right now.

Bumble The Dating App‘s’ IRL Dating Cafe

This sorta stuff makes me lose my mind. Enter Bumble Brew, a saccharine-styled We-Work-esque 80-seat restaurant and cocktail bar, courtesy of Bumble the dating app. Plonked in the heart of Nolita, NYC, this yellow-themed venue tries to exemplify the same female-forward principles as their app — to such extent that their first design included a “menu free from messy food that might cause embarrassment at the table,” reported Surface Magazine. That got nixed, cos women know their way around a fork, ya know? Rebranded, the “new” Bumble Brew says their cafe is less intended as an awk-first-date place, but more as a couples “safe space.”

Quite how they got to that oh-so-popular buzzword is unclear. Sure, yellow represents happiness and warmth (thanks color matters color theory website!) but it also signifies traffic lights and road signs that “indicate caution all over the world.” OK. Plus, just saying you’re a safe space don’t make it so — the company shared no plans to check diners vax status or if entry comes with a side grilling of toxic masculinity. What’s left then? A cafe capitalizing on the Bumble brand because we’re in hot vax summer mode? Alrighty, coulda said that to begin with. Speaking of which, enjoy this John Oliver clip of newscasters losing their mind over hot vax summer.

Side note: There’s a pre-existing yellow-themed Bumble Brews in North Carolina. They’re a playspace for kids and run Mommy and Me and Princess Ariel-style events.

Hope they cleared the IP with them, tbh.

Pepper The Robot Is Unemployed… Again

Pity poor Pepper the personable robot, reports Miho Inada in the WSJ (now say that fast!). The adorable kid-sized humanoid, introduced in 2014 by SoftBank Group Corp was supposed to be an easy stand-in for a bunch of human tasks. Use cases on the companies site show Pepper happily standing in for librarians and BMW brand ambassadors.

But in the non marketed reality… ehh. For example, Pepper was hired for a gig reading scriptures to mourners at funeral services. The bot was programmed with the verses. Alas, a cog went loose, and Pepper stayed schtum in the trial runs, so Pepper was sent packing. This wasn’t his first red card. In 2016, Pepper was hired to run singing lessons at an care home for the elderly. Residents thought he was cute… and staff liked the cost-cutting. But again, the robot didn’t live up to expectations, faltering or halting mid-song, and its dance moves were underwhelming. At sports games, Pepper was called “creepy.” Pepper’s facial recognition is supposed to allow the bot to identify faces and respond in kind… but again, that flopped.

This is a problem — remember, the purchase price of Pepper is around $2,000 with a $550 a month subscription. The robot isn’t designed as a plaything or a quirky to, or priced as such. Pepper’s meant to be an adjunct hand the home, an alternate at work. Even Pepper’s pivots — the robot can, apparently, warn people to wear a mask, and has been imbued with “AI face mask detection” — haven’t been enough to save him from the cog factory in the sky. Yes, the most adorable robot that wasn’t has been put out to pasture, replaced by a newer younger model, know as the Whiz. The Whiz is a $400 a month cobotic vacuum — meaning, it CLEANS collaboratively with hired cleaners — and covers15,000 square feet of floor in three hours. However, it gets zero cute points, seeing as it lacks a face to anthropomorphize.

RIP Pepper, it’s not that the world didn’t want you… you just weren’t ready for us yet.

Louis Vuitton’s Spinning Top Speaker

Let’s be real: Louis Vuitton has never been subtle about their logo. The brand made its name slapping the ornate LV in various shades of beige onto bags, teddy bears, golf clubs… Given this, it’s unsurprising that their logo is prominent in their latest tech foray, reports The Verge. The logo adorns their UFO-meets-spinning top speaker, in large, repeated, embossed black letters. Oops, sorry, in embossed “emblematic signatures,” according to their lawyers… Yours for the sweet price of $2,890, a steal, right? Constructed from glass, stainless steel, 35 LEDs, and whatever the f**k “noble leather” is, at least their wireless speaker is striking. The LED apparently syncs to the beat, meaning you get a speaker with a side of a light show and it spits out an omnidirectional sound. What cracks me up is Louis Vuitton’s description of the said shiny toy as an “elegant and discreet travel companion.”

Agree to disagree.

Answers to “Two Truths and a Lie”: The hot-vax-app startup is the fake one. The short-lived Clover startup provided the Uber for Strippers app, and the Nipple web and desktop app lets you track your nookie (though not fully operational anymore).