This is astonishing even with sound off. I expect it to be five thousand times as awesome when I get to watch it later today with the sound on, when I can hear the music this enormous structure is playing.
(Hat tip: Dan Lyke.)
Turbo Tango is a new sort of a beverage that can’t be sipped.
“The soft drink-meets-squirty cream” is an aerosol soft drink, which when sprayed into the mouth will deliver a foamy blast of orange. It’s targeted at teens in the U.K., and will be sold at $2.50 per bottle.
The pack looks deliberately edgy and disruptive to engage with its target audience.
“Soft drink meets squirty cream?”
Unintentionally hilarious fireworks packaging.
There’s a clip at the end of the “Computer” firework going off which is really impressive in its way; I didn’t know that you could get consumer-level fireworks with such a complicated sequence ….
Bonus clip: The NYPD blowing up 5000 pounds of seized illegal fireworks. (In a wooded area? Oh well. The caption says it’s their firing range; if they want to set fire to it, that’s their problem.)
First thing in the morning, Magnificent Ruin
And the scary thing is, you can tell what it’s taken from instantly. Now that’s branding.
The copy reads thus:
Sputnik, the microwave that doesn’t look like a microwave.
Please note that my “brilliance” tag is applied to the ad and not the product, which is stupid.
Actually, by scanning bits of real humans, the Uncanny Valley is pretty well dodged here - although I could spot which one was the artificial human easily in the first video on the page, that’s more because of the photography/lighting differences than anything else.
The most telling thing is that the fact that Aimi Eguchi does not actually exist does not in any way discourage or turn off her fans. (Hardly surprising, really - why is it different from being a fan of any other fictional character?)
This is the frontier, folks. And remember, virtual movie stars and pop stars cost much less, do not age, do not die, and do not go on strike. The instant that Uncanny Valley is finally crossed for good, the flesh-and-blood talent had better have a really top-notch contingency plan.
Pluses:
- Cute book, looks from the sample like it will be well-written and well-drawn.
- A lot of thought was given to design. Waterproof pages! Lie-flat binding!
- Author is opinionated in a good way (the “why no vodka?” FAQ answer is worth the price of admission).
Minuses:
- A part of my personality is deeply allergic to crowdsourced projects; it feels too much to me like passing the hat (and I neither give nor accept charity). This book looks well-written, so I simply do not believe that he couldn’t get it published through normal channels. (And I don’t buy his logic that a publisher would make him “water it down.” A cocktail book? I don’t think so. Opinionated is a virtue in a cocktail book.)
- Author is opinionated in a bad way. The statement “There is no concise, comparable ‘cocktails 101’ book out there at the moment” is just flat wrong. What he likely means is that those books don’t make the cocktails his way; which is pretty rich coming from a man who puts carbonated water in a mint julep.
All that said, I may give him some money anyway because I like his chutzpah. I wish I could find a way to get people to give me money to be opinionated at them about booze. After all, I have become known as something of a mixologist myself ….
![tart-pastry:
The Brooklyn Bridge fashioned out of a bar code.
It’s the “from midtown to flushing” that really makes it. [Caution: May be less funny if you don’t know your way around New York.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ln73r5Y10X1qhbkduo1_500.jpg)
The Brooklyn Bridge fashioned out of a bar code.
It’s the “from midtown to flushing” that really makes it. [Caution: May be less funny if you don’t know your way around New York.]
… as viewed through old media. At the link above, Jason Oberholtzer (whose I Love Charts Tumblr, let it be said, I adore) rants mildly about the time structure of the average “Mythbusters” episode. If he confined his rants to the needless recapitulations in the show, I would have no quarrel. But he extends this to a general rant about the advertising content, and there we part company.
Look, while I respect good and clever advertising (which very little of it is, by the by), in general I’m no more fond of ads than the rest of you. But I’m going to keep repeating this to the why-can’t-all-content-be-ad-free set (and also to the why-can’t-all-content-be-free set, who are not necessarily the same people) over and over until it sinks in:
1. Nobody makes content for very long without getting paid. As a general rule, the higher the quality of the content, the shorter the time the creator is willing to go without getting paid for it. There are some exceptions - for example, stuff that has no market or cannot be legally marketed, which is why you actually sometimes find good writers writing fanfic for free. But as a general rule, a quality artisan’s willingness to work for free stops the instant s/he COULD get paid for it. And this is as it should be. Ideally, no one should make something for someone else’s consumption without some form of recompense. Do you expect a furniture maker to give you furniture for free, or a restaurant to give you food for free?
2. This means content will always cost someone money. It may not be you. You don’t pay directly for television programming, but someone else did.
3. There are two ways of getting that cost back, and only two: a) Use it as an inducement to get people to see your advertising, thus obtaining equivalent intangible benefit in terms of traffic for your goods and services, or b) charge people to see it.
That advertising that you block, or skip with your DVR, is paying for your shows. If you really want to go wholesale and not watch TV, that’s your business (and I am sympathetic; “Mythbusters” is actually the only television show I watch on a regular basis). But if you’re watching the shows and skipping the ads, or downloading it later without ads, you are a freeloader. When there are too many freeloaders, eventually the proposition becomes useless to the people paying for it, and your TV channel goes away - or goes paywall.
One of the big reasons for the nasty changes in new media - cable TV trying to find new ways to suck your soul, websites locking content right and left, big media’s increasing paranoia and their trying to find new ways to charge you for content and keep charging you for it over and over (see the game item posted yesterday) - is coming about primarily because you hated the ads so much and wouldn’t sit through them.
And the old-media types don’t do pay content very well by the new rules - they don’t really understand “lots of little tiny ad-hoc payments.” (Apple and Amazon do understand this, which is why they’re the current giants. Does this make people like Time-Warner want to compete more smartly? No, it just makes them more paranoid and jealous.)
The point is, if you don’t want ads, then you’ve chosen to have the other fight.
Go back to point one: It is unrealistic to expect anyone to give you content for free. Ever. It doesn’t matter if they are one loon at a desk or a big media conglomerate. Wanting to secure just payment for content is not greedy. It is not evil. It is realistic.
Ads or direct payments. That’s all there is. If you think you have a viable third option, I would like to hear it.
