prog | Entries tagged with advertising

Rendering the video of a Jmac's Arcade now, but it won't be done tonight, and I'm entering into Busy Land so I don't know when it will be done. Maybe tomorrow if I can grab the time. This one will be pretty short, at just over three and a half minutes.

Why don't I have digg and del.icio.us links all over my two podcast sites? Sheesh. It takes me a while to catch up on these things. I also mean to look at libsyn.com. As I write this I haven't even visited the website yet, but I do note that lots of podcasts I don't listen to use it. If they have nice goodies for video podcasts I will set something experimental up.

Last night I played Antike with some nice people but I really disliked it. It's a zero-sum territorial game, and I lost a lot of territory early on to a player experienced enough to pull off a mega-super attack combo that I didn't understand, reminding me of recent attempts to play Hearts online. I then resigned myself to playing solitaire for the remaining 90 minutes or so, seeing how many victory points I could get by paddling around the little archipelago upon which my conquerors kindly let me live out my days before one of them finally and mercifully crossed the finish line. I tried to make a display of good spirits but I'm afraid it came out all biley and I apologize if I was acting too acid to taste.

Then I made a game attempt to watch super bowl ads but was so horribly offended by the first one I saw that I had to stop there. And any description of it really uses more words than it's worth (I've tried twice) so I'll just say that I really hate almost all TV ads. A lot.

Now that I've started posting there, I can plug

advert_eyes, a community that

colorwheel started a little while ago. It's for discussions about advertising. The most recent posts have me building cockamamie theories linking banner ad effectiveness with evolutionary biology, and later I admit to liking veggie burgers. You don't want to miss this.

One of many ads we've sprinkled over Google, actually. But this one has my favorite copy. Zarf wrote the last line. (Yes, it would be better with "and", but there is a 35-character-per-line limit.)

One of the angel groups I threw an unsolicited pitch at last week has set up an informal meeting with us this Thursday. This is in addition to the semi-solicited meeting with a VC person that we already have scheduled a couple of weeks out.

Woo woo. Wish us luck.

(Also another angelic representative, from River Valley Investors, sent me a rejection letter with a reason for rejection and some relevant advice in it, directly refuting a statement I blogged yesterday about how most capital groups reject applicants. I wrote him a nice-thank you note acknowledging this rare kindness, and he wrote me a you're-welcome note. So there you go.)

Are those anti-environmental ads for real, or a parody that lost its attribution and got out of hand? I listened to one on a podcast while in line at the post office today and made noises. They imply that environmentalists are against all CO2 emissions and therefore wish to make breathing illegal. Especially children's breathing. (Too bad for them that fetuses don't breathe or they'd able to swing some sweet cross-base message there.)

I like this stack of ads seen on BoingBoing, which (top to bottom) go from transcendental to earthy to one of the most jawdroppingly cynical appeals I've ever seen.

This is a brilliant ad, in both visual design and message.

Readers of Boing Boing or

cnoocy will know the punchline already, but if you don't, take a look at this version that I've intentionally shrunk so that its smaller text is illegible.

We have:

Lonely looking guy wasting a perfectly good party-night in front of a computer

Stark, scratchy typeface labeling him as a basement-dwelling elf-pretender

Amber-colored smudge in the corner that's clearly the logo for the product being sold

So it's probably a beer ad, right? With the tiny text saying something along the lines of "Don't be a pathetic loser like this guy; get out, drink [Foo] and get laid", right?

Nope: full image link.

Not only is it simply clever, but any gamer who first encounters it (even in full-sized print, I'll wager) will initially assume it's a setup for a sarcastic attack on their lifestyle (whether or not they're MMORPG players per se) in order to sell its thing, and it ends up in a loving embrace. (In order to sell its thing.) Holy crap. Give its designers 10d20 GP.

For whatever reason, the ~10-year-old Cross/Odenkirk launch vehicle Mr. Show seems to have risen in visibility lately. As I didn't have any HBO in the 1990's, I didn't even hear of the show until a couple of years ago, when its release on DVD generated some trickle-down buzz. After Netflixing one of these DVDs, I understood why: it's a sketch comedy show, but its sense of humor and timing is bang-on perfect for, erm, people sharing that sense of humor, and its everything-segueing-into-everything-else format was brilliant.

I watched the show on HBO after that, with my TiVo faithfully recording the rare times they aired it, usually as late-night filler. But last year TBS started showing it, and soon afterwards Comedy Central scooped it from them. (I mean that the instant CC started airing it, TBS stopped. Funny how one can sometimes track apparent contract disputes via TiVo.) And this made me kind of sad because even though the shows aired regularly, the insertion of ads broke up their rhythm. Furthermore, they bleeped out all the swearning.

But an interesting note about that: At first, CC bleeped nothing but the F-bomb and variants. Then it bleeped almost every blue word. And now it's shrugged, switched the show's rating to TV-MA (unless it was that way before, but I dern't think so) and bleeps nothing at all. I was actually pleasantly surprised to see that... it seems to be against the trend of TV management in the shadow of the current baby-jesus-led FCC. Good for them!

I think my favorite swear word right now is "cockgobbler" because it sounds like it should be a McDonaldland character. At first it would be villainous but soon would come the relevation that its intentions were merely misunderstood, and soon it would be accepted as openly friendly. I am not sure which particular fast-food item it should be associated with though. I guess chicken sandwiches.

Do they still make McDonaldland commercials though? My memory is fuzzy. The concept might have died when I was still a kid for all I can remember. Oh well. I'm sure otherwise I could have sold my idea to them for big bucks.

Has anyone seen that dreadfully creepy ad for Disney World featuring CG Mickey and Goofy talking about new park attractions? It's awful... the animation director apparently didn't know the difference between "elastic" and "liquid" and so the character's faces and even eyes constantly wobble and ripple like sacks of gelatin while they speak and gesture. I actually stop and watch this ad every time I start to TiVo past it, because it's such a car wreck.

How did Disney approve of this? I really have to imagine that this is an exception to the any-publicity-is-good mantra. Mickey really shouldn't make children cry just by smiling and causing his mousy facial-flesh to ripple back and forth.

My parents finally picked up a Globe to check real estate prices 'round here. They didn't believe the numbers I have recited to them, until now. But then this led into another long lecture (in the academic sense) about home-buying strategies, so I know it didn't really discourage them from their dream of seeing their youngest become a homeowner; owning property is the one true form of financial security, to them.

I'm still not convinced of why I'd want to own a home versus renting one. However, I suspect that I just haven't collected enough reasons yet. I still feel that it's pretty likely that Linden's the last apartment I'm going to rent, before entering the real estate market on my own. I feel that it's equally likely I'll live here for more than a year. Perhaps I'll break the two-year record I set with my W-ville place! But, yes... we'll see.

Volity news:

Volity isn't behind schedule, but I feel like it should be. I guess I'm just impatient. Some of this also comes from the fact I'm repeating myself in mail to people, including curious strangers who've been joining the mailing list. I've had to write two separate emails about how the graphics're going to work, to two people who independently asked the same question. The question was perfectly reasonable, emerging from the currently published doucmentation describing the graphics system in general but not in detail. This makes it clear to me which book chapter I ought to write next, which is great, but on the other hand I'm hesitant to write anything definitively until we actually have a client, and can prove (to ourselves as much as anyone else) that these ideas will actually work.

That's actually what I'm impatient about. Clients we have so far include a very basic command-line thing that

daerr wrote, and the Java client that K has recently started building. The latter is going to be the big deal, but it's a month or three away from usability. What to do in the meantime? I predict that I'll spontaneously sink some hours into mutating d's client to use the Jabber libraries I wrote, and then extending it from there to handle all the functionality I'm adding into the server code. Either that or talk d into doing it. We'll talk.

Random thought (spurred by the music the diesel is playing right now, dunno why): One of the Karate Kid movies (II? III?) had the title character visiting Japan, and the TV trailer depicted him awkwardly asking a local girl "Are you... arranged, like?" (Referring to arranged marriage.) My dad, when we watched this ad (long, long ago, mind you) thought he said "Are you arranged right?" and exclaimed about what a crude movie this no doubt was.

I'm pretty sure I saw Karate Kid II, but I don't remember anything about it other than the Bad Karate Man (he wore a black gi, boo hiss) and a scene of KK and his coach on the long flight to Okinawa (IIRC). The fact that they were flying wasn't as important as the fact that they were traveling, and the focus of their scene was conversation about their destination. I think I remembered that scene because it seemed inspiring to me, who was (and remains) jittery on cross-country airplane flights, and here were these guys not even thinking about an intercontinental flight.

That Christmas I got an action figure of the BKM, who didn't have kung-fu grip per se, but did have a button on his back or hip or somewhere that made him kick, and came with little plastic oil barrels or something for him to kick over. The other figures based on the movie all did different things, chop and punch and so on, but I didn't have any of those. However, the BKM was like twice the height of my Star Wars guys, and so made for an effective exotic villain in young jmac's chop-socky playhouse of the mind.

Has anyone ever created a piece of media titled The Kung-Fu Grippe? I'd check now but I'm not online. It could be about any number of things, anyway.

Crap. I just asked the girl "C'n I have half a refill of the dark?", but it came out as "have have a refill"... I'm speaking in thinkos... and now I have a second large coffee here, which is too much. If I drink it all I can't let myself have any coffee until I finish peeing all this out, which won't be until 6 p.m. or so, or I will turn into Mr. Coffee Nerves and ineffectively fly around the office with my little jet pack and ruin marriages until it's time to go home.

True fact: I'm less shy about the word "girl" than I have been, perhaps as recently as a year ago. UMaine isn't the most oppressively P.C. place on earth but it does encourage what I imagine is the standard battery of Right Thinking through Word Elimination that one sees in American universities. There, "girl" is never ever the right word, unless one is talking about an actual young child. It took years of soaking in the Real World to get a feeling for the contexts when the word is just fine -- even stylistically appropriate -- to apply to an adult female-type person, and the contexts when it is legitimately too squirmy for the 21st century. (Which are many, granted.)

I'm probably like this with a bunch of words, actually.

Of course, this assumes a rational audience. A friend once told the story that someone crossed out the phrase "The home of Boston's chic shops" from an ad poster in the T, and wrote "WE'RE CALLED WOMEN" over it.

Also, it's old news, but still: did I call it, or what? I was guessing that his downfall would have been a misstatement, not a sound effect. But, whatever. Doom doom doom. I will do what I can.

Hey, I don't remember that being there. (Look closely.) (Yes, it's in the movie version, too.) (From Derek Vadala)

Still not used to having a "moblog" (cough) camera... walking right past obvious photo opportunities and not realizing it until my walk-mind momentum has carried me too far away to turn around and go back. I'll get on the ball eventually.

This morning it was a new poster at the Park Street T station advertising (I think) a community college, and featuring a couple of smiling yoots in close-up. Someone had already attacked it in the necessary way, blacking out teeth, but instead of the usual Dali mustaches added nose studs and divers other facial piercings, which I find to be a new and exciting application of adivertilogical technology.

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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

Entries tagged with advertising

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