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“You know, it’s weird, man. It’s like everybody’s real cordial with each other. But, at the end of the day, we’re, like, buying weapons to destroy each other. I don’t want to, like, sound too liberal or anything. But it’s really not glamorous. This s*** f***** kills people.”
Impressive stuff from Vice. I remember when they were a punky zine in Montreal.
For the past ~6 months Google has been giving me this message when I try to reconcile my business email address (james(at)adhack.com) because of a change they’ve made to accounts managed through Google Apps for Domains.
As a result, all the data in my account prior to their change has been dumped in the kludgy james%adhack.com(at)gtempaccounts.com account. But when I try to add that account to an existing account or move it into a new account, I get nowhere. Or, more specifically, I get the error in the attached screenshot.
So I carry on with james%adhack.com(at)gtempaccounts.com for my Reader account and a few other Google services. This felt like a small first-world problem for many months but now feels like a Kafkafian purgatory.
I cannot merge the data into another existing account. I cannot migrate the data into a new account. So james%adhack.com(at)gtempaccounts.com persists.
The larger story is that Google wants me to use its products like Google+ and to pay for Apps for Domains so I can access Docs and Calendar and Mail. But I have no confidence in them delivering on reliability.
And then what? Who resolves the problem?
They say, ‘Sorry, there seems to be a problem.’
And they’re right. There is a problem.
As of March 21, 2012:
I like this.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
— Theodore Roosevelt
Found on Destraynor.
Welcome, 2012.
I have 2 new things I’d like to do with you: gymnastics and drawing.
Gymnastics? Yes. I’d like to try out gymnastics, again.
Last time I was taking any gymnastics I was in the 5 to 7-year-old range, so it’s return to youth, to recess, to trying to do something new with the body.
I’ve done a little searching and the options in adult gymnastics are scarce. Most are geared towards high-level gymnasts who want to keep training and stay in shape. I am not one of those.
I am an amateur looking to try gymnastics for 1 to 3 months. I have taught myself handstands with low consistency but can’t master the cartwheel. I’d like to be able to do a handspring and to feel comfortable with my body upside down and flipping.
Best option thus far seems to be Phoenix Gymnastics.
And drawing?
Yes. I am a terrible drawer. I have some difficulty with stick figures. Flowcharts I can must in a tortured fashion but I need some basic skills: shape, perspective, composition, scale. The fundamentals.
The search is on for a class. If you have anything to suggest, please let fly.
And all the best in 2012.
For the past decade I’ve been driving in Vancouver. During that time I’ve accumulated a goodly amount of knowledge about the drivers and cars on our city’s streets, and which ones that you need to watch the fuck out for.
As a public service, I now present my personal observations in a collection available for peer review and scrutiny: an inventory of the most dangerous cars and drivers in Vancouver.
It goes without saying that a few types of cars are dangerous. Cabs, of course, have no karma. Avoid them because you know they will screw you six ways to Sunday.
Models and Colours
Sometimes cars that don’t match the make or colour of the ones above or without the driver attributes above can still be a hazard to your health on the road.
But like poisonous snakes and berries, telltale signs reveal their danger.
I’ve collected a list of some of the most obvious signs to watch for below, from roughly most dangerous and most obvious, to less dangerous and less obvious. If you have additions, please add them. This is public service in action.
Now please, add your findings so we can make the world a better place.
This is awesome!
Let’s not forget “The Sloucher”
The Sloucher
He is always driving a 1990 Thunderbird SC with faded paint, a broken trunk, low profiles and shiny rims. The rims are worth more that the car.
Required attire a white sleeveless T. Hair cut – shaved very very short.
Stance while driving – slouching. The seat so far back that you wonder how he can actually reach the break peddle. Left hand / arm on top of the wheel – hand hanging of the edge. Right hand – flip phone – Motorolla (usually gold). Always leaning way to the right in the seat – phone to ear.
Never signals, wanders lane to lane. Always riding the line to the right in conjunction with the seat leaning or how in depth the phone call may be.
Optional – girlfriend in passenger seat. They kiss at length at stop lights if he isn’t on the shiny gold bling phone.
We have all driven behind him.
Ok, a couple of additions to start us off.
1. Any Audi Driver
2. In fact you can add the majority of BMW and Mercedes drivers
3. Any vehicle where it’s clear that one of or both of the following is true
a). The height of the driver when standing is less than the height of the vehicle
b). Where the potential cost of the vehicle divided by two > than the apparent age of the driver
Been thinking a lot about Hemingway quotes of late. Collected a few particular favourites here, below.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.
— A Farewell to Arms
Never mistake motion for action.
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
The first draft of anything is shit.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
In our world of excess and super abundance of words, entertainment, distractions and information, the spareness and clarity is refreshing.
Each quote a refreshing breath of hard-won wisdom.
My friend Patrick Brealey sings some dandy songs. Here’s an overview of his most-recent album, Mercury in Songbirds.
Have I’ve spoken to you about this before?
If so, now I’m following up with some early-stage draft ideas. If not, here’s the background.
I’m working on a bit of a model for creating great advertising.
My idea is that great advertising emerges from 3 things: an inheritance, a product and pretending. The image above presents a conceptual model.
The idea rose from reading this post by Russell Davies on pretending.
When adverting can hit the middle of this model, it succeeds. Big time.
The trouble is: everyone has their own version of the above model in their head. That’s what makes good advertising so tough to do.
Everyone has their own frame of reference (inheritance), usage patterns (product) and imagination (pretending). So everyone’s experience of the advertising is different.
Okay, that’s assumed. But can this model help us understand the ingredients needed to get beyond that unique experience and to a common experience?
That’s what I’d like you to help me with.
I’m trying to work out some clever, salient things to say that make sense of this idea and this model. I’d love to hear what you think about the model overall and about how useful it is.
Best,
James@adhack.com
(and comments way below too!)
Firstly, this was easier when talking about it over coffee and scribbles on napkins.
Secondly, I remain entrapped in the same paradox of believing the world is too complex for a single model to “crack” great advertising while believing deeply in integrative principles that unite all mediums and communications founded on human traits paired with the hubris of wanting to create a unifying model.
However, principles are good to put some form around this valuable thing called marketing. I like the the key buckets of product, inheritance and pretending. However, prescribing things like comedy or imaginary fall down depending on the brand or even a specific challenge at a moment of time for a brand. EA’s Tiger Woods game wouldn’t do too hot with humour right now.
What is interesting is that different brands live more broadly and deeply to different degrees in each particular frame of product, inheritance and pretending. They are not together a frame but each their own.
A brand like Coke has a very small product frame as it’s simply sugary water but pretending is tremendous, increasingly so over time as it builds off it’s inheritance. Pretending is massive – its platform of happiness is entirely based on pretending. That is what Coke is.
Microsoft is very slender on the pretending, struggles with its inheritance but is strong in the product frame (yes, they are if we put away our Apple blinders on for a moment.) Its ads are playing to this and out performing per dollar spent Apple multiple fold.
Lululemon is big and deep on product though slim on pretending – you buy into a bit of imagining it will lead to a more slender you but primarily product drives it still and in fact the lack of advertising further builds its inheritance over time.
Don’t know if these make any sense but I’ll follow up with a note to you of a different visualization to allow a more dynamic representation of the interplay of the entire framework between frames. A Venn diagram is a little to simplistic and static for the complexity you’re trying to simplify. But what I really love is the incorporation of imagination/pretending – it’s interesting right now seeing an influence of behavioral economics and hard science proving the messaging model and left brand MBAism in marketing are not the most effective approach. It is flippant to say they are not effective or broken but relative to the payoff of imagination they are inferior.
Watch you email for some poorly designed graphic thoughts.
I like the pretending post but–seen through an advertising lens–it mostly feels like he’s reframing a well-established idea in marketing: the power of aspiration. That is, so much of what we buy, whether a video game or a watch or a cup of coffee, is driven by its aspirational quality. The products and services we consume partly reflect who we are, what values we have, etc., but they often also reflect who we wish to be. Is that the role that pretending plays in your model above?
I’m not sure I follow the inheritance component properly. Is that a reference to cumulative experience? If you can say a little more about that and the inheritance-product commodity overlap, I’ll have a stab at further ruminations.
One of my original aspirations for this website was to use hip-hop slang incorrectly, mostly because that tends to really annoy humorless people. However, most of the time I can’t figure out what hip-hop slang is supposed to mean for real, so my attempts to use it incorrectly might inadvertently result in me using those terms in their proper context, which would just make me look like one of those misguided Caucasian idiots who talk too loud in bars. For example, on the track “Hip-Hop is Dead,” there is this line where Nas says, “Grinding, hitting Brazilian nines from behind.” He says it twice in a row. For the longest time, I had no idea what this meant. But then my friend Laura – who, weirdly, also works for Simon & Schuster – deduced that Nas was implying that he was having rear-entry intercourse with various Brazilian supermodels who were almost (but not quite) perfect 10s. It all seems so obvious now, but I had no idea what that meant for over a year. Oh well. Problem solved.
Chuck Klosterman from the hot promo action for his new collection of essays Eating the Dinosaur, which I recommend, strongly.
You have very keen eyes to observe what’s happening in trafic. I liked Your post.