If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

…They’re just such a massive collection of thundercunts that anything they now come out with just seems like a giant pair of fingers being shoved down your throat:

https://vimeo.com/130232144

Eg: when the man is sad on the floor of the lift I just wonder if he’s feeling some guilt at being connected to HSBC laundering money from Mexican drug cartels. And when he’s laughing with those Asian gentlemen it might be because they all benefitted from HSBC’s illegal tax avoidance schemes in Switzerland.

Disgusting.

Fuck off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDP1e17qDU4

And another tip of the hat to the ridiculously pleasant and talented folks with whom I work.

This is a great idea:

(Interest declared: the creatives, Amber and Lovisa, are friends of mine.)

But if you know anyone who might be interested in buying a poster (or ten), point them in this direction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-7uXcvOzms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNUC6UQ_Qvg

Nice one, all you lovely, talented people.

Read all about it.

…I assume you’ve already read this.

But there it is anyway.

x

Posting sporadically.

Someone who did a brilliant thing for me in 2011 writes:

It’s Hayden, the guy who worked on the Water Water Everywhere iPhone app for you (quite a few years ago now I think).

I wanted to see if I could take advantage of the side projects posts that you sometimes run.

While, strictly speaking I don’t work in the ad industry, I’ve been working on what’s essentially a side project for the guys from an advertising agency out of my home town Melbourne.

Actually, the story goes like this. Josh Schooling, who’s 15 years old, came up with an idea for a mobile game. Then, in what could win him father of the year, his dad put together a team of people who work for him or have worked for him to get the game made.

Today, Spring Cat has been launched for iOS and Android. It’s an endless runner mobile game for iOS made by people who work for Bravo Tango Bravo Advertising in Melbourne or are freelancers who do work for BTB.

So, check out the game, it’s been great fun making it and I honestly thing that it’s great fun playing it as well.

Thanks, Hayden!

Good luck with that.

Worrying items sold in 1902 (thanks, T).

How Game of Thrones is written every year (thanks, J).

Rejected poster designs for The Shining, complete with Kubrick’s notes.

Superhero alphabet (thanks, J2).

Mad Max editing (thanks, A).

Tourists can go on Cocaine tours in Colombia (thanks, T):

Tom Hardy’s old MySpace page (spookily he claims, ‘I’ll crash the motor’ and ‘I am a goldfish walking through a desert’).

Cube dogs.

What’s inside toys (thanks, S).

Cassetteboy fun:

If any of you read the Mad Men post, reached the end, clicked on the Josh Weltman link and read to the end of that, you would have seen the following quote:

“…any edge that you have that makes people have more confidence in your idea tends to help its survival. So if you’re staying ‘til 10:30 and everyone else has left at 9pm, it helps. It’s just the way a meritocracy works. You can talk about whether it should or shouldn’t be that way, but we’re dealing with a place where it’s all subjective opinion. Like what you’re wearing. If it makes the CD believe in your idea more, that’s the world we’re living in. If what we want is something that’s more balanced, then we can’t live in a place that is so subjective. Most other careers have more of a balance of the subjectivity and objectivity of the work. And there’s not much of that in creative departments.”

I love it when someone articulates that which we all know but rarely speak of.

Clothes matter.

The hours you keep matter.

The music references you drop into a pre-prod matter.

Should they matter? Should anything matter beyond the work? Is it kind of sad that those kind of things have a bearing on something that you could argue to be broadly unrelated?

You can answer those questions however you want, but the answers are immaterial. We all know that every single thing a person does creates an impression of them that affects the way you assess all other aspects of what they do.

Joe’s into football? Joe is now a little more cool/sad/boring/everyman-ish etc.

Joe likes West Brom? Joe has become quirkier/more down to earth/lamer etc.

Joe used to play for West Brom under 18s? Joe is cool/odd/now wasting his life etc.

The extent to which that impression changes how much you do or don’t like someone’s work is totally unpredictable/variable/flexible. We all know it happens so we all play the game, whether consciously or otherwise. So wear those clothes, put those posters up in your office, drop those cool references. It might help you sell an ad, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll be judged more on your ability to do your job.

Or maybe not.