We had chocolate, but not in a way people today can understand.

Thousand yard staring chocolate. Distant chocolate.

My brother still has the same haircut as that guy.

My favorite moment is when he takes a bite and looks up, as though orgasming/getting the wind knocked out of him. If a look could be gutteral, this one would be grunting.

It's like a Trump ad, if his TV people would only listen.

You mean the emphasis on whiteness?

That and nuts.

Also wind machines and hairspray.

And billowing dresses. It's barely subtextual. "Eat our chocolate, it's white."

Anyway, I only got one right on the quiz. And that was a guess. I don't even have a Spotify.

Still on Twitter, signed up for Blue Sky which is Jack's new Twitter like Mastodon fork the other day. It looks a lot better than Mastodon.

The multiple servers thing on Mastodon confused me.

2 out of 8. In my defense several of them I don't really see or use (Spotify, Snapchat at least).

Still reading Twitter, though mostly because I have a third-party client that must be small potatoes enough that it didn't get deactivated, and I can still read in chronological order. I've become way too attached to reading forwards in time (which is backwards as social media goes), and the Mastodon clients I've tried aren't quite as good at that.

12 same which is why I never signed up. It also seems to have a tumblr like culture.

I also think it's interesting that the 80s had a love affair with slow motion. It wasn't a new technology.

I bet there's a great dissertation out there somewhere looking at how camera angles/techniques/speed/jerkiness/cuts etc are used to communicate intensity in different eras.

Still on Twitter. It's not as good, and feels like it's falling apart, but it's still the best there is; when it's truly gone, which still feels like an inevitability, something will be lost. Mastodon doesn't quite do it for me but I think if you're in the right subcultures it's great. Also on Cohost--even paid for it--but it is extremely Tumblery and doesn't scratch the same itch (but again, good for the right subculture).

I'm still reading Twitter because I'm compulsive, but it definitely has gotten much less interesting. Not on Mastodon yet, possibly in a few more months.

é

May my hanging semicolons infuriate you as much as your Anglo-Saxon imbecilities infuriate me;

Go steal the water from some poor farmers, you pseudo European conglomerate.

0. Other than Twitter I don't use any of them much, but also I am terrible with shades of color

And punctuation.

As for the Nestle ad, wasn't this understood as a parody at the time?

No. I can't remember whether I thought it was notably absurd at the time or just ordinary, but I'm sure it wasn't an intentional joke.

Of what?

For more baseline 80s advertising: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1m28PqHYans

Yeah. It was rough before irony was invented in 1988.

There was a point sometime in the 90's after which most ad-makers had grown up with Mad Magazine and the baseline attitude in advertisements became tongue-in-cheek, and that ethos has persisted. Ads before that period (including the 80's which I see as transitional) are always a bit jarring.

Of course Japan never went through that shift.

I just figured out that's not Willem Defoe.

I got 5 out of 8 on the quiz, mostly guessing since I don't even use most of those apps.

I'm still on Twitter, though it has gotten noticeably worse both technically and content-wise as some of the more interesting people have left. There's still nothing else like it for the broad cross-section of different subcultures and the serendipity when they intersect.

My theory is that you were all too young to get the joke.

I stopped commenting on Twitter - no free content for Elon! - but I still read it quite a bit. Mastodon is almost there but I feel like I'd have to put a bunch more work into curating a feed, and its difficult to be arsed.

Meanwhile, on Facebook I feel like the signal-to-noise ratio is just so much noise these days. That means I don't find much good content there, but also I feel like when I put up good content, it doesn't get seen by others. Meanwhile, a spammy post asking for people's memory of their first car and also their mother's maiden name will get 10K responses.

"Remember the 80s, when we all used '4576' as a PIN. Repost if you still do."

no free content for Elon!

I feel like at this point people using Twitter probably costs him money so I don't feel a lot of qualms about it. Not that I'm a very active poster myself.

Meanwhile, on Facebook I feel like the signal-to-noise ratio is just so much noise these days. That means I don't find much good content there, but also I feel like when I put up good content, it doesn't get seen by others.

Yeah, Facebook has recently seemed to nosedive in quality even from its already low level. I still read it but rarely post anything.

23: Upon deep reflection, I realized this question is fundamentally unanswerable. Even if we had testimony from the creators that they were cracking up at the absurdity of it, or that this song expressed their sincere profound love of the chocolate bar, it wouldn't answer the question of how audiences understood it. And the likely reality is that most people that watched it were hardly paying attention, and didn't give it any thought at all. But plausibly the song stuck in their head, and created an association between Nestle and romance, and that's mostly how advertising is supposed to work anyway

Someone saw it and thirty years later declared war on "Critical Race Theory."

Back in the '80s I always thought of Netsle as the sophisticated chocolate bar, so I think the advertising worked.

Go steal the water from some poor farmers, you pseudo European conglomerate.

Farmers have the very best, F-A-R-M-E-R-S.

There weren't many seven letter words ending in S in this thread.

Some words need to end in S, L-E-T-T-E-R-S.

Whose joke is forced the best? H-E-E-B-I-E'-S.

Off to teach, under duress. T-O-O-D-L-E-S.

I'm mostly off twtr -- but logged in yesterday to send a DM to a guy I know, but whose email I didn't have. It worked, and he responded with his email. I try not to click on twitter links: sometimes it's the only bridge to get to the actual source material. I've been able to stay out of twtr rabbit holes, and ratio drama, which is a win for me.

I really don't have any issues with mastodon -- there are some folks I followed on twitter that I'll follow if/when they switch, but all in all, it serves much the same functions as twtr used to for me. It'll be better when more reporters get on it.

Choosing the 'instance' seemed like it was going to have consequences, but it basically hasn't. It might be more meaningful that choosing what hue the twtr bird is on your monitor, but that significance hasn't revealed itself to me yet.

As for finding new people/sources, I use the same system I did at twtr and it's working pretty well, given the limitations of where we are in the adoption curve. What is that method? Looking at what other people link, including Mineshaft alums AWB, Sifu, arthegall, etc. I never thought the algorithm was worth even half a shit at suggesting content for me.

I wasn't a follower of 'Black twtr' and don't know whether there's a real 'Black mstdn' yet. I did follow a number of folks in 'Native twtr' and that's the main loss I feel about dropping out. I have enough other sources for 'Montana politics twtr' so not feeling the lack yet. When Jon Tester goes fully onto mstdn, that'll bring a lot of other folks to it.

One scene in the nestle ad is really similar to a painting-- blue sky framed by classical white columns and a prone figure, but I can't for the life of me find an image. Love the ad, also LB's in 26.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K872GIcXCoo

23/35: The video was made by the J Walter Thompson agency, maybe there are memoirs by creative staff there? Certainly there are histories, this hosted at Duke:

A hallmark of JWT advertising practice has been its systematic approach to account planning and management. Beginning around 1916, JWT developed a simple mnemonic called the T-Square, a printed or metal draftsman's t-square that bore five key questions to guide all efforts toward designing and executing an account strategy: "What are we selling? To whom are we selling? Where are we selling? When are we Selling? How are we selling?" In the 1920s, account planning was further systematized with the Plan and Data Form, which spelled out the market situation, consumer base and advertising strategy. These two procedures guided account management for half a century, until the London Office developed what came to be known as the T-Plan. The T-Plan began with an intensive situation analysis that took into account not only the position of the product in the market, but also that of competing products, and undertook a much finer-grained analysis of the consumer base. This information drove actions by two different parties within JWT: the Target Planning Team working on the account, and the Strategy Review Board, a management oversight committee who reviewed and made recommendations of how a campaign should progress. The turbulent years of the mid-1980s saw the development of the Thompson Way, launched in 1987, a set of account management tools intended to reinforce JWT's core mission "to deliver greater value from their advertising than any other agency." In 1996, a new version, called Thompson Total Branding, emerged, that incorporated market assessments, product positioning, target audience and brand vision into a comprehensive and integrated brand communications strategy. Thompson Total Branding also sought to reposition the entire agency, "to transform the world's first advertising agency into...the world's first global brand communications agency" as an early internal presentation put it. The following year, 1997, JWT launched Thompson Total Targeting, which integrated brand communications with marketing database analysis.

Holy shit but the font the Verge uses for the score numbers is appalling, and to be incorporated in a graphic design-oriented elaborate webpage. I say malicious stoner, 100% that they go through a lot of black nail polish.

45.1 I think it's meant to evoke Maxfield Parrish's Daybreak.

I knew people who had prints of this when I was in college, but I had no idea how popular the image is. A better seller than The Last Supper?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daybreak_(painting)

16
Still on Twitter. It's not as good, and feels like it's falling apart, but it's still the best there is;

I use Reddit for most of what people seem to use Twitter for. It seems fine. Definitely seems easier to zero in on specific topics or communities, although that might not actually be a goal. It has had its own controversies, but nothing quite like Twitter's current meltdown.

I struggle to remember anyone with a print of "The Last Supper" in their dorm room.

I don't recall anyone with a nude from that distance either.

It's funny, I've experienced basically none of the technical issues on Twitter that people are always complaining about (I exclusively use a browser, no app). I never have to switch it back to the timeline one from the algorithm one, and rarely see any of the glitches that tend to get fixed. I'm not a power user, of course, but I see the complaints from so many people, many of whom are not AFAICT power users either. It's weird.

But, like, I never see Nazis or whatever except when someone normal I follow screenshots one to complain, which is something that's always been true. Not saying that there aren't more Nazis, just that I don't have to expend any effort to avoid them showing up in my feed.

I used Twitter almost exclusively to follow a limited number of journalists and journalist-ish individuals; I rarely posted. I deleted my account in November, fearing that mismanagement would eventually lead to (worse) security problems. It's not really usable without an account, which was the case before Musk took over anyway, and I haven't missed it even a tiny bit. In a more general way, I miss having a good journalistic aggregator, but I don't think I actually miss anything about the way Twitter facilitated that in particular. It's so far down the long list of regrets-and-nostalgia at this point, probably well below "that Ethiopian place with the amazing coffee and injera that was open for about three weeks in 2004." Would I trade all of Twitter to eat that dinner a few more times? Honestly...

The one thing I don't quite get about the persistence of (let's call it) overly sincere ads into the late '80s is that we know Boomers made fun of overly sincere ads when they were in their teens and 20s, but Madison Ave kept making them almost exclusively until the youngest Boomers were almost 30.

I guess one answer--and maybe this is just me taking Mad Men too literally--is that ad campaigns were largely dictated by business owners, who were A. older than that, and B. almost definitionally square.

Ads could be intentionally funny (whether successfully or not) or silly, but peep's notion that something like the Nestlé ad was made to be laughed with is just completely missing the zeitgeist. Evidence for this is when you go and look at ads from the early '90s that were trying to be ironic--they were laughably bad, because the makers had no idea how to match the kind of irony that was coursing through Gen X circles.

Somewhat separately, I don't think doing that sort of thing ironically was the Gen X vibe anyway--certainly, Gen X would parody overly dramatic productions, but so did Carol Burnett. Gen X humor tended towards the deadpan and the absurd, not the dramatic-but-with-a-wink.

Meanwhile, on Facebook I feel like the signal-to-noise ratio is just so much noise these days. That means I don't find much good content there, but also I feel like when I put up good content, it doesn't get seen by others. Meanwhile, a spammy post asking for people's memory of their first car and also their mother's maiden name will get 10K responses.

I'm on FB more lately for local politics reasons, and JFC is it ever trash. Not because of the local people, but the algorithm has made it completely mush. I really don't understand how anyone suffers it.

Burnett was funnier than people remember.

Facebook somehow learned that I'm a Swiftie and then very quickly my feed changed from being lots of Points Guy stuff that I can't get rid of to tons of celebrity stuff I can't get rid of. I've been trying to teach it I don't know who Jenna Ortega is and don't care about her, but it's really a losing battle. The weird thing this week is that apparently despite all the brouhaha about "female presenting nipples" the Facebook algorithms are happy to send you lots of photos of celebrities with visible nipples. And like I know I stopped scrolling to look when you showed a picture of Florence Pugh in a see-through dress, but that doesn't mean I want my facebook feed to become NSFW! So now I need to find some way to send the algorithm in a different direction. It's really infuriating that you have to train yourself not to stop scrolling (and not just to not click on things!) if you don't want them taking over your feed.

I would like to subscribe to the Florence Pugh Nipples channel. Right now all I get is guns and "old fart" platitudes.

Florence makes the very best, N-I-P-P-L-E-S.

despite all the brouhaha about "female presenting nipples"

I think that was a Tumblr-ism, and it's been more recently revoked.

I really think that the facebook purity software has made all the difference for me. No adds, no algo putting anything in front of me. Just people I follow.

I finally clicked through to see what commercial that was in the OP. I think I hit puberty to that ad campaign.

JUST NOW???

44: I didn't know arthegall was on twitter.

64 Mastodon

63: Heh.

Nobody explain the spelling thing to me. I'll remember better if I figure it out for myself.

Sounds like someone else hasn't hit puberty yet, either.

I wasn't a follower of 'Black twtr' and don't know whether there's a real 'Black mstdn' yet.

I think there is in the sense that there are a few servers where people are consciously referring back to "Black twitter" as the kind of space they're trying to build. There's even an instance at the URL blacktwitter.io .

But also mastodon as a general "place" is pretty white, at least in the English-speaking communities, and there was a lot of conflict and outright hostility to black people and other people of color who came over to try it out in the fall of 2022. It's not that every instance is white or hostile, just that if you were following lots of people of different backgrounds on twitter, it's hard not to notice that mastodon is much less diverse overall.** So there are a bunch of people I used to follow when I was on twitter* who either tried Mastodon and stuck with twitter or have said, in tweets, that Mastodon doesn't feel like a good place for them.

* and to be clear, I wasn't on Black twitter, to the extent you can be on any twitter that isn't just twitter, but I did follow a bunch of accounts who I think would describe themselves as being part of Black twitter.

** At the same time, the way federation and blocking tools work on mastodon has meant that explicitly white supremacist and Nazi instances can get completely banned so you don't have to do as much individual blocking if your individual instance has good moderators.***

*** Maybe just to prove that there's nothing inherently anti-Nazi about the technology underlying Mastodon, I think truth.social is actually built on Mastodon software underneath.

65: As arthegall or under his real name? I'll have to see if I can find the latter in my e-mail.

47. Yes! Thank you, Charlie.

Now we just need unironic idealistic video branding talents to consider https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bouguereau_Combat_des_centaures_et_des_lapithes.jpg . I am thinking maybe a good brand identity for a pizzeria, or maybe an eclectic food hall?

71.2 Maybe an insurance company?

34
If you post about how much.you love Hitler you can cost Elon even more in German fines.

Twitter is noticeably deteriorating, and I've created a Mastodon account as my backup plan (and to follow folks who are now primarily there), but around 5/6 of the people I follow on Twitter weren't on Mastodon when I checked, so I'm still mostly reading Twitter for now even while I observe the creeping rot. Anyone wants to follow me there, I'm @dewtell@sfba.social. Not posting much there yet, but I have some possible stuff planned when I get time.

69 It's too bad there was conflict and hostility. I don't see what the point of that would have been for the people instigating it, but people do dumb (and sometimes evil) shit.

I don't think anyone set out to create Black twtr or Native twtr, but the platform really lent itself to allowing them to develop and evolve. I don't see that the technology at mstdn prevents these things from developing, but the instance thing -- which I think takes up a lot more attention from new users than necessary, has been a barrier. Also, there's no way that on day 1 or day 100 that X mstdn would be as good as X twtr on day 2000.

56: I don't usually reply to myself, but my own train of thought got me thinking about Carol Burnett's "Gone with the Wind" parody and I learned that Bob Mackie designed the curtain rod-dress.

48 is disturbing because I have never seen this ghastly image in my life. Who's buying it?

"Like many artists Parrish also makes use of the Golden Ratio; a technique using math"

the Facebook algorithms are happy to send you lots of photos of celebrities with visible nipples.

For the first time I'm tempted to open a FB account.

Don't. All the nipples in the world won't make it worth the trouble.

True. It's not like that's the only game in town for celebrity nips.

80: Spoken like a man who is mostly into butts.

Or feet.

Daybreak must be the Raging Bull of paintings. I've seen a bunch of references and ripoffs of both but have never seen the actual thing, at least before now.

From the wikipedia page, we see that the Nestle ad has a second image based on a Parrish painting: Ecstasy. Which was done for a 1930 calendar. So, 80s evoking the 20s.

Who did they think wanted to eat white chocolate with almonds, anyway?

Yeah. It's not very good in terms of taste.

I wonder if you could also lump this commercial in with the then-new trend of playacting luxury (Grey Poupon).

And the product, I should say.

Who did they think wanted to eat white chocolate with almonds, anyway?

I wouldn't kick white chocolate with almonds out of bed for eating crackers.

Racist.

||
Any of you read Crane's The Bridge?
|>

Facebook has recently seemed to nosedive in quality

It is so, so bad, and at least half of the posts at any given moment are either meme-ified inspirational posters or the same dozen people endlessly posting other people's videos about "here's what it's like to be [ADHD/introverted/neurodivergent/etc]". At least the ads in my feed are now almost exclusively for THC gummies, which is an improvement over this winter when it was entirely ads to join the class action lawsuit over the water at Camp Lejeune. I guess sometimes it lets me know when people die too.

I also enjoy white chocolate with almonds. Take that, wokesters.

91: Twenty-five years ago, yeah. (I remember liking it.)

Thanks snark!

Like JRoth way back at 52, I have had basically none of the technical issues that people complain about. But also like JRoth, I only ever visit Twitter via browser on a desktop/laptop. My feed also behaves and stays on "Following" rather than switching over to "For You". I have noticed that people I like are posting less, or sometimes not at all. With a ruthlessly curated feed, it still works for me.

96: yes. the stupid dog thing was annoying but really that's it.

95: Tapping my memory banks a little more, I think my main response was "what if TS Eliot had been Whitman (gay, cosmopolitan, in love with America and cities and hunky sailors, often florid and sentimental)?" Looking at a precise of it, I may have skimmed over some of the weaker sections. (I can't remember why I read it! Maybe for a class that had several different instances of writing about New York?)

98: Whereas I've read no more modernist poetry than one might in HS (minus the Americans because Atlantic, other side off) but have read several different instances of epic poems.

I read one about some guys in a boat.

OT: Is it just coïncidence that I keep hearing about Rochester Institute of Technology or is it becoming better known in general?

Are you writing for the New Yorker now, Moby?

100: TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG!

I'm writing for the old ladies in Dubuque.

I do like The Bridge, even if some sections are stronger than others; also the shorter poems in White Buildings.

100 might have in mind Stephen Crane, who wrote both a famous story and a famous poem on guys in a boat.

Was it about a Greek guy?

106: I knew it was the Odyssey!

It was named after the video game console my parents got us for Christmas when we asked for an Atari.

Speaking of market segmentation and culture, the culture was is getting weird again with progressives apparently going to win Bud Light and Disney.

Bud Heavy isn't actually bad though. And the Mandolorian is great. I guess I don't need to worry about the rest.

So, we have new neighbors. Turns out that they like to sell $10 dinners from their front yard on the weekends. This is great! Last weekend it was barbecue, just now it was mole.

So I got to talking with the grandmother who made the mole, and in the course of chatting her up, I asked if mole is hard to make. What she does is chicken in a gravy of flour, chili powder, and peanut butter. I've never heard of this!

It tasted very different than standard local mole, and in fact tasted exactly as you'd expect.

The wikipedia entry on mole lists peanuts in a few variants, and I found one online recipe that called for peanut butter, but also called for ranch dressing. So who knows. But I thought it interesting.

(I really love regular mole, so I didn't like this as well, but it wasn't bad.)

IT'S MOLE!

Wait. They sell yard-dinners and everyone is like "Great. I'll take two."

I did, at least.

Do they make you promise you aren't a an undercover health inspector?

Well, they know where we live. And their daughter had Jammies for geometry last year, so they at least know he's not.

If their daughter ever forgets the Pythagorean Theory, they might seek revenge with poisoned food.

Didn't want to put this in the parenting thread, but Michelle Gurevich's song "For Old Time's Sake" is really funny. To be added to the smooth mix for local wine bars.

We don't even have a wine bar. Or if we do, I'm not aware of it.