The thing about marketing, and branding is, it’s less about selling the product immediately, and more about keeping the brand identity in peoples minds.

There used to be a time in the 1960s when Howard Johnson was one of the most dominant brands of hotels in America. They existed at the height of family road trips. The boomers were anywhere between 5 years old and 20 years old. So mostly at an age when they’re kids/teens. So they became the brand of ice cream at the hotels for the kids, good nights rest for the parents. But they never evolved as the boomers grew up, and the family road trip died off. Today, the brand is totally dead. It’s the Ask Jeeves of hotel brands.

But now look at Coke. Their ads don’t ever entice you to drink coke. They don’t really advertise the product. They advertise the brand. You see polar bears telling a short story, in 15 seconds. Followed by the coke logo. You don’t get “HEY EVERYBODY!!! DRINK COKE!!! IT’S DELICIOUS!!!”

They don’t do that. They don’t advertise a product, they advertise firmiliarity with a brand so when you’re in a store, and see soft drinks, you recognize the coke logo. Eventually you start seeking it out. And now those ads are no longer about advertising. They’re about conditioning. And it works. When’s the last time you had Jerrys old time cola? Or RC Cola? Maybe pepsi. But there’s a reason “Is Pepsi ok?” Is the meme, and the answer is no.

Max+ Go Away (with your inevitable price gouging)

They bombed Laos?

Well, if you’re renting, you have no idea what the previous renters treated it like. Just remember, you’re sharing a planet with idiots. They might have just been punching the seatbelt holder for no reason. And then you, not having that information, are like “why’s the seatbelt holder broken?”

sits in your lap

Peanut please. Peanut me now.

It may be possible to jailbreak an older, end-of-support Kindle and continue adding books to it. But doing so carries risks.

Yeah. The risk of being able to use your device without corporate oversight.

My brother in law

I just typed up a funny comedic reply. Then I read it back, and it came off wayyyyy too aggressive. It came off like I was just being an asshole for no reason. So I deleted it, and tried to workshop it. I wanted something that I could say mean spirited things, in a joking way, but it came off waaaaay more mean than it should have been.

So instead, imagine I sent a reply, where I was mean, but you could tell I was joking about the fact that we can’t have nice things because we’re all plebs, and not the billionaire ruling class. And then we’d laugh while giving them the finger.

Ok, all caught up? Cool. Back to work, dickhead!

The only way to get to the bottom of this is by giving our personal information, buying those VR glasses, and living inthe metaverse.

Should we do it? No? Oh. I guess that’s what they mean by “ignorance is bliss”.

I want to see a modern study on cigerette smoking.

When I was a kid (early 90s), my mom defended her decision to not stop smoking when she was pregnant with me, by quoting a study from the 1970s. They found it did not cause any ill effects.

Well around 2005 I was poking around the internet, and found that yes, that study was reported exactly how she claimed, and was performed by the Nixon administration.

It was also funded by Marlborrow. So take that study with a salt mine worth of salt.

I want a new modern independant study done. Because my mom never stopped, and I have always felt like something is wrong with me, but I’m too dumb to put it into words. I’m not calling it autism, but it feels like there’s a mental blockade preventing me from being me. I don’t know how to explain it.

I’m not defending this guy. I know nothing of him, nor his story. I haven’t even clicked the link, or seen the screenshot.

All that being said, I can absolutely believe some service (in this case discord) would ban him without just cause or recoarse.

Back in 2018 I got banned by twitter BEFORE musk bought it. A pro-wrestler posted a funny video of herself. I replied “Oh man, that killed me!”

As in…that was very funny.

Twitter bots mistook that for a threat of violence. Banned.

In 2023 I was awarded on reddit as being in the top 1% of karma earners for 2022.

Then, later in 2023, they offered me the chance to buy reddit stock before it went public. Well, I was dealing with cancer at the time, and had $0 income. So I couldn’t.

Then after I declined they gave my account a strike for a comment I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Like nothing about the comment even made sense what they were flagging.

Then it did it again the next week, just as the reddit IPO went public.

Then again a day later. Which banned my 10+ year old account. Someone on lemmy speculated that it was because I didn’t buy the IPO. Someone else speculated it’s because I used a VPN.

Either way, reddit’s official stance is that I was harassing users. When I asked what part of any of my 3 messages was threatening, the reply I got didn’t even address my question. Instead it just said my comments were reviewed by a team of humans who deemed my comments to be harassment.

To this day, I still don’t believe any human actually looked at my comments.

Netflix plan to bring even more ads to even more parts of it’s service…and I plan to continue not being a customer.

Well, not the first few batches of cyber truck. I think it went up for preorder before musk showed he was a nazi, and sold through probably 3-4 batches.

But after that? I agree with you.

Oh man! The 2003 blackout was AWESOME!!! I’m from Cleveland, and I thought I caused it. Local time power went out at 3:45pm exactly. I know that because in those days I worked at a regional grocery store, and we used physical plastic time cards that you swipe, and then it beeps and you click the button that says “In” to clock in after it beeps.

Well, I start my shift at 4pm, and I was allowed to clock in 15 minutes early, but not 16 minutes early.

So at 3:44 I’m waiting. And waiting. And then 3:45. Swiiiipe! power dies

What’d I do? Oh fuck…what did I do? It didn’t even beep. I swiped my card, and then everything went black…

These were the days when your phone didn’t have a flashlight, but the nokia phones of those days were bright enough you could kinda use the screen itself as a source of light.

So once I made my way out of the office, I realized the whole BUILDING had no power. Now I was less sure I caused it. I thought one breaker had somehow gotten tripped, but that would just be a small portion of the building.

Then a coworker came running in, and said the whole block was out. So now I knew I had nothing to do with it. We turned on the radio, as we waited to figure out what to do. The music got interupted a half hour later saying the whole city was out. Within another hour we found out it was half the country.

So we got sent home before it turned dark. And thats when the day got fun. We sat on the sidewalk with lanterns and candles at our apartment building. We then watched in pitch black as a single headlight came flying around the corner real fast. A motorcycle that was then followed by about 3 cop cars chasing him. We’re all drunk on the sidewalk, sitting on folding chairs. We see the motorcycle go flipping and there is no way for me to describe the weird light show we saw. It lasted forever, and also onlu about 2 seconds. We had no idea what it was.

Turns out the motorcycle hit a curb at 70mph in the dark, went airborn and was flipping through the air, before crashing through the window of a house.

It took police 90 minutes to find the rider. Because they thought he ran on foot. Turns out he hit the wall above the window, died on impact, and his body fell to the ground behind a bush.

But we were all laughing not knowing he was dead. We were just imagining being inside that house, in candle light, before randomly a motorcycle crashes into your front window.

We just thought he did a magic trick, and vanished. Suddenly cops were descending on our block, with ambulances, and for some reason a fire truck. So we took that as our cue to go inside and smoke weed, and have sex all night.

Next day is when we found out what we saw. We didn’t know he had died. We eventually had figured out the light show was the motorcycle flipping end over end.

There is a very easy way to force linux users to enforce this. However, I won’t give it away here, because as far as I can tell the current law makers are clueless.

And I don’t want to give them clues.

Ah, it happened in 1634. That’s why I hadn’t heard of this. I wasn’t born yet for a few more years.

I don’t know what you do with your life, and there’s no way to include everyones life in one post.

So lets just say you work at a laundromat. 8am-4pm.

Being famous would be like going to a grocery store at 6pm, and EVERYBODY is screaming your name, and saying things like “OMG!!! I LOVED HOW YOU ADDED FABRIC SOFTENER TO THAT LOAD OF LAUNDRY!!! I BET IT CAME OUT SMELLING SOOOOO NICE!!! CAN YOU SIGN MY NAPKIN???”

And then you go to the movies, and as you’re getting out of your car some random guy comes RUSHING over, and starts hugging you, and taking out his cell phone to take selfies with you without asking. And thats when you realize he’s not harmful, just disrespectful. In the past, people have ran at you with a knife because they saw you add Tide, but they prefer Gain.

And as you enter the movie theater, you see a couple of girls who notice you, and rush over and ask if you’d sign their tits. And you do.

Then you go watch your movie. And by the time you get out, you see all your silenced notifications. The world is talking about how you’re a pedophile, and tried grooming two 14 year old girls. And now half the internet is defending you saying there’s no proof, and the other half are saying they have pictures of your autograph on their tits.

The next day you meet a fan as you’re leaving work, and he pulls a gun. The gun jams, and you get away unharmed.

So you become a bit more reclusive. You no longer sign tits. You no longer engage with fans on the street. And now the internet is calling you an asshole. Saying you’re ignoring fans when they see you on the street. So you make your public time next to zero. You put out a tweet that basically says you love your fans but there’s been some incidents lately that haven’t gone well.

And now the internet is speculating if the girls were fabricated, and AI created to help you sell more washes at the laundromat.

So now at work everyone hates you for trying to decieve the customers. And you realize none of this is real. None of it matters. You may as well shave your head, and just go off on anyone who looks at you funny.

So then the internet talks about how you “went crazy”, and moved to Africa, when in reality you just moved to a small town in Ohio, where everyone is racist to you.

So now at your now at your new laundromat job, the stress gets to you, and you lash out at a customer.

AM I GOING TO WALK AROUND AND RIP YOUR FUCKING CLOTHES OUT OF THE WASHER??? THEN WHY FUCK ARE YOU WALKING RIGHT THROUGH??? AH-DA-DA-DA-DAAAH LIKE THIS IN THE BACKGROUND??? WHAT THE FUCK IS IT WITH YOU??? WHAT DON’T YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND??? YOU GOT ANY FUCKING IDEA ABOUT HEEEEY, IT’S FUCKING DISTRACTING HAVING SOMEONE WALKING UP BEHIND BRYCE IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING WASH CYCLE??? GIVE ME A FUCKING ANSWER!!! WHAT DON’T YOU GET ABOUT IT??? OOOOOOH, GOOD FOR YOU!!! AND HOW WAS IT??? I HOPE IT WAS FUCKING GOOD, BECAUSE IT’S USELESS NOW, ISN’T IT? FUCK SAKE YOU’RE AMATURE! STAY OFF THE FUCKING LOT, MAN! FUCK SAKE! NO! LETS NOT TAKE A FUCKING MINUTE! LETS GO AGAIN! I’M GOING TO FUCKING KICK YOUR FUCKING ASS, IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP FOR A SECOND!!! ALL RIGHT? I’M GOING TO GO…DO YOU WANT ME TO FUCKING TRASH YOUR LAUNDRY??? DO YOU WANT ME TO FUCKING TRASH YOUR CLOTHES??? THEN WHY ARE YOU TRASHING MY DAY??? YOU ARE TRASHING MY DAY! YOU DO IT ONE MORE TIME, AND I AIN’T WALKIN IN THIS LAUNDROMAT IF YOU’RE STILL A CUSTOMER! I’M FUCKING SERIOUS! YOU’RE A NICE GUY. YOU’RE A NICE GUY, BUT THAT DON’T FUCKING CUT IT WHEN YOU’RE FUCKING AROUND LIKE THIS!"

This then brings new people into your life who promise to make everything better. A whole organization dedicated to protecting laundromat employees by violently qttacking and harassing anyone who dares oppose you. Even going to far as to kill peoples dogs, and protest the funeral of dead soldiers because the widow in attendance wrote something mean about you online. In addition they will stalk people for you, and kidnap people for you, and give you connections to lawyers, and drugs, and women, and weapons, and cars, and all you have to do is remain loyal to them…or else they will kill you.

And that’s what being a celebrity is all about.

Two things…

1. Is…is Cleveland known for high energy usage? I don’t get the reference.

2. Tulips had a bubble? I’m so confused.

No no…vote for me instead.

My campaign motto is:

Bacon

And I will not elaborate or give any context. Just…Bacon.

Why don’t they just build a voltron???