This post is part of a series I started after reading “Notice, Collect, Share” by Russell Davies. I’m more inspired than ever to get back into the habit of…noticing, collecting and sharing. As part of that return to habit, I’m going to try and find five things that interest me every week, and share them here on my blog. 5 things per week, for 20 weeks, equals 100 Interesting things. Maybe one of these things will inspire you. Maybe one of them will inspire me. We’ll all learn something along the way.
I’ve also been tracking all of the stuff I find in my “Deck Of Interesting” - it’s screenshots, links, and assorted notes of things that might make into one of these posts.
#36 Context As A Strategy Discipline Buried deep within an article filled with talking points from agency leaders about the uniqueness of their own agencies is an interesting paragraph about Context as a unique strategy discipline:
““Context is a discipline that only exists at Translation,” Rodriguez said, noting “the focus of my team is on how we choreograph a campaign, how we choreograph a message and idea so that it connects in culture … it’s that independent spirit that we have to go build something that we believe needs to exist if it doesn’t currently exist.”
While I disagree that we need “Context” strategists or that they are different from channel planners, creative strategists, or pure-capital-S-Strategists I do like the description of choreographing a campaign. To me, it’s a reminder that there isn’t one way to do anything and that the work is as much an art as it is an applied science.
#372 Why The Miami Vice Pilot Was So Good Aside from a few repeated viewings of the "In The Air Tonight” scene on YouTube and that my own condo style (and despite the fact that my own condo style was once referred to as Miami Vice), I’ve never actually seen Miami Vice.
This long-ish article on Vulture makes me want to watch the pilot. Mostly because it was directed by Michael Mann (I’ve previously written about my love for Heat and LA Takedown), but more so because the article talks about how the show truly defined a genre:
“The 97-minute Miami Vice pilot (two hours with ad breaks) aired on commercial TV but felt like it should’ve been in a theater. It was a shimmering postmodern neo-noir in the vein of movies like Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, Mann’s Thief, and Brian DePalma’s Miami-based remake of Scarface (to which Vice would often be compared). It also owed a lot to the sexy-bloody-glossy Hollywood features directed by English TV-commercial wizards who had crossed the pond in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including Alan Parker (Midnight Express), Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), Tony Scott (The Hunger), and Adrian Lyne (Flashdance). Another element in the mix was MTV, which debuted in 1981 and normalized a music-video aesthetic that was more about highlights and moments than literary concepts of conventional storytelling.”
#38 The All-AI Social Network I’ve been following the news of the All-AI social app for the last few weeks and am endlessly fascinated by it.
As one commenter wrote, “you can login and feel exactly how Elon Musk must feel with thousands of bot-replies to your every tweet, without the feeling of wasting $44 billion dollars.”
The app’s creator, Michael Sayman, is getting a lot of pushback. I understand why, but I also feel that this sort of thing will be the future. A text-based social network is easy to populate with AI. The next step is an immersive game world (imagine Skyrim, No Man’s Sky, or GTA) with characters having realistic personalities and full lives beyond just pre-written text.
Then extrapolate that further into an even more real social network where you can’t tell who is a your friend, a new friend, an AI, a bot, or someone using an AI.
#39 Writing Better If you’ve been following this series you know that I’m on a quest to be a better writer.
Better writing means simple language. I can’t remember where I found the image below, but I love the concept of saltintesta:
#40 The Elephant Graveyard Is Art Like almost everyone else I discovered The Elephant Graveyard due to his incredible takedown of Joe Rogan and his latest podcast. Every video he creates is art. The editing is perfect. The voiceover is well-written comedy delivered dryly.
it’s about punching up, but punching up so hard it becomes a David and Goliath situation. And one that a lot of us have been waiting for.
This week’s photo is fro NASA’s photo of the day and is of the “Rampaging Baboon Nebula”, which is 500 light years away (relatively close!).
