Category: Advertisements

Creepy Is The New Normal

Brian J. Noggle

So I was streaming my gym playlist from my phone to the upgraded stereo system in our older conveyance on the way to martial arts class, and Amaranthe’s “82nd All The Way” played.

I really like the song, which is the best Swedish band covering another Swedish band’s song about Alvin York’s experience in so I played it a second time. As I said, the song prompted me to watch the Gary Cooper film Sergeant York.

And the next time I got onto Facebook, which I visit once or twice a day to see if I can recycle any quips I’ve made in the past as blog posts and maybe see if I can find an advertisement to make mock of since my Facebook feed these days is a woman I worked with for a year about fifteen years ago, two or three bloggers, and a slew of advertisements and recommended for you posts dealing with old music or old movie stars–along with the occasional post from someone else on my friends list when they have a Very Important Political Message that Facebook thinks I should see.

So I played this song twice on my phone, and I see:

I don’t have any Facebook app on my phone, gentle reader.

So are the two events actually connected, or am I seeing a pattern that only exists in my mind?

Welcome to the 21st century, where the Occam’s Razor now says Go with the crazy.

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Do I Look Like An Amateur?

Brian J. Noggle

C’mon, man, I have more than 80 classic Atari games in my Atari drawer now.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I own over 350 Atari cartridges (but not Private Eye), but most of them are duplicates. The collection has not expanded much since I haven’t seen any Atari cartridges in the wild recently except for a couple of very common cartridges at an antique mall marked something like $8 each.

So now you know, gentle reader, why I have accelerated my purchase of physical videocassettes and DVDs at garage sales–because I know that sometime relatively soon, perhaps as little as ten years, you won’t find them in thrift stores or garage sales, and if you’re like me, it will only in retrospect that you notice they’re gone.

Kind of like it was with old computers and game systems–in the 1990s, you could find them with some frequency at garage sales for low prices. Then, when all the attics were empty, they were gone. Mostly into my storage cabinets, probably, but you can find them on eBay at a premium, but where’s the fun in that?

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You Never Forget Your First

Brian J. Noggle

Apparently, Facebook thinks I need fake friend.

C’mon, man, let’s just call that what it is: an Americanized version of a Japanese dating simulator.

Jeez, I would hate to see a Signal ad that describes how Facebook sees me.

But I came not to dunk or snark on replicants, or at least the replicants our 2021 can produce since all the smart kids for the last twenty-five or thirty years have gone into data collection and manipulation instead of robotics and bio-engineering so that we’ve got a cut-rate Blade Runner future where instead of flying cars and moving billboards that are forty stories tall, we’ve got Facebook feeds and perhaps soon-to-be mandatory electric vehicles that can go dozens of miles on a single charge. I didn’t come to make snarky comments on the misbegotten world of the 21st century, but this is a blog, gentle reader, and I have been a curmudgeon since I was thirteen or fourteen years old.

Where was I? Oh, yes—

This would not be my first AI friend, gentle reader. And, no, it was not a Japanese dating simulator. Nor Bradley, the character in my purloined copy of Little Computer People.

The first would have been Eliza. Picture below the fold. Continue reading “You Never Forget Your First” →

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But She Hasn’t Gone Away

Brian J. Noggle

Now that the advertising wars have shifted, and advertisers are hopefully only temporarily outwitting my browser’s ad blockers, I get the chance to make mock of some ads I see.

Like this one:

Remember her? I remember that she was the geeky science girl on NCIS, although I never watched the show, and I had to look up her name. Pauley Perrette only left the cast of NCIS in 2018 under some controversy or dark cloud or something. After playing the character for fifteen years.

So Remember her? seems a bit premature since she’s already on another television show.

Of course, on NCIS, she’s made up to be manic pixie science girl with the high pigtails (are they still pigtails that high on the head?). However, she’s actually three years older than I am, which makes her fifty-something.

A more recent and natural photo accompanying the article circa 2018 shows her like this:

Still lovely, but definitely different.

So they could very well have used then and now pictures taken only a couple years apart. Or they could have taken a picture at the beginning of the series and compared it to the end of the series, and she probably would have aged, but that would have been mitigated by the makeup and hair styling.

Case in point: Here she is on her new show, made up:

Then and now and then again.

I didn’t click through on the clickbait. Someone else will have to let me know if they swapped in Myrna Loy for anyone.

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The Whiff of Desperation

Brian J. Noggle

I have mentioned and alluded to the fact that I am not on Facebook much these days. I go some days without checking in, but I do like to go and see what I’ve posted on this date in the past, and some organizations with whom I deal use it as the primary communications channel. But I’m not posting a lot of content over there to fill the data mines.

And, seemingly, I have muted most everyone, or no one I know is posting much, either. Because my feed tends to fill with various non-sequiturs and seemingly random advertisements and recommendations. I think the ratio of random sponsored stuff and actual friends’ posts is closing in on 1:1, and as I mentioned, some of the things don’t really make much sense to me.

That’s not to say I’m going to poke fun at the advertisements and recommendations. I mean, they might be effective to appropriate target audiences, but to me?

Continue reading “The Whiff of Desperation” →

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Judging By The Photo, For Me Number 1 Would Be Castration

Brian J. Noggle

Fun fact about Nogglestead: We have, and have had for twenty years free weights at our home in Casinoport, Old Trees, and Nogglestead. We’ve added an elliptical here at Nogglestead. And the items go mostly unused; I’ve given this some thought as I look around the lower level and think about how we could rearrange it for some novelty.

Personally, I need the ritual of going to the gym to exercise. If I’m home, I have other things to do. Often work or checking blogs. Or tapping out twee little posts like this one.

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Well, That Was Quick

Brian J. Noggle

Yesterday, I posted a bit on the audio course The Search for Intelligent Life in Space.

Today, I get a Facebook ad for launching my DNA to the moon.

Creepy fast.

The only thing that could make it creepier is if they were telling me that they were going to send my DNA to a Lagrange Point whether I liked it or not.

To be honest, I am not sure what sort of information the advertisers have on me. They think I’m wealthy, old, and beset by a variety of health issues. Somehow, brothers and sisters, my DNA is probably not the best hope for resurrecting the human race at some point. I am no Lazarus Long; I am more like Milwaukee Short.

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Maybe Realistic Isn’t The Word You’re Going For Here

Brian J. Noggle

A woman in essentially a medieval bikini and fishnets with a magic staff and some sort of fire spell? Happens all the time here in Brookline when men are over fifty.

I am not sure whether this is the same game that features pixellated T&A and promises You can do anything you want, but it looks to be different from Vikings, a game targeted at youngsters who are only over 40.

Which the ads suggest is also a hyperrealistic portrayal of a warlike patriarchal society around the turn of the first millennium AD. The bare female midriffs coupled with weapons guarantees it, as does the targeting to men of a certain age.

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But I Like The Current Model

Brian J. Noggle

Ad:

While I can understand why some people would like a different or new model in their bathrooms, I am still well pleased with the existing model, pictured here as seen modeling the IMAO Nuke the Moon t-shirt. Which, yes, is the clothing line that she modeled with Michelle Malkin.

You know, she looks like that today. Which is amazing.

Wait a minute, I have just been handed a note: Apparently, remodeling does not mean getting a new model for–it means something like repainting and updating the fixtures. I have never heard such a thing, and we certainly have not done anything like that at Nogglestead. I should look into it.

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Do They Come In Otter Sizes?

Brian J. Noggle

For some reason, Facebook has been showing me ads for cosplay wings over the last couple of days.

I cannot think what I might have clicked Like on that earned me that market segmentation.

In otter news (ahut), I saw that this guy posted something with an otter in it, and I would have clicked or commented on it, but that’s just reinforcing Facebook’s projected fetish.

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Not Exactly A Valentine’s Gift

Brian J. Noggle

So someone thought “You Are My Sunshine” in a music box would make a romantic gift of some sort.

I suppose that’s really sweet if you’re only familiar with the first verse, which is the happy romantic one.

The rest, though:

I expect many people have only been exposed to the first verse in that French’s Mustard commercial from twenty thirty almost forty years ago.

And parents of a certain age who sang the first verse to their children.

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I Am Not A Player Or A PUA

Brian J. Noggle

and I say that I’ve come to appreciate a wider beauty in women as I’ve gotten older, but….

I don’t think I’d ever have called that woman a dog.

What? She’s hugging the aforementioned dog, and the advertising company cropped it so there would be a pretty girl to catch your eye instead of another dog? HUSH YOUR PUPPY!

You know, I am not sure what principle determines that I am the target audience for canine vocalization cessation, but I see ads for this a lot. I live out in the country; I don’t care if other peoples’ dogs bark, and if my dogs bark, I want to hear what they have to say. I haven’t clicked through to see if the treatment is for your dogs or the yappy dog in the suburban next yard that prevents you from sleeping, but, brother, that isn’t here.

UPDATE: I hit Publish on the post, and I go to another Web site, and:

A different not-a-dog and her dog.

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I Ain’t That Eld

Brian J. Noggle

I’m used to seeing ads for the “I am from Wisconsin, but I live in Missouri” t-shirts that indicate that I’m a Packers fan or a Milwaukee fan or something.

But I got this one:

The Milwaukee Braves are juuuuuust a bit outside my lifetime.

My oldest baseball card, though, is a Del Crandall Milwaukee Braves card from about 1952 that I probably found when I was living in the projects; its corners are rounded and I think it’s taped together. But that doesn’t make me an Atlanta Braves fan. And I’m not sure when Facebook tossed my closet to review my baseball card collection.

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Won’t Work

Brian J. Noggle

REPORT: Washington Redskins Will Likely Change To The Washington Warriors.

Come on, son: “Warriors” has been racist for over 25 years. Anyone remember these guys?

Yeah, me either.

Gosh, after 26 years, I guess I have to explain. The Marquette University mascot had been the Warriors for fifty years when a couple of activists of some stripe or another decided that the word “warrior” was demeaning to native Americans (the depiction was of a native American warrior, one iteration of which wore a historically appropriate outfit that native tribes helped design), so they held a poll amongst students to rename them. Strangely enough, my votes for Jumpin’ Jesuits and Fighting Octopi were wasted, as the first round yielded not the result that the university wanted, so they had a run-off to get the result they wanted. You can read my contemporaneous column for the Marquette Tribune here and a more recent history of Marquette mascots here.

And the clock is ticking for them to discover that the “golden” part of Golden Eagles is racist. And “Eagles” might be jingoisticly patriotic or something.

Meanwhile, Marquette University is in the news again in an unflattering way, again:

Marquette University is a ridiculously left-wing institution, but this, from the College Fix, is appalling. An incoming freshman may have her acceptance revoked because she is a Trump supporter….

So, Brian J., you’re a profligate supporter of education, giving money to various schools and churches across the country, but how much do you give to Marquette every year? None, gentle reader: I already paid for what I got from them. I chose Marquette when I was twelve years old, and when I went there it was starting to be an environment where a conservative was an outlier. Now, I’m sure, it’s a place that’s unsafe for conservatives because the other students feel unsafe. And, I remind you, it has its first lay president instead of a Jesuit, so it’s on the clock for its Catholic affiliation ending entirely. So, yeah, let it do its thing there.

(Link via Instapundit.)

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