Technology
We’ve been through this before. A new app hits the shelves and suddenly it seems like everyone is talking about it. It becomes the must-have app of the moment. Everyone is using it. VCs love it. Celebrities love it. Your younger sister loves it. Your friends love it. Your mom’s, of course, never heard of it. Which means you have to at least check it out.
Unfortunately we’ve been through this before. Some popular social apps never make it. Vine, which was originally promoted as a news app, became a great platform for comedians to make short-form videos. Twitter couldn’t…
Marketing
This year, Super Bowl 55 unleashed upon it’s unsuspecting audience, an unrelenting torrent of shockingly terrible ads.
They ranged from noticeably weird:
Maya Rudolph rides a tiny horse
The Jason Alexander Hoodey
To blatantly confusing:
Jimmy Johns is the King of Cold Cuts
Matthew McConaughey is Flat
To obnoxiously self-righteous:
Robinhood says we’re all investors
Can a burrito save the world
To painfully unfunny:
Ashton Kutcher accuses Mila Kunis of stealing Chee-tos
Tracy Morgan for Rocket Mortgage
To utterly pointless:
Paramount Plus Expedition
Fiverr visits Four Seasons Total Landscaping
To surprisingly well targeted:
Dr. …
Movies
Zach Snyder gets his groove back
It’s not often that directors get a chance to fix their mistakes. Screeners and test audiences help a little in giving studios insight as to how well their movies will be received, but it is not until a movie goes out to the general audience, and Twitter reviews are tallied, that a director or studio knows if they made the right moves.
The entertainment business is particularly difficult, because unlike the rest of the business world, it does not rely upon developing products or services that help satisfy people’s needs. …
Politics
My home state of Kansas is never one to miss an opportunity to humiliate itself on the national stage. After an eight year wrath of terror brought about by the likes of Sam Brownback, we finally have a governor who has some common sense and understands that you can’t fund road construction if you don’t have the taxes to pay for it.
Of course Kansas, never one to disappoint, elected post-Capital insurrection Trump apologists Roger Marshall and Jake La Turner to Congress. Marshall, fortunately, had the good sense to retreat from his stance. LaTurner; however, has not. Granted, LaTurner is…
Entertainment
A woman with nothing to lose
Margot Robbie’s fledgling production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, has gotten off to a rocky start. It’s first four films: I,Tonya, Terminal, Dreamland, and Birds of Prey had less than stellar reviews and no particularly significant returns at the box office. Some people blamed the writing, others blamed promotions, and some actually blamed Robbie herself. She cast herself in the title role of all four of those first four films. People claimed that she had a bad eye for casting in that she cast herself.
Robbie is obviously quite striking and easy on the eyes, which works great when the role calls…
Investing
Probably not 🤷♂️
There is always something wild going on in the world of finance. It’s what makes finance so interesting, but also what makes it so confusing. One can never really know who to trust when it comes to the stock market.
Does Jim Chanos really think Tesla is a terrible company or does he just want to convince everyone else it is a terrible company so he can profit off his short position?
Does Warren Buffett really think people should hold stocks for a long time or does he just want everyone else to hold their stocks for…
Influencers
The real star of the D’amelio duo
If you are unfamiliar with the D’amelio sisters I can only imagine you’ve been living under a rock for the last year. Charli, the primary sister in this dynamic duo, shot to unbelievable amounts of fame in the digital world within the last year. Harnessing TikTok as her weapon of choice, she began posting videos of herself dancing in July of 2019.
By December of 2019 she had grown her TikTok following to 30 million fans. At the beginning of March she was entertaining about 45M fans. And of course, thanks to our annoyingly treacherous pandemic, which caused a surge…
Success
The self-help world seems to be on a crusade of trying to convince everybody that we should all start waking up early. There is evidence to suggest that these assertions are not without merit. However, in my own experience, and people I am close with, waking up later is typically the way to go.
The basic argument says that by waking up early you get a jump on the day. There’s something powerful about being up before everyone else. …
Coronavirus
Jared Leto probably has the right idea when it comes to the Coronavirus.
In mid-March, after the pandemic hit, it made celebrity news that Jared Leto was unaware of the Coronavirus. He had been in the desert on a meditation retreat when the pandemic struck the US. He returned to discover that the world had devolved into complete and utter chaos.
I’m a little jealous of Jared Leto.
I sometimes wonder:
- Would life be any different if I had no knowledge of the Coronavirus pandemic?
- Would our reaction be different if we didn’t have the internet?
- Is the news to…
Entrepreneurship
It’s a lot harder than it looks
The ability to work from home is the dream for many people. You can wake up late, make some coffee or enjoy your breakfast, read the news, take care of your kids, work when you want, and run some errands whenever you want.
This is the dream but it is also a fantasy.
Working from home is a lot more difficult than people realize. As more and more workers attain the ability to work from home they are beginning to realize that it is not all it’s cracked up to be. …
Chase B Anderson
Freelance writer and professional gig-worker. I mostly write about the impact of technology on business & culture. Find me on twitter @chasebanderson.
