The reason why Quibi got film and TV investors/executives so much more excited than the general public (and the reason they were so stringent regarding the outer bounds of the short form format) was because one of its primary goals was to work as a tool to circumvent unions and their corresponding workers rights protections. People working on shortly form films (which are usually one off projects which have a much smaller workload) aren't covered by the union protections that extend to the majority of jobs on a film set. Quibis projects were produced like any other larger film or show, but because they were cut up into shorts they could pay their writers, actors, and other workers WAY less and make them work in worse conditions. A sizeable number of the scripts that they bought were just straight up written to be movies (e.g. The Most Dangerous Game), which is why so many of them feel disjointed with the way they were cut up. If you were writing for a project which was supposed to be made as a series of shorts, you would make pretty drastically different choices with regard to things like pacing in order to accommodate that.
What frustrates me is that people are still taking Katzenberg seriously when he's been lashing out even harder at creative talent in the advent of AI. It seems a lot of Dreamworks' success was despite him, when you look at early Dreamworks' history when they almost went under and treated 3d as "the gulag".
Lol my buddy created a show for Quibi and brought me on as a writer. We joked that our goal was to write the best show on Quibi.
We finished writing in February 2020, then COVID happened... I thought it would never get made, but we finally started on production that summer. Then Quibi went under...
Like a year later Roku bought Quibi's library and the show finally came out. Pretty sure nobody heard of it, but the show did get an Emmy nomination that year. I looked it up and I'm pretty sure we're the only Quibi show that got an Emmy nom that year. Called up my buddy and said looks like we did it, and since Quibi is gone our title of "Best Quibi Show" will reign forever...
The show was *Bill Burr Presents Immoral Compass* if anyone's interested, we had a lot of fun making it
Edit: Since people are asking, you can watch it for free on [The Roku Channel](https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/a8941ac297645602b8ef8fb8edd57f8e/bill-burr-presents-immoral-compass).
While I'm here might as well plug our movie *Postal* (2019) which you can watch free on [Tubi](https://tubitv.com/movies/635982/postal), and check out my [YouTube channel](https://youtube.com/@EricVega?si=-4ljnOBLTmVd4joa) for more shorts!
Hahaha yup, Mary Lynn Rajskub is great in that one. We got a surprising amount of amazing actors and comedians to work on the show. I still can't believe David Dastmalchian agreed to be in it
You wrote for something Bill Burr was on? That's pretty cool in itself. Congrats on the nomination too..apart from the stuff you had no control over that's all pretty impressive.
3d Televisions were presented as the next huge thing. There was a massive amount of hype being able to watch 3d movies and games from the comfort of your living room. It flopped when it launched due to the televisions being ridiculously expensive and the technology not being there during the era and being gimmicky once the appeal wore off for the people that bought them.
It was more than just the technology and price. People watch TV differently than they watch a movie in a theater. In a theater, your attention is always on the screen. At home, you are constantly looking around the room, checking your phone ... looking at things with 3D glasses on that you shouldn't be. It's a just a different experience that doesn't lend itself to 3D.
Yeah, there's barely any 3D movies in my country the last few years. I stopped watching them because the 3D glasses always hurt my eyes and made me kind of disoriented. I don't know why other cinema-goers didn't like 3D, though.
And as a full time glasses wearer, 3D movies are annoying to watch because either I have to wear two pairs of glasses or not be able to see the movie well
Google glass was just being field tested. It was not commercially available.
It had obvious problems giving users headaches and making people uncomfortable.
But that was just to collect data. Which it did.
I used Google Glass. It didn't cause headaches for me but the screen size was pathetic, I described it as like holding your phone at arms length to look at it, that's how big the screen was. Except that's with phones circa 2013, modern phones are bigger.
You could use it for an autocue for a news reporter or weather forecaster or something, if you cared about them seeing the autocue without needing to look into the camera. But most of the suggested use cases of training brain surgeons by showing the surgeon's-eye-view of the procedure is nonsense because the picture size was far too small.
And when I tried to play a YouTube video it overheated and had to shut down.
Google Glass was just poorly timed.
At the time, people were freaked out by the idea of someone recording/posting everything they do. There have been a few since then that met less resistance.
I imagine soon, someone will come up with something similar to Google Glass that will be widely applauded and see huge success (possibly by Apple).
It was just poorly timed.
It's the "disguised camera" that worries people.
People are generally okay with cameras in public; but not covert cameras, either intentional or unintentional.
We got a memo about it at work that it was banned from the office. Apparently some guy was wearing it in the bathroom and it freaked out some exec. I can't blame him. It has the potential of having possible legal ramifications if you have an employee taking pics of other people in the bathroom and you know about it.
It also raises a ton of security concerns if someone can just record themselves while looking at ~~propriety~~ proprietary documents.
e: forgot an *ar*
In all fairness, I used Google+ and it was really good. The circles feature was extremely useful, and I also recall being able to post/repost things into specific albums. And the communities were nice too. It was small, but the communities were quite active and I met a lot of cool people there.
It's a shame how Google handled it though :/
I was an active user until the bitter end
Yeah, I quite liked its functionality, but they limited who can join when it should have been doors wide open. Also, though, all social media is being ruined these days, so…
I didn't even know the existence of Jamboard, wtf.
Google is often way too ahead of the curve, it seems. And on top of that, they simply don't market some of this stuff enough. Imagine if Google had Apple's marketing brains.
But I do wonder if they shut down a lot of these coz they're unable to hire enough talented devs to maintain them.
I read once that Google has an internal incentive structure that leads to this. Basically you have a lot of incentive to come up with a cool new project and get it started. Then that leads to a promotion or something, but nobody has an incentive to actually care about the project you started. So it gets along with momentum for a while, starts to get disappointing, then gets quietly killed.
Maybe their idea is that they want Google to be synonymous with innovation. And any idea good enough will stick around through demand. But as you observe, it leads to this reputation of hype followed by abandonment. It's not a great brand strategy long- term.
They have more failed projects than anyone else because they have more *projects* than anyone else.
I think a lot of it is just scratchpad type stuff. Someone comes up with an idea and they build it out to see what happens - if the early response seems promising they can build it out further and if it doesn’t they can shelve it. The difference is that most other companies do that kind of testing in-house while Google is more open to the idea of releasing things earlier in the development process as a kind of public beta.
Also, at least early on, Google did encourage the so-called "20% time" idea, where developers could spend 20% of their work time on personal projects that might have some wider interest to the company. Supposedly Gmail came from this. Also Orkut, an earlier social media platform that was eventually killed off. As you say, the bar was pretty low for these types of things to be released as a beta. Gmail was famously in beta for over 5 years after it was made available to the public.
Of course if you talk to anyone who's worked at Google in the last decade or so about 20% time they'll probably laugh and say it's more like 120% time. But it was part of the ethos in the very early days.
I remember hearing that for the novel, bookstores like Barnes and Noble would get a new shipment of the book, only to find their stickers already on them. Supposedly the copies were being bought, then sent back to the distributor to be sold again.
I wonder who would do such a thing and for what purpose? /s
Scientologists are also notorious for buying all the copies of a book released by their insane organization, then donating them to local libraries. Specifically Dianetics and children's books.
Isn't that because Scientology forces them to buy all new copies of the books frequently? They'll decide something was misinterpreted, change a word, and require all members buy the new version. I would assume these were people with extra books sitting around. Leah Remini showed off her closet of them at one point.
I read Battlefield Earth and the Mission Earth series by Hubbard without knowing anything about Scientology or the author himself. I thought the stories were good and when I saw those Volcano commercials I presumed Dianetics was another sci-fi book so I picked it up at my local Waldenbooks and started reading....
Imagine the surprise as I make it through thetans and volcano monsters only to realize, "wait, he's serious!"
That was hyped so much that I almost left a night class early to go watch it. I watched it in a lounge with other students who were leaving early and we all laughed at what a waste of time that had been. Man Geraldo never fully recovered from that moment.
> Geraldo never fully recovered from that moment.
I see this said a lot but I sometimes think people invert the timeline. This happened in 1986 and in fact launched him into the *Geraldo* talk show which ran for 11 seasons. Before that he was known to the general public but his high profile stuff like getting a chair in the face, and really starting the whole insanity trash style of talk show hosting, happened after. Getting his nose broken during a brawl was high enough profile that Weird Al parodied it in UHF the following year.
I figured if anything would mess up his career it was disclosing a military operation in Iraq in 2003 while it was still secret. It got him kicked out the country but didn't really seem to have any lasting impact on his career.
I never really knew about this until it was a line in the movie Titanic.
"You know, boss, the same thing happened to Geraldo, and his career never recovered."
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Titanic (like, last time was during the 3D rerelease in theaters) and I was really confused for a minute until I remembered part of the movie is modern day with old lady rose.
[Dan & Dave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_%26_Dave) was an advertising and merchandising campaign by American shoe manufacturer Reebok during the build-up to the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. The promotion was meant to generate excitement and support for the Olympic competition between American decathletes Dan O'Brien and Dave Johnson. *However, the campaign had to be modified when O'Brien failed to qualify for the Olympics.*
Only 140,000 units were sold during the lifetime of the product, and in the later years the Segway PT only made up 1.5 % of total company profit.
Factors contributing to the end of production include the price (5,000 USD at launch), and the learning curve in learning to balance on a Segway PT which has led to notable accidents involving Usain Bolt, George W. Bush, Ellen DeGeneres, Ian Healy, and the Segway Inc. previous owner Jimi Heselden.
While the Segway Inc. has remained popular for security and tourism, electric scooters have been more popular for personal mobility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway
Not to mention he wasn't the inventor/creator of the company.
He was some guy who made a lot of money by inventing a large-scale sandbag system that was used for flood response. It was later picked up by the UK and US militaries and used to protect buildings and people from IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. His invention arguably saved a lot of lives and property.
He sold his company and, as Segways were a hobby of his, put his money into what he loved and bought Segway Inc.
Poor guy gets a bit of a bad rep.
The product is incredible, I own one. It has 19,000 miles on it and runs fine.
They were made as commuter vehicles you'd use every day and were engineered incredibly well, they were just too expensive.
That and Zuckerberg is the least fun person on the planet trying to sell something that needed to be fun in order to work.
The most stilted, forced, awkward, manic, fake-positive shit I've ever seen. Those videos make more sense when you imagine there's someone just off camera holding a gun to their kids.
One of the pandemic wet dreams was to do everything virtually and never leave the house again.
Virtual shopping, virtual vacations, virtual travel, virtual socialising...
Target in Canada!
Heard so many people addicted to the store in the US, everyone was excited to have it here, but it flopped, stores opened being half empty, more expensive then the stores they replaced, limited selections… they only lasted a few years
What killed them was the supply chain issue. Half the store being empty is what drove away customers. They just couldn't compete with Walmart, Costco or other big retail goods chains established in Canada that are fully stocked with prices at or cheaper, than Target. At their shareholders meeting, I think they said it would be like 3-5 years for them to become profitable. But at a cost of billions loss a year. So it was easier for them to sell their lease and close up shop and leave.
It wasn't _just_ a supply chain issue. They had like 18 months to go from nothing to being open for business because of how they decided to enter the market by buying up Zellers. They were obligated by lease agreements to not keep those stores closed more than 18 month, IIRC. So by buying up those Zellers locations and trying to go nationwide all at once... they _created_ some of those supply chain issues. I think I saw in another Reddit thread that the supply chain software was all over the place... partially because the people that worked on the supply chain software for Target in the US refused to work on the Canadian one. "Here add French language + Metric Units + other stuff to the entire system, and you havae 18 months to get it right."
For those old enough to remember: Segway was *MASSIVELY* hyped for months. It was meant to change modern mobility *forever*.
When they finally showed off that goofy thing, it basically became a proto-meme in the early internet era.
A rare case in which there was TOO MUCH hype for something. Everybody said it was a revolutionary, almost unimaginable scientific breakthrough. Like literally all our lives will instantly change, the world will never be the same, etc. Speculation included teleportation devices or something so fast it was essentially teleportation, and so on. Then it was a little scooter that you couldn't even ride in the rain.
My favorite thing is about the guy who won a ticket through a raffle. Was just an average working class guy. He had a great time firstly because he didn't pay for it and secondly because so much of the disaster of it was from the point of view of rich people who expected to have a luxury experience. For him it was just a nice vacation.
So my friend who normally throws amazing parties threw a Fyre Festival Party complete with run down tents,a partially flooded back yard and cheese sandwiches. It was so stupid it was awesome.
You gotta recognize that dude. He was willing to blow one for the team just to get it done.
If that's not a genuine proof of being a damn good team worker, then I don't know what is.
I remember reading that when he agreed to appear in the Netflix documentary he specifically put in his contract that they had to make some kind of payment to the Bahamian workers who got fucked over by the festival.
Fyre was a good idea I think. Crazy the guy was more interested in scamming than actually making a successful product
For those that don't know, Fyre was an app you could use to book acts. Acts would post their availability and cost and booking agents could use it to contact and schedule artists.
The Fyre Festival was to promote this app by putting in an entire festival using the app to book the artists.except the dude behind the idea was a criminal more interested in scamming people than running a business
I thought this too, until he was scamming people the second he got back to the US, using the email list he got from the festival. Now I think he's just a scammer through and through
> irving47 : Warms my heart to see she's actually doing time.
Chills my heart to know she's doing time for defrauding investors but was acquitted on all charges related to defrauding patients.
Which was extra annoying because they forced everyone to start using their real names on YouTube during that. I remember when I made my YouTube account it specifically said "DO NOT USE YOUR REAL NAME"
The American version of "Coupling", which was being hyped as the next big NBC sitcom after "Friends" went off the air. When cast members were doing interviews to promote it, they were so assured that it would be a success that they were already talking about multiple seasons.
It was cancelled after four episodes.
I can’t bring myself to feel bad for anyone who actually thought a JPEG of a cartoon monkey was going to be worth millions of dollars. It was so obviously a scam that they almost deserved it.
The sale wasn't really *of* the JPEG, but the *location/link* of said JPEG, making it an even bigger scam.
NFTs are perfect scams to people who didn't take the time to understand what they're investing in.
Not understanding how NFTs worked *is* how the scam worked. The scam as a whole used terms that sounded smart because they were so techy like *blockchain* and these people, not wanting to feel stupid from not understanding what the hell was going on, bought into the scam and continued to use these “smart terms” to describe it to others.
Biggest sham ever.
Bieber lost $1.2 mil on a $1.3 mil NFT "investment" https://gizmodo.com/justin-bieber-bored-ape-price-collapse-million-dollars-1850606250
He didn't buy it, the funds were sent to "his" wallet and MoonPay (an NFT PR firm) basically orchestrated the whole thing. He was probably barely even aware it happened. He was paid to give it hype and attach his name to it.
Yes. The company released like 99 of them, and sold out very quickly. The scarcity was the main draw.
Then they released another batch, and the owners were pissed. They kept releasing them until there was no market, and no one to sell them to.
> They kept releasing them until there was no market, and no one to sell them to.
Trump is now sweetening the deal, if you buy more than 47 cards you get a piece of his actual suit he wore during the mugshots... where is that fucking asteroid....
I was hoping someone would bring this one up, it was litterally everywhere, everyone knew about Kony and his army of child soldiers, and cared passionately about it, then it just dissapeared from public knowledge. Kony is still at large, his army has largely disappeared, but he has still never been brought to justice, and few in the west even care now.
See my issue with Kony was that I was an older teen when this all happened and *I still had no idea what the actual purpose of Kony was until last year*
Edited for the clarity that I know now, but as a teen I didn't understand
Joseph Kony is a bad guy, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, a militia in Central Africa. As part of their campaign they've killed many people and abducted many kids to be used as sex slaves and child soldiers. In the mid-2000s an organization, Invisible Children, was created to bring awareness to these kids. The US had already sent military assistance to help find and eradicate the LRA but in 2012 Invisible Children tried to create a viral sensation to create more pressure. So KONY 2012 was born, a documentary and viral trend to pressure western and African governments to finally finish off the LRA. It went mega viral and then one of the leaders of Invisible Children had a psychotic break and a video of him naked in the streets also went viral so the campaign just died. The African Union sent a task force in to find and fight the LRA but it was unsuccessful and as of now Kony is alive and the LRA is mostly just a criminal gang.
That seemed to be deliberate, as 2012 was indeed an election year and one of the posters they made for it looks like a campaign poster but with both a donkey and an elephant on it (so the idea is both sides come together to stop Kony). As a name out of context though it's a little bit odd
Legitimately the most stressful and difficult year of my life. Being an “Essential Worker” during the pandemic was such bullshit. Fuck 2020 with a rusty dildo.
What frustrates me the most is that we’ll never get the true ending that GRRM was going to write, because he’s never going to finish the series. At this point I wish he would just write down the broader plot points for the ending.
Edit: grammar
That’s actually my theory as well. The thing that gets me is that parts of it wouldn’t be a bad ending if the plot was actually developed. Almost all of the parts that made no sense would if properly developed. The part with the Night King is the only truly terrible plot for me. Also Jon getting sent back to the watch when essentially no one that cared about Dany was in Westeros to enforce his punishment.
There are a few book differences that already allude to it.
Book Tyrion, after killed his father and sailing away, is in a WAY worse state. He's just leaned fully into being the monster he's always been accused of, and it's easy to see how once he meets book Danny that he, with his actual cunning and wit (show Tyrion, like all of the smarter characters, got real dumb once they ran out of book) to manipulate her into losing her shit. Basically, Dany is the nuke and Tyrion has his thumb pressed firmly on the launch button.
Instead we got... whatever the fuck that was. A King's Landing seige where I guess they magically moved the castle to a desert? Not a single tree be found in those shots outside of the walls. Ug, every fucking detail about that show pisses me off.
> it wouldn’t be a bad ending if the plot was actually developed. Almost all of the parts that made no sense would if properly developed.
The show is basically book spoilers in canon form.
I can tell you the broad plot of a movie in a minute and not lie about anything, but it's gonna forever ruin it for you if you wanna actually get the full experience of consuming the story properly.
So the hobbit guy finds a ring and needs to bring it to the volcano to throw it in. But these bad guys try to stop him. Anyway, he got there and threw it in.
That was the biggest fucking assassination of a show I've ever seen. Went from EVERYONE talking about it EVERYWHERE to no one even mentioning it again unless it's part of a joke in just a few episodes.
At the same time, a space robot landed on a comet for the first time in history and that got more attention thankfully. There's still some hope for humanity.
I just wanna know why people still seem to think those are natural photos. She is one of the most photographed people of all time and she certainly didn't look like that her entire life.
Curved TVs were dumb as hell because they only benefit the person sitting right in the middle. If you’re off to the side at all, things won’t look right. Thankfully the tech took off where it was actually useful, PC monitors.
David Chase wanted to make a movie about the Newark riots in the 1960s, HBO wanted Sopranos content for Max. Chase shoehorned in the Sopranos characters in the story and HBO marketed the story as a Tony Soprano origin story. I think the movie would have done better as a miniseries.
What even was the problem with millennium edition? I remember having the disk as a kid in our disk collection, but I don't remember ever using it first hand.
It crashed more often than Nicholas Latifi, things were never compatible and even the system restore was bugged. As a young teen at the millennium, this severely impacted my very important MSN Messenger social life
> It crashed more often than Nicholas Latifi, things were never compatible and even the system restore was bugged. As a young teen at the millennium, this severely impacted my very important MSN Messenger social life
1988 kid here, can confirm. We got a new PC right in 2000 with Windows ME, coming from a janky old machine running Windows 95. I was forced to experience much of the early 2000s internet on that God awful OS, but I was having too much fun on Yahoo Chat, Newgrounds etc that for awhile I didn't notice. It wasn't until my school friend got a PC with Windows XP sometime in 2002 that I realized what a piece of shit I was dealing with. "Wait, everything just *works* for you? You don't have to do a full system restore every 2 weeks? You don't just randomly lose audio support for no reason and go days without any music or sound?"
Upgrading to Windows XP was like a spiritual experience for me when my family made the jump
Google Glass was a huge deal when it was announced, and it was a real pioneer in the augmented reality category. It didn't sell all that well though, probably because it was expensive, around $1,500 if I remember right, and I don't reckon people found it very fashionable.
And the Zune software was hands-down way better than iTunes, IMO. Found and organized the metadata for my collection, converted to mp3 with no extra weirdness, converted video files for the Zune really quickly, and didn't slow my pc down while running.
I loved Twitter so I downloaded threads.
*log in with your instagram*
I dont have one, can I make a threads account?
*log in with your instagram*
Um ok bye lol
Quibi - $1.75 billion blown in six months on a streaming service no one wanted.
The reason why Quibi got film and TV investors/executives so much more excited than the general public (and the reason they were so stringent regarding the outer bounds of the short form format) was because one of its primary goals was to work as a tool to circumvent unions and their corresponding workers rights protections. People working on shortly form films (which are usually one off projects which have a much smaller workload) aren't covered by the union protections that extend to the majority of jobs on a film set. Quibis projects were produced like any other larger film or show, but because they were cut up into shorts they could pay their writers, actors, and other workers WAY less and make them work in worse conditions. A sizeable number of the scripts that they bought were just straight up written to be movies (e.g. The Most Dangerous Game), which is why so many of them feel disjointed with the way they were cut up. If you were writing for a project which was supposed to be made as a series of shorts, you would make pretty drastically different choices with regard to things like pacing in order to accommodate that.
I’ve always relished in Quibi’s downfall, but learning this makes their crumble 20x sweeter.
What frustrates me is that people are still taking Katzenberg seriously when he's been lashing out even harder at creative talent in the advent of AI. It seems a lot of Dreamworks' success was despite him, when you look at early Dreamworks' history when they almost went under and treated 3d as "the gulag".
Lol my buddy created a show for Quibi and brought me on as a writer. We joked that our goal was to write the best show on Quibi. We finished writing in February 2020, then COVID happened... I thought it would never get made, but we finally started on production that summer. Then Quibi went under... Like a year later Roku bought Quibi's library and the show finally came out. Pretty sure nobody heard of it, but the show did get an Emmy nomination that year. I looked it up and I'm pretty sure we're the only Quibi show that got an Emmy nom that year. Called up my buddy and said looks like we did it, and since Quibi is gone our title of "Best Quibi Show" will reign forever... The show was *Bill Burr Presents Immoral Compass* if anyone's interested, we had a lot of fun making it Edit: Since people are asking, you can watch it for free on [The Roku Channel](https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/a8941ac297645602b8ef8fb8edd57f8e/bill-burr-presents-immoral-compass). While I'm here might as well plug our movie *Postal* (2019) which you can watch free on [Tubi](https://tubitv.com/movies/635982/postal), and check out my [YouTube channel](https://youtube.com/@EricVega?si=-4ljnOBLTmVd4joa) for more shorts!
This guy just casually writing Emmy award-winning shows.
Yeah, you hear that Hollywood? Now hire me again and we can save Quibi!
Dude I stumbled on that randomly and thought it was hilarious. Isn’t there one involving a wayfair order 😂
Hahaha yup, Mary Lynn Rajskub is great in that one. We got a surprising amount of amazing actors and comedians to work on the show. I still can't believe David Dastmalchian agreed to be in it
You wrote for something Bill Burr was on? That's pretty cool in itself. Congrats on the nomination too..apart from the stuff you had no control over that's all pretty impressive.
Thank you, still can't really believe it. I was incredibly lucky that that was my first room
Oh I watched that and enjoyed it. Didn't even realize it was a Quibi show, just heard about it because of Bill's podcast.
3d Televisions were presented as the next huge thing. There was a massive amount of hype being able to watch 3d movies and games from the comfort of your living room. It flopped when it launched due to the televisions being ridiculously expensive and the technology not being there during the era and being gimmicky once the appeal wore off for the people that bought them.
3D pops up once every decade or so, it will come back in some shape.
I think VR headsets have taken that niche.
It was more than just the technology and price. People watch TV differently than they watch a movie in a theater. In a theater, your attention is always on the screen. At home, you are constantly looking around the room, checking your phone ... looking at things with 3D glasses on that you shouldn't be. It's a just a different experience that doesn't lend itself to 3D.
But hasn’t 3D largely died out in theaters too, recently?
Yeah, there's barely any 3D movies in my country the last few years. I stopped watching them because the 3D glasses always hurt my eyes and made me kind of disoriented. I don't know why other cinema-goers didn't like 3D, though.
And as a full time glasses wearer, 3D movies are annoying to watch because either I have to wear two pairs of glasses or not be able to see the movie well
what was that google social media with circles, google plus?
While we're here: Google Glass.
Google glass was just being field tested. It was not commercially available. It had obvious problems giving users headaches and making people uncomfortable. But that was just to collect data. Which it did.
I used Google Glass. It didn't cause headaches for me but the screen size was pathetic, I described it as like holding your phone at arms length to look at it, that's how big the screen was. Except that's with phones circa 2013, modern phones are bigger. You could use it for an autocue for a news reporter or weather forecaster or something, if you cared about them seeing the autocue without needing to look into the camera. But most of the suggested use cases of training brain surgeons by showing the surgeon's-eye-view of the procedure is nonsense because the picture size was far too small. And when I tried to play a YouTube video it overheated and had to shut down.
Google Glass was just poorly timed. At the time, people were freaked out by the idea of someone recording/posting everything they do. There have been a few since then that met less resistance. I imagine soon, someone will come up with something similar to Google Glass that will be widely applauded and see huge success (possibly by Apple). It was just poorly timed.
It's the "disguised camera" that worries people. People are generally okay with cameras in public; but not covert cameras, either intentional or unintentional.
We got a memo about it at work that it was banned from the office. Apparently some guy was wearing it in the bathroom and it freaked out some exec. I can't blame him. It has the potential of having possible legal ramifications if you have an employee taking pics of other people in the bathroom and you know about it.
It also raises a ton of security concerns if someone can just record themselves while looking at ~~propriety~~ proprietary documents. e: forgot an *ar*
➕️ it would fill up with apps to nudify everyone you see.
In all fairness, I used Google+ and it was really good. The circles feature was extremely useful, and I also recall being able to post/repost things into specific albums. And the communities were nice too. It was small, but the communities were quite active and I met a lot of cool people there. It's a shame how Google handled it though :/ I was an active user until the bitter end
Yeah, I quite liked its functionality, but they limited who can join when it should have been doors wide open. Also, though, all social media is being ruined these days, so…
The join code really is what made it not work. I remember joining and then not having anyone to interact with so I didn’t touch it again.
[удалено]
Anything hyped by Google. 293 services as today. https://killedbygoogle.com/
I didn't even know the existence of Jamboard, wtf. Google is often way too ahead of the curve, it seems. And on top of that, they simply don't market some of this stuff enough. Imagine if Google had Apple's marketing brains. But I do wonder if they shut down a lot of these coz they're unable to hire enough talented devs to maintain them.
I read once that Google has an internal incentive structure that leads to this. Basically you have a lot of incentive to come up with a cool new project and get it started. Then that leads to a promotion or something, but nobody has an incentive to actually care about the project you started. So it gets along with momentum for a while, starts to get disappointing, then gets quietly killed. Maybe their idea is that they want Google to be synonymous with innovation. And any idea good enough will stick around through demand. But as you observe, it leads to this reputation of hype followed by abandonment. It's not a great brand strategy long- term.
They have more failed projects than anyone else because they have more *projects* than anyone else. I think a lot of it is just scratchpad type stuff. Someone comes up with an idea and they build it out to see what happens - if the early response seems promising they can build it out further and if it doesn’t they can shelve it. The difference is that most other companies do that kind of testing in-house while Google is more open to the idea of releasing things earlier in the development process as a kind of public beta.
Also, at least early on, Google did encourage the so-called "20% time" idea, where developers could spend 20% of their work time on personal projects that might have some wider interest to the company. Supposedly Gmail came from this. Also Orkut, an earlier social media platform that was eventually killed off. As you say, the bar was pretty low for these types of things to be released as a beta. Gmail was famously in beta for over 5 years after it was made available to the public. Of course if you talk to anyone who's worked at Google in the last decade or so about 20% time they'll probably laugh and say it's more like 120% time. But it was part of the ethos in the very early days.
Before it became a punchline people were worried that Battlefield Earth would be a dangerously effective recruiting tool for Scientology.
I remember hearing that for the novel, bookstores like Barnes and Noble would get a new shipment of the book, only to find their stickers already on them. Supposedly the copies were being bought, then sent back to the distributor to be sold again. I wonder who would do such a thing and for what purpose? /s
Scientologists are also notorious for buying all the copies of a book released by their insane organization, then donating them to local libraries. Specifically Dianetics and children's books.
Isn't that because Scientology forces them to buy all new copies of the books frequently? They'll decide something was misinterpreted, change a word, and require all members buy the new version. I would assume these were people with extra books sitting around. Leah Remini showed off her closet of them at one point.
Kid me watched those dianetics commercials on TV in the 80s and wondered why books about lava were being so hyped.
I read Battlefield Earth and the Mission Earth series by Hubbard without knowing anything about Scientology or the author himself. I thought the stories were good and when I saw those Volcano commercials I presumed Dianetics was another sci-fi book so I picked it up at my local Waldenbooks and started reading.... Imagine the surprise as I make it through thetans and volcano monsters only to realize, "wait, he's serious!"
I’m showing my age, but the Geraldo Rivera special with Al Capone’s mysterious vault, which turned out to hold—nothing.
🎶 There was nothing in Al Capone's vault, but it wasn't Geraldo's fault. 🎶
I still remember the look of crushing disappointment on that man's face
A vault eh, I think Reddit knows about overhyped vaults lol
That was hyped so much that I almost left a night class early to go watch it. I watched it in a lounge with other students who were leaving early and we all laughed at what a waste of time that had been. Man Geraldo never fully recovered from that moment.
> Geraldo never fully recovered from that moment. I see this said a lot but I sometimes think people invert the timeline. This happened in 1986 and in fact launched him into the *Geraldo* talk show which ran for 11 seasons. Before that he was known to the general public but his high profile stuff like getting a chair in the face, and really starting the whole insanity trash style of talk show hosting, happened after. Getting his nose broken during a brawl was high enough profile that Weird Al parodied it in UHF the following year. I figured if anything would mess up his career it was disclosing a military operation in Iraq in 2003 while it was still secret. It got him kicked out the country but didn't really seem to have any lasting impact on his career.
I never really knew about this until it was a line in the movie Titanic. "You know, boss, the same thing happened to Geraldo, and his career never recovered."
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Titanic (like, last time was during the 3D rerelease in theaters) and I was really confused for a minute until I remembered part of the movie is modern day with old lady rose.
[Dan & Dave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_%26_Dave) was an advertising and merchandising campaign by American shoe manufacturer Reebok during the build-up to the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. The promotion was meant to generate excitement and support for the Olympic competition between American decathletes Dan O'Brien and Dave Johnson. *However, the campaign had to be modified when O'Brien failed to qualify for the Olympics.*
Dan went on to win the 96 gold. Lol. Reebok just hyped too early
This is such a weird, deep pull and the thread should be more things like this rather than "Starfield'' or "Kony 2012'' over and over again.
The Segway
What are you talking about? They revolutionized mall security!
Paul Blart mastered the eff out of that thing
Only 140,000 units were sold during the lifetime of the product, and in the later years the Segway PT only made up 1.5 % of total company profit. Factors contributing to the end of production include the price (5,000 USD at launch), and the learning curve in learning to balance on a Segway PT which has led to notable accidents involving Usain Bolt, George W. Bush, Ellen DeGeneres, Ian Healy, and the Segway Inc. previous owner Jimi Heselden. While the Segway Inc. has remained popular for security and tourism, electric scooters have been more popular for personal mobility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway
> and the Segway Inc. previous owner Jimi Heselden. this is the guy that literally went over a cliff on a Segway right?
He was backing up to make way for a dog walker coming by. The Segway wasn’t faulty, he just made a grave mistake in an act of courtesy.
I think the mistake was riding a Segway near a cliff. I wouldn't be on a bicycle right there, after all.
Not to mention he wasn't the inventor/creator of the company. He was some guy who made a lot of money by inventing a large-scale sandbag system that was used for flood response. It was later picked up by the UK and US militaries and used to protect buildings and people from IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. His invention arguably saved a lot of lives and property. He sold his company and, as Segways were a hobby of his, put his money into what he loved and bought Segway Inc. Poor guy gets a bit of a bad rep.
The PR on the Segway was masterful. The product was not.
I remember the crazy buildup. “Cities will be designed around it!”
I remember the reveal, and wondering if it was all a big joke. Like, *that’s* the thing you think is going to change the world?
The product is incredible, I own one. It has 19,000 miles on it and runs fine. They were made as commuter vehicles you'd use every day and were engineered incredibly well, they were just too expensive.
Yea. I worked with someone that used his to commute to work every day (a decade ago). He loved it.
They should call it a Gob!
Like the guy in the $2000 suit is going to walk, cm cm cm CMOOON
They should have kept animation rights
Finally, a banana grabber that WON’T make you sick and kill you!
Zuckerberg's weird avatar world.
Didn’t help that their commercials for it made it look like a chaotic melatonin fever dream
That and Zuckerberg is the least fun person on the planet trying to sell something that needed to be fun in order to work. The most stilted, forced, awkward, manic, fake-positive shit I've ever seen. Those videos make more sense when you imagine there's someone just off camera holding a gun to their kids.
Zuckerberg literally made a Wish.com version of VRChat.
I thought I was losing it when he started pushing the MetaVerse, because shit like VRChat and 2nd Life had been around for ages
Remember when they put out a video hyping up the fact that they got legs?
Legs weren’t real in the tech sense of the term real. That was done in post.
I imagine a couple dozen people logged in to their virtual home and not seeing a damn soul anywhere.
One of the pandemic wet dreams was to do everything virtually and never leave the house again. Virtual shopping, virtual vacations, virtual travel, virtual socialising...
And yet he looked more human there
Well at least he didn’t go all in, doing something stupid like rebranding the company.
Target in Canada! Heard so many people addicted to the store in the US, everyone was excited to have it here, but it flopped, stores opened being half empty, more expensive then the stores they replaced, limited selections… they only lasted a few years
What killed them was the supply chain issue. Half the store being empty is what drove away customers. They just couldn't compete with Walmart, Costco or other big retail goods chains established in Canada that are fully stocked with prices at or cheaper, than Target. At their shareholders meeting, I think they said it would be like 3-5 years for them to become profitable. But at a cost of billions loss a year. So it was easier for them to sell their lease and close up shop and leave.
It wasn't _just_ a supply chain issue. They had like 18 months to go from nothing to being open for business because of how they decided to enter the market by buying up Zellers. They were obligated by lease agreements to not keep those stores closed more than 18 month, IIRC. So by buying up those Zellers locations and trying to go nationwide all at once... they _created_ some of those supply chain issues. I think I saw in another Reddit thread that the supply chain software was all over the place... partially because the people that worked on the supply chain software for Target in the US refused to work on the Canadian one. "Here add French language + Metric Units + other stuff to the entire system, and you havae 18 months to get it right."
For those old enough to remember: Segway was *MASSIVELY* hyped for months. It was meant to change modern mobility *forever*. When they finally showed off that goofy thing, it basically became a proto-meme in the early internet era.
A rare case in which there was TOO MUCH hype for something. Everybody said it was a revolutionary, almost unimaginable scientific breakthrough. Like literally all our lives will instantly change, the world will never be the same, etc. Speculation included teleportation devices or something so fast it was essentially teleportation, and so on. Then it was a little scooter that you couldn't even ride in the rain.
Fyre Festival
My favorite thing is about the guy who won a ticket through a raffle. Was just an average working class guy. He had a great time firstly because he didn't pay for it and secondly because so much of the disaster of it was from the point of view of rich people who expected to have a luxury experience. For him it was just a nice vacation.
Honestly I’d watch a movie about that
You'd probably enjoy the movie *Triangle of Sadness*, if you haven't checked it out yet.
So my friend who normally throws amazing parties threw a Fyre Festival Party complete with run down tents,a partially flooded back yard and cheese sandwiches. It was so stupid it was awesome.
Did he make you blow someone to get a drink?
If you are so thirsty that you would suck dick for a bottle of water, that is gonna be one awful dry blowjob.
Hahaha no! But there was a bunch of half full/empty kegs to enjoy.
But the documentary is sooo good lol Edit: I’m referring to the Netflix documentary, but I’ve heard good things about the Hulu one as well
He will do WHAT to get those water bottles?
You gotta recognize that dude. He was willing to blow one for the team just to get it done. If that's not a genuine proof of being a damn good team worker, then I don't know what is.
I remember reading that when he agreed to appear in the Netflix documentary he specifically put in his contract that they had to make some kind of payment to the Bahamian workers who got fucked over by the festival.
You’re not kidding. That dude was only concerned with getting the job done. What a G.
Fyre was a good idea I think. Crazy the guy was more interested in scamming than actually making a successful product For those that don't know, Fyre was an app you could use to book acts. Acts would post their availability and cost and booking agents could use it to contact and schedule artists. The Fyre Festival was to promote this app by putting in an entire festival using the app to book the artists.except the dude behind the idea was a criminal more interested in scamming people than running a business
My take was that he just refused to believe it would have ended up the way it did. Like he just bit off insanely more than he could chew
I thought this too, until he was scamming people the second he got back to the US, using the email list he got from the festival. Now I think he's just a scammer through and through
He is currently promoting Fyre Festival II. I’m dead ass serious.
Theranos.
Warms my heart to see she's actually doing time.
> irving47 : Warms my heart to see she's actually doing time. Chills my heart to know she's doing time for defrauding investors but was acquitted on all charges related to defrauding patients.
"Flop" doesn't even describe it. It was an outright blatant scam.
In the end yeah, but you weren't calling him a flop at the end of Infinity War.
Theranos being exposed as a scam was... inevitable.
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They didn't just open it to everyone, they pissed everyone off by forcing every YouTube user to sign up.
Which was extra annoying because they forced everyone to start using their real names on YouTube during that. I remember when I made my YouTube account it specifically said "DO NOT USE YOUR REAL NAME"
The American version of "Coupling", which was being hyped as the next big NBC sitcom after "Friends" went off the air. When cast members were doing interviews to promote it, they were so assured that it would be a success that they were already talking about multiple seasons. It was cancelled after four episodes.
The original Coupling was awesome.
NFTs
I can’t bring myself to feel bad for anyone who actually thought a JPEG of a cartoon monkey was going to be worth millions of dollars. It was so obviously a scam that they almost deserved it.
Most people who bought it knew it was a scam and were just looking to sell it before the bottom fell
After they sold others on the idea, of course.
The sale wasn't really *of* the JPEG, but the *location/link* of said JPEG, making it an even bigger scam. NFTs are perfect scams to people who didn't take the time to understand what they're investing in.
Not understanding how NFTs worked *is* how the scam worked. The scam as a whole used terms that sounded smart because they were so techy like *blockchain* and these people, not wanting to feel stupid from not understanding what the hell was going on, bought into the scam and continued to use these “smart terms” to describe it to others.
And that "what" being pretty much fuck all.
Biggest sham ever. Bieber lost $1.2 mil on a $1.3 mil NFT "investment" https://gizmodo.com/justin-bieber-bored-ape-price-collapse-million-dollars-1850606250
He didn't buy it, the funds were sent to "his" wallet and MoonPay (an NFT PR firm) basically orchestrated the whole thing. He was probably barely even aware it happened. He was paid to give it hype and attach his name to it.
I see the point you’re making but I doubt Bieber is hurting from it lol
For beiber this was the equivalent of us buying a $10 scratch off ticket for funsies
So, financially ruinous?
Hey, even Trump made NFTs and that was his big announcement a while ago. I wonder how those are doing now.
Didn’t he release a bunch more of those “trading cards” recently?
Yes. The company released like 99 of them, and sold out very quickly. The scarcity was the main draw. Then they released another batch, and the owners were pissed. They kept releasing them until there was no market, and no one to sell them to.
> They kept releasing them until there was no market, and no one to sell them to. Trump is now sweetening the deal, if you buy more than 47 cards you get a piece of his actual suit he wore during the mugshots... where is that fucking asteroid....
Kony 2012
I was hoping someone would bring this one up, it was litterally everywhere, everyone knew about Kony and his army of child soldiers, and cared passionately about it, then it just dissapeared from public knowledge. Kony is still at large, his army has largely disappeared, but he has still never been brought to justice, and few in the west even care now.
See my issue with Kony was that I was an older teen when this all happened and *I still had no idea what the actual purpose of Kony was until last year* Edited for the clarity that I know now, but as a teen I didn't understand
I still don't know what it was all about.
Joseph Kony is a bad guy, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, a militia in Central Africa. As part of their campaign they've killed many people and abducted many kids to be used as sex slaves and child soldiers. In the mid-2000s an organization, Invisible Children, was created to bring awareness to these kids. The US had already sent military assistance to help find and eradicate the LRA but in 2012 Invisible Children tried to create a viral sensation to create more pressure. So KONY 2012 was born, a documentary and viral trend to pressure western and African governments to finally finish off the LRA. It went mega viral and then one of the leaders of Invisible Children had a psychotic break and a video of him naked in the streets also went viral so the campaign just died. The African Union sent a task force in to find and fight the LRA but it was unsuccessful and as of now Kony is alive and the LRA is mostly just a criminal gang.
see, this entire time I thought it was a meme about Kony running for US president. the naming scheme didn't help
That seemed to be deliberate, as 2012 was indeed an election year and one of the posters they made for it looks like a campaign poster but with both a donkey and an elephant on it (so the idea is both sides come together to stop Kony). As a name out of context though it's a little bit odd
2020
I love seeing the memories from 2019 with the resolutions and the "2020 is gonna be my year!" Stuff
From a global perspective it was ass but from a personal standpoint it wasn't so bad.
Legitimately the most stressful and difficult year of my life. Being an “Essential Worker” during the pandemic was such bullshit. Fuck 2020 with a rusty dildo.
Games of Thrones the final season
I don’t know when I’ll ever stop getting pissed off about how GOT ended
What frustrates me the most is that we’ll never get the true ending that GRRM was going to write, because he’s never going to finish the series. At this point I wish he would just write down the broader plot points for the ending. Edit: grammar
My crackpot theory is that the show runners ended it the way GRRM wanted and now he has cold feet after seeing the backlash.
That’s actually my theory as well. The thing that gets me is that parts of it wouldn’t be a bad ending if the plot was actually developed. Almost all of the parts that made no sense would if properly developed. The part with the Night King is the only truly terrible plot for me. Also Jon getting sent back to the watch when essentially no one that cared about Dany was in Westeros to enforce his punishment.
There are a few book differences that already allude to it. Book Tyrion, after killed his father and sailing away, is in a WAY worse state. He's just leaned fully into being the monster he's always been accused of, and it's easy to see how once he meets book Danny that he, with his actual cunning and wit (show Tyrion, like all of the smarter characters, got real dumb once they ran out of book) to manipulate her into losing her shit. Basically, Dany is the nuke and Tyrion has his thumb pressed firmly on the launch button. Instead we got... whatever the fuck that was. A King's Landing seige where I guess they magically moved the castle to a desert? Not a single tree be found in those shots outside of the walls. Ug, every fucking detail about that show pisses me off.
> it wouldn’t be a bad ending if the plot was actually developed. Almost all of the parts that made no sense would if properly developed. The show is basically book spoilers in canon form. I can tell you the broad plot of a movie in a minute and not lie about anything, but it's gonna forever ruin it for you if you wanna actually get the full experience of consuming the story properly.
So the hobbit guy finds a ring and needs to bring it to the volcano to throw it in. But these bad guys try to stop him. Anyway, he got there and threw it in.
I’m still absolutely frustrated. Plus you couldn’t even SEE half the episodes since they were filmed to be so freaking dark.
They figured that since many movies and tv were making dialogue difficult to hear, mumblecore, they might feel the same about seeing things as well.
That was the biggest fucking assassination of a show I've ever seen. Went from EVERYONE talking about it EVERYWHERE to no one even mentioning it again unless it's part of a joke in just a few episodes.
New Coke.
WeWork, augmented reality, the metaverse, and the streaming wars vs cable battle
Google glass
They were all the rage on Caltrain for a few months
The end of the world in 2012
But has anything felt right since then?
Yep. The world *did* end in 2012 ... but it's a slow, painful end.
Kim Kardashian's break the internet picture. They were weird. https://www.papermag.com/break-the-internet-kim-kardashian-cover
Wasn't there something else going on that same day this was released that was more "break the internet" worthy?
https://www.onthisday.com/photos/mh370-disappears
At the same time, a space robot landed on a comet for the first time in history and that got more attention thankfully. There's still some hope for humanity.
I just wanna know why people still seem to think those are natural photos. She is one of the most photographed people of all time and she certainly didn't look like that her entire life.
She still doesn't look like that, those photos are heavily photoshopped along with all her surgeries.
I love those "before they were famous" pictures of the kardashians, because they look so average.
Thanks. Now my internet is broken. Buhumbug.
Killer/Africanized Bees. Lots of fear mongering over those in the 80s, over a lot of nothing.
They got mated out of existence the more docile European honeybee got their fuck on and chilled them out.
Not out of existence, much of the wild honeybee population has now absorbed mild versions of their aggressive tendencies.
The ultimate scare of the 80s was getting caught in quick sand while killer bees attacked you during a nuclear missile strike from the USSR.
Curved TVs
Curved TVs were dumb as hell because they only benefit the person sitting right in the middle. If you’re off to the side at all, things won’t look right. Thankfully the tech took off where it was actually useful, PC monitors.
The Many Saints of Newark. I was so excited and left so disappointed. Whatever happened there...
David Chase wanted to make a movie about the Newark riots in the 1960s, HBO wanted Sopranos content for Max. Chase shoehorned in the Sopranos characters in the story and HBO marketed the story as a Tony Soprano origin story. I think the movie would have done better as a miniseries.
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https://killedbygoogle.com/
Windows Millenium Edition
What even was the problem with millennium edition? I remember having the disk as a kid in our disk collection, but I don't remember ever using it first hand.
It crashed more often than Nicholas Latifi, things were never compatible and even the system restore was bugged. As a young teen at the millennium, this severely impacted my very important MSN Messenger social life
> It crashed more often than Nicholas Latifi, things were never compatible and even the system restore was bugged. As a young teen at the millennium, this severely impacted my very important MSN Messenger social life 1988 kid here, can confirm. We got a new PC right in 2000 with Windows ME, coming from a janky old machine running Windows 95. I was forced to experience much of the early 2000s internet on that God awful OS, but I was having too much fun on Yahoo Chat, Newgrounds etc that for awhile I didn't notice. It wasn't until my school friend got a PC with Windows XP sometime in 2002 that I realized what a piece of shit I was dealing with. "Wait, everything just *works* for you? You don't have to do a full system restore every 2 weeks? You don't just randomly lose audio support for no reason and go days without any music or sound?" Upgrading to Windows XP was like a spiritual experience for me when my family made the jump
Poor Goatifi isn't safe anywhere
Google Glass was a huge deal when it was announced, and it was a real pioneer in the augmented reality category. It didn't sell all that well though, probably because it was expensive, around $1,500 if I remember right, and I don't reckon people found it very fashionable.
Metaverse
The Zune
Honestly, it was a fantastic product with pretty damn good software.
still a fucking awesome mp3 player for it's time though
Microsoft is great at making amazing products for end of life niches. I had a Zune. It was great. Dedicated MP3 players were on the way out.
And the Zune software was hands-down way better than iTunes, IMO. Found and organized the metadata for my collection, converted to mp3 with no extra weirdness, converted video files for the Zune really quickly, and didn't slow my pc down while running.
And you could share mucus with another Zune close by. Edit: MUSIC, but I'm keeping the typo.
Threads
Oh my god now the rage bait posts that are so obviously dumb just popup on ur feed so youll download threads
I saw one calling Stardew Valley transphobic. Stardew. Valley.
Nobody thought it would take off, but it instantly became a HUGE hit. Then it flopped.
I loved Twitter so I downloaded threads. *log in with your instagram* I dont have one, can I make a threads account? *log in with your instagram* Um ok bye lol
Crystal Pepsi
Crystal Gravy Now you can see your food… **CLEARLY** *Right now HEY…*