It’s Sunday, and that means that in preparation for the week ahead, it’s time to sit back, relax, and brood on all the things that annoy me.

Modern Netflix Documentaries

It seems like for every recent Netflix documentary, somebody takes all the experts that have been selected to speak on the topic, and puts them through some kind of boot camp to have big personalities and to speak in a way that borderlines on sassy: optimising for punchy soundbites.

A few weeks back I tried to watch Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, but I had to stop after two episodes: it was just too doctored to be watchable (see the trailer for a taste).

I’m an adult! I’m happy to watch uncharismatic experts expound on the minutiae of interesting topics.

This reminds me of highschool chemistry class where the teacher would occasionally put on a documentary for the sake of better captivating unengaged students and it always struck me that the very bells and whistles you use to engage an audience will necessarily draw their attention away from the important information!

Remasters of RTS games with long shadows

Just because you can make something more realistic doesn’t mean you should: long shadows make it much harder for people (at least me, maybe others) to make sense of what buildings and units are on their screen at any given time. I haven’t actually played Age of Mythology Retold yet, so I’ll find out whether it lets me turn off shadows, but it just seems like a no brainer to stick with the original game’s approach to shadows: just pretend the sun is directly overhead everything so the shadows are tucked underneath the units.

Here’s the original. Look how easy it is to discern the units and buildings

Here’s the new version:

I can barely see the villagers under that Hesperides tree! A side by side comparison for good measure:

Is there something wrong with my brain? Or is it just way hard to see what’s going on in the new version?

The recent Ice Break ad

As a founder I’ve learnt that in order to get the message out about your product there’s no avoiding the fact that you’re gonna have to annoy a few people. So I empathise with anybody involved in marketing a product.

Nevertheless, if I find an ad particularly annoying I’ll avoid the product out of spite.

One such product is Ice Break (iced-coffee beverage) after their especially soulless ad has now interrupted multiple of my youtube watching sessions.

Embarrassingly I actually can’t find a link to the ad online. So I’ll just retell the voice-over from memory:

Ice Break: Ice cold.

Ice Break: Real coffee strength.

Ice Break: …Bring it on.

…all spoken while showing images of the bottle with ice animations.

It’s some absurd, incoherent haiku spoken by a quintessential True-Blue Aussie Bloke in an effort to hypnotise me into buying their product, or maybe to hypnotise me into something else? Come to think of it, I have been entertaining the idea of joining the navy since I first saw the ad…

The Ice Break ad is so soulless that you might think they delegated the writing to ChatGPT, but I don’t even think ChatGPT could have written an ad so shamelessly transparent in its subliminal intentions.

This whole time I’ve been mad at ads that show me young attractive friends hanging out and bonding over a sugary beverage in an attempt to make me confuse the having mode and the being mode, yet it never occured to me that when the messaging is stripped down to its purest form—a blatant attempt at hypnosis—I might actually prefer the facade.

Is it better to look upon the counterfeit-but-fair face of Arnold Schwarzenegger, or the terrifying-but-authentic Terminator face underneath? More importantly, when did our robot overlords’ grip on consumer minds become so strong that they felt comfortable shedding the mask entirely?

The thought has occured to me that perhaps the ad’s true intention is to get people like me so perplexed and frustrated that they go and criticise the ad online in an act of conspiratorial post-traumatic therapy, ultimately resulting in more eyeballs on Ice Break. That may be the case, but if you’re a marketing person smart enough to pull that off, surely you’re also smart enough to just make a good ad in the first place that is successful for the right reasons?

Okay I’m good now

My purpose here was to obtain catharsis and I have achieved that goal. Now to spend the rest of my Sunday actually relaxing.