Get your mini-muffin updates

I don't always have time to sit my lazy ass down and write something thoughtful or persuasive here on my blog. However, I always seem to have time to update my twitter and I always seem to have something spontaneous to say (though that spontaneity is sometimes mundane). Does this make me a twit?

In either case, if you're really craving some muffiny-script goodness, then follow me tweets. I'll still be updating here once every week or so, so don't fret too much!

Alienating Diamonds

Since I got engaged this month, part of my weekends have been spent with my fiancee shopping for an engagement ring. We finally decided on one with a neat design from Spence Diamonds. It looked something like this:



I like the three stone look and Jasmine likes the hearts in the setting (which you cannot see in the image). We picked a 18K yellow gold ring and rocks that added up to exactly 1.5 carats.

Whenever people think of Spence Diamonds, they recall those annoying radio ads that everybody seems to hate. People often wonder aloud "What were they thinking?". These ads are certainly an unorthodox way of branding yourself.

However, insofar, only a small handful of people have been completely turned off from Spence so much that they do not even want to step into one of their stores. Rather, the ads are extremely effective in being retained in people's mind. When they think diamonds, they think of Spence and all the benefits and offers they have. While the ads are dodgey, the stores are utterly brilliant and professional in contrast and, along with the staff and products, are designed to impress.

It really is just a simple practice in being stand-out-unique. If they went with traditional ads, they would just blend in with all other jewellers regardless of how good their offers are. However, the annoying guy's voice just cuts through the white noise and what he says is heard and embedded in your mind.

On top of that, the awfulness of the ads have picked up a viral mode of transportation, spread by word of mouth as people share their mutual dislike of the commercials and positive impressions of the product itself.

It isn't something that can be pulled off easily or consistently. You always run the risk of alienating your customers. Therein lies the ingenuity of the Spence Diamond radio commercials. Not only did they pull it off, but they did it with great and continued success.

Deeper Motifs in Pixar's WALL-E

Life's complicated right now and I'm not really in the mood to do this but for the sake of keeping week to week updates I'll leave something of a placeholder here. Maybe next week I'll have a musing piece for you guys, since I've done a lot of rants recently.

Here's a list of things that I noticed in WALL-E that deserve some further discussion:
-Background storytelling, getting around a silent protagonist
-Problems of over consumption, pollution unchecked
-Problems of over reliance on machines and SEP (somebody elses problem) mindset
-Problems of over privatization, advertising is everywhere
-Definition of the soul, do robots dream (think EVE's coma security cam)
-Can individualism be misinterpreted? Is it what separates humans and machines or simply those with a "soul"?
-The Argos problem and WALL-E
-Balance of love and labour
-A new kind of dystopia, advancing so far that we severely regress as a society and culture
-What is main thematic message presented? Think: Pixar and Disney's audience and track record. Which are jokes and which carries serious overtones?

Jung at Heart (part two)

There are many arguments for and against the stereotypes portrayed on television. It seems that, no matter how you argue, television does have a role to play in influencing youths. Mr. Carl Jung had an idea about the human psyche that involved stereotypes, or archetypes, that people inherently knew from birth. These preconceptions guided people's behaviours in their day to day interactions with other people.

Inherent knowledge aside, I feel that television plays a vital role in helping people encode and decipher identities. That is, television presents stereotypes that become subconsciously ingrained into modern culture and people draw from those images to mold themselves into an easily recognizable stereotype. Television, in other words, act as the "key" in this code: people who identify themselves in a particular way want others to identify them in the same way and so they assume qualities that have been associated with that identity, regardless of whether that quality defines them as a person. These stereotypes that people learn from television and other pop culture media also helps them in identifying other people. People are quick to judge, not because of bias, but because there is a need to rectify the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing how to interact with someone.

Here's an example. My girlfriend got her Bachelors last year in June, but she went back to school in order to become a high school teacher. Before her practicum, she expressed a dire need to go out and buy some "teacher" clothes and a "teacher" bag. These are items that would allow her to show that she wasn't a student, but a teacher. By acquiring and using these items, she is hoping that other people will identify her as a teacher and not as something else.

This is not a bad thing. Rather, it is a necessary thing. People do not walk around with a large version of their business card pinned to their shirt to help you identify them. There is a reason why the police and other important people have uniforms. It is because there is a need for people to recognize and correctly identify each other. Television is a huge factor in this communication process, however, as I mentioned last week, some of the "stereotypes" that it portrays is dangerously wrong and is being picked up and assimilated by the wrong demographic.

So, while we can't and we shouldn't stop television from stereotyping people, there are some things that we have to be careful about. Along with the images of "adulthood" being shown to the tweens, there are still some unfair and malicious portrayals of the homosexual demographic on television as well, which can cause some serious harm to people trying to encode their identity and to people trying to decode it.

As human beings, our mind works at a million miles a second. It is important that we learn to understand where our feelings and behaviours come from. Doing so will allow us to improve ourselves and the way we interact with others. If for nothing else, it will help us to hone our encoding/decoding ability.