Stab you with a club, or beat you with a sword. Some will giggle while others cry.
If only their phone booth had been bigger on the inside.
Someone asked me today what I thought about the Utah Beer Festival. My reply to them:
It's kind of like a perfect Christmas morning. You're 8 years old, wake up to the smell of cookies in the oven, bacon on the stove, spiced apple cider and cocoa to sip while the family gathers around the tree. A fresh blanket of snow covers the ground, and the neighborhood is filled with in-tune voices singing your favorite Christmas carols.
The tree must be 15 feet tall, and there are presents as far as the eye can see. It's time to dig in, and you frantically tear the paper off each gift. Over and over again, you get the wrap off and inside you find... nothing.
One box after another getting your hopes up and letting you down. When you finally open a full gift, it's nice but not nearly as impressive as you expected. Overall, the magic has been ruined because of the repeated negative experiences. All that time, all that work to wrap box after box but Santa forgot to put presents inside each one.
Also, you're now sunburnt.
Let me clarify by saying, I did have a great time overall. I love the idea of this festival, & enjoyed the great people I got to spend time with. Such a great event, but pretty much destroyed because there weren't enough personnel serving. I don't know all the details of how this event was staffed and what it took to put on. I have no doubt that it is A LOT of work, and I do give a gracious hat-tip to those who put it together. But, as a guest, and as a marketer, my faith is a bit shattered in the event.
Lines were up to an hour long. You can't sit around and enjoy a drink because your beer is near-boiling after 20 minutes. It needs to be in May/early June, or September/October. They need at least more than 4X the amount of servers so guests can actually enjoy grabbing a drink. There were ticket presales, so they had to have known how many people were going to arrive. I saw 2, maybe 3 people at each brewer's table. So I see about 30-35 people serving 5,000 guests.142 guests per server? Which sounds about right, considering I counted over 100 people in many lines at any given time.
I want this to succeed, but not sure if I can endure that type of event again. The price was right, the location was great, the brewers were serving some of the best beers on earth. But it all came down to the waiting game, and that's where this was lost.
What are your thoughts? Let's send a message to the organizers.
Since this is apparently still a thing that the "social media (insert retarded overused plural noun here)" still blog about, I thought I would help you with a guide that is actually helpful. I've heard sentiments from many friends that "Twitter isn't what it used to be," or they "just don't get the same interaction" they used to.
This is a problem, because Twitter should be something enjoyable where you can communicate with others, learn new things, and bounce ideas off people. The problem is, we probably went to some meet-up (tweetup) or conference and met people in person who REALLY WANTED US TO FOLLOW THEM, or just started following others because they were talking to us. Only to find that they were the worst kind of covert spies who had a conversation with us only to foil us into following, now they blabber on about their shit-for-brains startup social media company they're trying to promote.*
Seriously, these self-promoting, quote reciting, marketing whores are like the secret high school slut. Seems nice and innocent, but once you're in you find yourself with a contagious case of crabs. Fortunately, there is a cure and it's easy.
Meet the unfollow button.
Here's how you get back to the old twitter.
Get that list down to people you enjoy talking to, and those who do not make you want to murder puppies. Then have a conversation with some of those survivors in your timeline. Ta-da! It's back to the good old Twitter.
Remember, murdering puppies is bad, so use that unfollow button and start using Twitter more.
*Author's note: see also, SEO consulting, Success-coach, MLM juice seller, blogger who thinks they will make money, wannabe PR practicioner, or entry-level employee who somehow conned their way into a corporation as a social media manager and now has no idea what the hell they're doing.
Stadium of Fire: n. (stay-dee-um uv fy-er)
1. An annual celebration for Independence Day, yet rarely held on July 4 due to absolute retardation by the organizers. Also, suspected terrorist ties as they obviously hate America.
2. A gathering of Mormons, many of whom reside in Utah County, to watch the lowest standards of "entertainment" and fireworks.
3. Absolute hell on earth. Residents of Utah County are among the rudest people in the world. Imagine the French if they spoke like uppity hicks and were always sober with the exception of mood-altering drugs for depression and copious amounts of caffienated high-fructose corn syrup beverages. Also, there's probably a prayer before each musical act.
The sad thing is, blow up a couple robots and so many will forgive the unlimited flaws in Michael Bay's latest bag of abortions, Transformers: The Dark of the Moon.
I'm not being a film snob, and I do understand the need for mindless action movies. But this is not one of those films. It does not have the qualities of a mindless action films. For anyone who says "I just want big explosions and cool CGI," I rebut with the fact that this is a 90 minute chick-flick with the most hate-worthy male chauvenist character, & a woman straight out of 1950 who doesn't have the self-confidence to leave her abusive relationship. Afterwards, there's a handful of explosions once you're bored to pain.
The plot: Apparently, the Decepticons forgot their original purpose during the first two movies, as now it's no accident that they've landed on Earth. They've been here for over 30 years, and they had hatched a plan long ago to use Optimus Prime for their ultimate purpose of human extermination. Hmm, so that was their plan all along, but they instead pursued a couple of other battles with them, followed by periods of downtime, rather than spending any time working on the plan that was thirty years in the making.
A series of M. Night Shamalayan twists, add in every sequel cliche of appearances of past characters, introduce a couple of entirely under-utilized actors, put a Victoria Secret model in a handful of scenes but not scantily clad, excessive conversations and narrations that make a congressional sub-committee meeting on C-Span seem absolutely enthralling, and wrap it around a love story where you actually want the bad guy to get the girl. Apparently they wrote the script in a round-robin setting with 12 of the worst writers on earth, none of which were actually paying attention to the other writers.
I'm willing to look past the ridiculous flaws, like how a gigantic space ship has been on the moon for nearly 50 years; how Sam Witwicky has not only been laid, but has a girlfriend and somehow survives 80' tall robots beating on him; how there's no logical continuity to this third installment of the series; how every other character is some hastily inserted grasp to add comic relief; and so many other flaws. Fine, we'll look past all of that. I'll even discount how the entire city of Chicago is destroyed in less than 10 minutes, and it takes Optimus one shot to put an end to the entire war.
2-1/2 hours. 157 minutes! Honestly, at 80 minutes, this would have been a perfectly acceptable finish to the franchise. Even if full of flaws, if the right disasters had been edited out, it would have corrected everything wrong with the first two movies. By the time any real robot fights happen, you're so excruciatingly bored with the film that you can hardly enjoy it. Then, in the last minutes of the film, apparently the three robot leaders wrap up their fight as if they had somewhere to be.
No nudity, yet enough innuendo to not be appropriate for kids. So if you're going to take it that far, give us some tits. But my biggest complaints:
Sam Witwicky is the most useless and annoying character since Jar Jar Binks. But you can't even hate him to the point that you enjoy hating him. He's just annoying, and his role in the movie seems like they were trying to squeeze the producer's kid into the film simply to feed egos. Wait, he's not the producer's kid? Then what the fuck is he doing in this film?
Then there's Jerry Wang. A character which only exists to display Asian stereotypes. Entirely non-essential to the "plot," doesn't advance the story, too hastily inserted to really develop the character, and more racist than a 1960s film by the KKK.
Need to see it? Wait for video. It's not impressive on the big screen, sound or video. Watch until Witwicky comes on screen, fast-forward until robots start blowing up Chicago. But to drop $9+ on this shit is criminal.
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