Month: February 2024

THIS WEEK IN BURGER WORLD

I see a lot of bad marketing emails from Square, but the marketing emails I get from Bad Luck Burger Club are fucking great.

It’s bold. It’s bright. The logo screams in your face. Love that.

The copy-writing matches their brand so well, too:

✅ The Intergalactic Rolling Church of the Burg (aka our food truck)

✅ Also, when you park at the market, don’t park in the dang bike lane!

✅ Party on, Burger out.

Most marketing emails are just square blocks of things for sale, but Bad Luck gets away with it because the top half was written by people – you can’t get an intern or AI to write that well.

Like, there’s a difference between greeting your customer with a hearty “hello, how ya doing today?!” and “so how many burgers ya want?”

I’ve eaten several of their burgers, all in one week at Furnce Fest in 2023, and they’re fucking amazing.

“I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.”

Cory Doctorow

OAVETTE LP

Glad I emailed an old bud the other day, because they sent me a link to this amazing album and I’ve been listening to it every day since.

I’ve been listening to a lot of electronic music the last few years, and I’ve always been a sucker for bands that do the repetitive loop stuff, and wow, Oavette hits a nerve for me.

It’s like I could watch this band play at an art gallery, you know?

ENGADGET GUTTED

Engadget is looking to “increase their velocity.”

Ten people at (Engadget) are losing their jobs, and the editorial staff will be split into two sections. A memo says strategy will focus more on traffic and collaboration with sales and SEO

Founded 20 fucking years ago by Peter Rojas, it was then bought up by AOL in 2011, which eventually became Yahoo, which has a stellar track record of destroying everything they touch.

From Engadget GM Sarah Priestley (via Daring Fireball):

“[The changes] will allow us to streamline our work, increase our velocity, and ultimately deliver the best content to our readers.”

I love how the new leadership of these once-beloved brands are hell-bent on winning the race to the bottom.

GOODBYE, VICE.COM

From the Wall Street Journal (below copied from 512 Pixels, as the WSJ has a paywall):

“It is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously,” Dixon told employees in the memo. He said the company could partner with established media companies to distribute its content. “As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com.”

And before this:

A domain name and hosting aren’t overly expensive. Put out something that folks will pay for and maybe earn a living doing it.

The glory days are over. Time to get back to making good shit with some friends and hoping for the best. 404 Media is profitable after just six months. Jason Kottke is making it work.

“The market didn’t reject Pitchfork: Condé had a captive audience, and never bothered to make a pitch.”

Pete Tosiello 

Newspapers were subsidized by ads decades ago. Classifieds meant local alt-weeklies could exist. Banner ads paid the bills for websites, until they didn’t.

Then came the corporate interests, the “smart” VPs with their business jackets and jeans outfits.

They came in, had their $400 lunches, made their money, and walked away just fine.

Like I said, “Maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.”

DON’T GO BACK TO THE CRAP

I love this so much from “How Tiny Desk Concerts Became a pop culture phenomenon.”

Folk artist Laura Gibson felt deflated after her 2008 South by Southwest show in Austin, Texas. The Thirsty Nickel bar allowed noisy 6th Street revelers who didn’t purchase tickets to enter, and they had no interest in listening to the soft-spoken artist.

“Mid-set, I was like, ’Why did I drive all the way down to Texas … What am I doing with my life?” Gibson remembered. “I felt like ‘I really just want to go hide somewhere and cry.’”

Two folks from NPR were in attendance and offered Larua to come to their office and perform, and it became the first Tiny Desk Concert.

Laura had to go out and do something and it sucked. Yet she did, plowed through it, and it led to something else.

I think a lot of us had some great fun and success with social media back in the day, but then it sucked.

Laura (I hope) didn’t have to go back to play another shitty venue to keep her career going. She just moved forward, like I see a lot of other artists doing, leaving behind social media.

Yes, we made our connections, had some wins, but “going back to a shitty venue” isn’t how we’ll get to the next level.

(via Kottke)

TIMELESS VALUE

This video is lovely. It was an absolute warmth and joy, and exactly what I needed this morning.

What I love about this video is near the end, Sam Abell meets the grandkids of some of the people I photographed in Japan 40+ years ago.

“By far the most meaningful are the human connections that I’ve been able to make as a photographer.”

Gorgeous video, and one I’m sure I’ll watch again someday soon.