5 Comments

The chemical story seems like a riff on the various "words of the year" awards presented by various dictionaries and the American Dialect Society. I might actually be attending the upcoming ADS Word Of The Year ceremony for 2024, by the way!

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you're absolutely right. I don't know why I forgot to make that connection :)

And that's awesome news about the American Dialect Society! I know Webster's does a word of the year, but didn't know about ADS

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The Everyman role is great, have thought about it a lot whenever a major entertainment figure fails at not recognizing their ridiculous situation. Heard a showrunner for a major series rant against LA 1% before discussing the new cars he bought for his teenagers.

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I always have a soft spot for eccentric local ads, so enjoyed the mattress sales article. While the internet has definitely hurt local ads, they're having a resurgence on tiktok. Prime opportunity for a new generation of Spring Kings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/dining/tiktok-sketch-comedy-restaurants.html

Maybe 2004 was the last time it'd be funny to joke about Y2K, but a comedy/horror movie came out this year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K_(2024_film)

I don't think privacy advocacy is even a concern anymore. There's a scene from parks and rec more than a decade ago where Ron Swanson, a curmudgeonly libertarian, sees that google maps has a picture of his home. He responds by throwing away his computer. I don't think that that joke would land in 2024.

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I'm not on TikTok, so that's fascinating to me that local ads are surfacing there. And yeah, privacy feels pretty dead. I remember that Parks and Rec joke, which felt a little stiff then but is unimaginable now.

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