Agent Palmer

While not entirely applicable, the word that kept coming into my head as I read “The Laptop Millionaire: How Anyone Can Escape the 9 to 5 and Make Money Online” was “shyster.”

Author Mark Anastasi’s 2012 book feels like a novel in that it is a bunch of regurgitated buzzword internet money-making schemes that feel more about making money than the “value” he claims they represent. Adversely, he never actually represents that value with anything more quantifiable than overusing the same word.

Squaring the Circle is a 2022 film about the story of Hipgnosis, the designers and the album covers they created.

And while you may have never heard of Hipgnosis, or their founders Po (Aubrey Powell) and Storm (Thorgerson), you have seen their work on the album covers of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Wings, Peter Gabriel, and many many more.

Fumbling the Future, is a book published in 1988 about “How Xerox invented, then ignored, the first personal computer.” It all starts with three questions: Name the companies responsible for the longest playing series of personal computer commercials? The most creative single commercial? The first personal computer commercial?

The answers, as you find out through the first page and the subtitle, are IBM’s Charlie Chaplin ads, Apple Computers’ 1984 Super Bowl commercial, and Xerox.

“Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?” isn’t just a small documentary series on Netflix about one ad campaign. This is a nostalgia fest of 90s culture, a deeper look into the Cola Wars, and a showcase of documentary-making about a court case.

In 1995, Pepsi launched their “Pepsi Stuff” campaign. At the end of the launch commercial, it displayed on screen that for 7 million Pepsi points, you could get a Harrier Jet. John Leonard took that seriously, and what happens from there is documented in this series.

Entertainment is changing. It’s becoming independent in a way that is vastly different from what 20 years ago was indie film. It’s small, it fits on whatever device you want it to, and it streams to you, sometimes staged, sometimes live, always creative and more often than not, fiercely independent.

I am one of those people…