Agent Palmer

I have finally read Chuck Klosterman’s debut book, Fargo Rocks City and it was everything I thought it would be.

I understand that as a fan of Klosterman’s work, it is a bit odd that I picked up his sophomore effort Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto and then went on to read and own every other book he has published, save for his debut.

Well, I have remedied that mistake and his debut is on par with the wit and pop culture furnishings that I’ve become accustomed to.

What were we thinking? Why did anyone take it seriously? What is a cru-da-tay?

These are questions that will probably never be answered. But one question that was answered: could we pull off a 24 hour live broadcast of the 7 Days A Geek podcast?

And the answer was a resounding yes!

In order to increase sales of toys marketers have always used Saturday Morning Cartoon commercial breaks, but some went to the extreme creating whole new brand monsters that took on a lives of their own. From He-Man and the Masters of the Universe to Transformers, Care Bears, G.I. Joe, Pound Puppies, and countless others, let’s look at the franchises of in variety of mediums spawned from toys, in order to increase the sale of those toys.

Keep in mind this was 30 years ago, before the marketers of today realized that releasing toys to a movie, will boost a movie.

Meerkat is trending. This is a fact. Partly it is trending because it’s a new name on the social media scene and partly because of its issues with Twitter’s Open Graph. But Meerkat is not new, nor is it innovative. It’s old and automated.

Meerkat has been described as SnapChat for live video with the added benefit of being tied into Twitter, so that all of your followers get the link to your live stream.

The New York Times called it “A remarkable collection of characters…courageously exploring mindspace, an innerworld where nobody had ever been before,” and they’re right. The book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy is as great a story as the real-life characters and their accomplishments that adorn the book.

Names you’ve heard like Wozniak and Gates, and those you haven’t like Felsenstein, Greenblatt, and Gosper are among the many mentioned.