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Showing posts from September, 2018

#2: The Greatest Commercial of All Time

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This is the greatest commercial of all time. "Hi, Phil Swift here with Flex Seal!" I'm serious. No other commercial has embedded itself so thoroughly in our collective psyche - from my perspective as a young person on the internet, at least. It has inspired hundreds of parodies, thousands of posts, and hundreds of thousands of comments. Phil Swift, always excited and eternally grinning, is a veritable deity of internet memes. His immortal words, " That's a lot of damage! " (from a different Flex Seal commercial ), are arguably better known than the product itself. Phil Swift is the CEO and spokesman of Flex Seal Products, which produces the eponymous Flex Seal, the product Phil describes as "liquid rubber in a can!" Backed by optimistic electronic music, this two-minute 2015 infomercial features him fixing pots, sealing leaks, and trying and failing to destroy Flex Seal with a blowtorch and liquid nitrogen. To top it all off, Phil repl

#1: Built Ford Tough

As a high school junior in Microsoft country, it's safe to say that I have constant exposure to media of all varieties.  I carry five ounces of iPhone in my pocket at all times and I carry five pounds of laptop in my backpack.  Except for my graph notebooks, everything I create I keep online or at least digitally.  I spend an hour every day browsing Reddit, reading newsletters, and writing ideas; my weekends consist almost exclusively of homework and online gaming.  I don't need to leave the house to spend time with my friends; I just need to start my laptop, and that's what I usually do.  You could easily argue that media are my life; take away my pencil and my keyboard, and I have no outlet for creativity. The aforementioned homework also takes place largely online.  In fact, you're reading a homework assignment right now. Recently, my class watched and analysed four television commercials, including two from Dove ( here  and here ), one from Greenpeace about Dove

"There's nothing here!"

That's what this page said before I posted this. There's nothing here! Nineteen light gray sans serif characters, existing only to proclaim: There's nothing here! Were those letters not something? Was that message nothing? There's nothing here! The volume rises. Even in death, the words live on: There's nothing here! There was nothing on this page. There is nothing on this page. There always will be nothing on this page. There's nothing here! Footprints in mud, ripples in water, gone forever, but imprinted always. These words are special, for to those who can read them, they are truth. There's nothing here.