In The Lipstick Lesbian Elixir, a butch female detective gets sprayed with an illegal drug and finds herself slowly turning into a super-girly bimbo with an insatiable appetite for other girls!
My Roommate Changed Me Into a Goth Girl! is exactly what it sounds like. A bitchy sorority girl's new roommate is a Goth girl who out of revenge for a terrible prank turns sorority babe into a Goth girl too. Mayhem ensues.
Even if you don't want to read them, please go download them to help me move onto bestseller lists. I mean come on, they're free so you aren't out anything.
Free rant time: WTF was up with the Super Bowl ads this year? Gawd, what a bunch of stinkers. Pardon my sexism here, but apparently the Mad Men think the only people watching the Super Bowl are women on their periods. How else do you explain the spate of schmaltzy ads with lost puppies and "The Cat's in the Cradle" and all that? Look guys, the point of the Super Bowl is for people to eat a bunch of junk, drink tons of beer, and watch a violent game where men get paid millions of dollars to knock the snot out of each other. Amidst all that do I really want to watch an ad guilt tripping me about a kid drowning in the tub?
Even the "funny" ads were crap. Like the Fiat one that made it seem like their car was on Viagra. Because people want a car that's like an old man's erection. And hey I'm a huge Breaking Bad fan (I've been rewatching it the last few days since the Roku is working) so it was cool to see Walter White again, but the punchline for that ad was lame. I can't even remember what company it was for. Live action Pac-Man is neat, but it was another lame punchline. Then again, Bud Light ads are always lame.
When I think about it, probably the last Super Bowl ad I really remember was the Frito-Lay one where Dan Quayle asked for some potato chips. And that was what, 1993 or something? I guess it's hard to create an ad that really sticks in the memory for a long time. I suppose that doesn't matter to the Mad Men; they only care if it sticks with you long enough to buy their product. I'm never sure how effective those ads are. Except if McDonald's or Burger King or Wendy's or wherever has a new sandwich; then I might stop by to try it once if it sounds interesting.
I think that's the problem with most ads: they don't really tell me why I should buy the product. A lot like Apple, Nike, etc try to sell you on the lifestyle associated with the product. If you have this, then you'll be cool! Which matters not to me, but I guess it matters to others. I suppose that's what Bud Light is trying to do: if you drink our beer you'll have fun and be cool! (Because really our beer is swill.) So many ads are just style over substance, usually because the product is shit.
Like recently I saw this ad for the Schick Extreme 3 Sensitive razors. In the commercial a guy waiting for an interview sees the owner is bald and so buys a razor and quickly shaves all the hair from his head. I was not all that impressed with the Gillette ones I had been using so I decided to give these razors a try. The result was pretty pathetic. I mean every couple of swipes I had to clean the gunk out from between the blades so they'd work. And it's not like I had Duck Dynasty facial hair going either. Unfortunately they sell these 4/$5 so now I've got four shitty disposable razors. Seriously the ones I bought from the 99 Cent store in Phoenix worked better and they were 2/99 cents!
When I bought my car, I didn't buy it because I saw a commercial where the car was injected with Viagra or driven by some celebrity; I bought it because it had the features I wanted for a reasonable price. And Ford was the only one of the Big Three not in bankruptcy at the time. So there's that.
Anyway, a lot of people loved the stupid Budweiser puppy one, which means we'll get more schmaltzy bullshit next year I'm sure. Ugh. The people who like that are probably the same ones who buy Nicholas Sparks books. No accounting for taste.
I just wanted to mention one other thing. We're such a throwaway culture these days where you basically get a new phone every year because the screen is slightly bigger. Recently the hook on the strap of my netbook case broke off. I could have just bought a whole new case, but that seemed wasteful since the actual case was fine; it just needed a new strap. My first temporary repair was to get some rope from the dollar store and cut off a length to tie to the loops on the bag. But then later I was at the Salvation Army store and they had a whole bin of old laptop cases, backpacks, duffel bags, garment bags, etc. Anyway, I dug through there until I found a couple that had a strap like my netbook case with the right kind of hook. Then someone said over the speakers that blue tags were half off. So I found a blue tagged bag with the right strap that was $4. With the discount it was only $2. So basically I spent $3 to fix the bag when I could have gone to Amazon or Wal-Mart or something and spent $10-$20. Plus I had a new bag that I put my Nintendo Wii in, so that was a bonus. The point being that you don't have to automatically throw something out just because one little thing on it breaks. A little ingenuity and sometimes you can fix what's wrong for a lot less.
Here's another pearl of wisdom: my brother was moving recently and since it was a two-story we had to carry a bunch of shit down the stairs. One day of that and I was waking up with cramps in both legs. So I looked online and read that what movers sometimes do is cut a box up and use it to make a slide. That seemed like a really economic solution, so I got a couple of moving boxes from Lowe's for like $3, cut them up, taped 1 1/2 together and we could just slide shit down from the top floor to the bottom. No more climbing, plus it's fun, unless the box falls open or something.
Since I mentioned it, I've really enjoyed rewatching Breaking Bad, first on AMC and then lately on the Roku. Now that the series is over, when you watch it again, you have a better idea of where things are going and how they fit together. I think it works that way for books too, where sometimes you reread a book and you can get a better idea for the story because you already know what happens, so when you reread you see better how things fit. So there, some writerly-type advice at the end.
Now go download my books! And you can buy others. I mean come on, I still have no real job so this is the closest to an income that I have. Maybe I just need a schmaltzy ad to sell myself and my books. Or I could figure out how to cook meth.
3 comments:
The Super Bowl ads did stink it up this year. I always get cramps after moving myself or others. We've used rope connected to some wooden boards for a make shift lift, but making a slide sound a lot more fun.
The ads were either pulling at heartstrings or downright depressing. I did like the Brady Bunch-Danny Trejo-Steve Buscemi Snickers one. That was the highlight for me.
Oh, and Left Shark too. Stole Katy Perry's thunder.
Most of those ads came across as trying too hard and desperate because they all want to have the commercial everyone talks about and remembers. *eye roll*
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