A family tradition

Many years ago, my Mom helped Alyson and I create a special gift for Dad.

We went to Color Me Mine, a chain of shops for the commercial buying and painting of porcelain goods ranging from dinnerware to sculptures of robots and dragons that are put through a kiln on-site.

In my experience it’s a popular suburban activity for kids with vague creative aspirations and too much energy to burn. The Rochlin family has made its fair share of goods there, which is another subject I may have to circle back to one day.

All those years ago, Aly and I made Dad a mug with our little baby handprints on it.

The gift was very well received and used for years. But… That mug in the Featured Image isn’t the original piece.

That first mug actually broke through a heartbreaking turn of events.

So in 2005, we made him a replacement mug:

The 2005 mug continues to be used and has held together relatively well over nearly 15 years.

But now it’s starting to crack.

That mortality was the subject of a recent joke from Dad which got our gears turning. We figured it would be as good a time as any to continue this family tradition by making him a new handprint mug for Father’s Day.

Here we are last Wednesday getting our hands all dirty.

Unfortunately the idea was a bit spur of the moment, so the mug wasn’t finished in time for us to hand it off before all the Grandpa Joe and pasta-making stuff happened.

I was able to pivot our time out into a fun little Tweet about Jamba Juice. It was meant to simply cover our tracks, but a few days later grew into something more.

Nice pic! Wish we had sponsorship opportunities, but we will let you know when we do.

— Jamba (@JambaJuice) June 18, 2019

Yeah.

Shout out to that social media person for having a bit of fun with us. I’m usually cynical about that kind of brand interaction, but it’s kind of cool to actually see it happen.

Today we were finally able to pick up the mug — and a little more Jamba Juice, but I didn’t want to push my luck by grasping desperately for further social media clout.

Here are the fruits of our labor:

The end product is perhaps messier overall, but that’s what happens when you decide to color everything instead of leaving a large portion of the body white.

Personally I think the brushstrokes are indicative of the energy we put in.

Even if I’m less enamored with my handprint, because at this point it’s big enough that I struggled to fit the whole thing.

But that said I hope Dad will be happy with the gift.

Because you know. He’s not home from work at the time that I’m writing this. So I don’t actually know how he’s going to react. And I’ll be telling him not to read this until he gets home later.

It’s like you all get to be in on a little secret. Hopefully you enjoyed the brief glimpse at part of my family history!

Industrial aesthetic in Culver City

If you’ve been around my blog long enough, you know I have a thing for interesting architecture and industrial design when I see it.

The prior was on full display when I went to Pasadena City College for one of my sister’s auditions, while the latter was best seen with this weird and pointless piece about hedges around lumber yards.

You know that one was early in my ‘write every day’ commitment because of how picture-less it is despite the visual topic.

It was also my first mention of Wizard of Legend, which is neat considering I’ve gotten into playing it recently!

Not the point.

The point is, those related interests converged today as I joined a few other members of the Gladeo team for a video shoot at the Dentsu Aegis Network office in Culver City.

Dentsu is a digital marketing group that helps advertising firms secure locations for their product.

Or at least, that’s how I understand it. To be honest I was somewhat disconnected from the filming process because our conference room was so small that I couldn’t watch my on-air reporter Katelyn do her stuff without being in the shot.

I did carry camera equipment, and help craft the video’s message while laying out fair use policies using my Comm Law knowledge during our break — over a delicious pork belly grilled cheese.

Speaking of, the Rice Balls of Fire food truck was a strange combination of Korean, Japanese and high school cafeteria. But it was delicious. So there’s a plug.

But I’m not here to plug food trucks. If my Featured Image didn’t make it clear, I’m here to talk about the bizarre and interesting office!

Get this. You have a marketing group on the fifth floor of a building that intentionally looks half-finished. It’s a totally open floor plan with few offices and conference rooms (much like Fandango). From the ground you can only access the area with a key card, but if you park in the adjacent structure you can simply walk across a bridge and enter.

A bridge that wobbles in the wind. Very disconcerting when six people simultaneously figured that out while carrying rented camera equipment.

Oh and there are games scattered all over the room, from giant Jenga to foosball.

Though my favorite was this giant chessboard in the courtyard outside:

The outside area also had furniture scattered everywhere, with different areas labeled after interior rooms. The living room, family room, etc. Pretty weird.

But wait, there’s more.

Overlooking the space was a second story balcony, on which I found this cheeky little blue bomber surveying the scene:

Reminds me of my SSBCU post from yesterday.

Apparently Dentsu worked with Capcom on getting a Mega Man cartoon series put out in the West.

Which is great, because context makes everything better.

… Though I would have been okay just assuming someone in the office is a huge dork.

This place probably has the most Silicon Valley mentality I’ve ever seen. Considering it’s a business focused on digital marketing I suppose this makes sense, though it was still kind of weird seeing it in Culver City of all places.

That said, I’m not sure I would be too opposed to working there. It’s a nice space, even if open floor plans are still a weird concept to me.

And that’s about that. I wanted to end on a photo of the Gladeo folks together, but they have not been posted.

So instead you’re getting this awkward, stilted cut-off.

Strange restaurant names?

Originally I was going to skip writing a post tonight because I’ve been busy with chores, homework and cleaning for the imminent arrival of my Grandma this week — plus the gym as an added bonus, but I just couldn’t get this out of my head.

I had to share it.

My family was over at the Century City Mall for a solid chunk of the day to hit up a couple stores (which, fun fact, is the same place I was when I wrote my Summer 2018 Initiative post), and at one end was this place:

The Crack Shack. A fried chicken and egg-themed restaurant as I found out through rudimentary research.

We didn’t actually eat at this place so I can’t pass any sort of judgement regarding how good the food is. I’m purely here to pick on the name.

Because let’s be honest here, Crack Shack sounds like a junkie’s favorite dining experience.

Honestly just thinking about that alone made me laugh enough that I felt it was worth going back to take a picture as we were moving on. But then I thought about it more…

And I came to the realization that Crack Shack isn’t even the weirdest egg-themed restaurant name. Because eggslut is a thing.

These kind of viral or gag-based named websites became a very interesting subject to me this afternoon after thinking about these places.

I personally would not want to eat at a restaurant called Crack Shack, for instance. Mostly due to that drug association that I can no longer delink in my head. I also don’t know that I want to eat at eggslut for essentially the same principle, even though I’ve heard the food is really good.

So I can’t help but wonder whether or not trying to make a viral name is actually helpful for business.

On the one hand, there’s something to be said for the old idiom that any publicity is good publicity.

But on the other hand, you risk hitting a threshold where your name is so off-putting that nobody wants to visit after that initial media splurge.

I can’t say what that threshold would be, as some place like eggslut is a very popular place for a combination of its quirky, provocative name and (reportedly) good food, and if there are any restaurants that have been shut down for their overtly edgy name, I certainly haven’t heard of them.

That said, I suppose I’ll leave it here: If you know of any really bizarrely named restaurants (that have either survived or crashed and burned), I’d be very interested to hear about them.

I’d also like to know what you think the absolute threshold might be between a quirky, provocative name for a restaurant and something over-the-top.

So yeah, let me know somewhere on the Internet!

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As an extra added bonus, while visiting a Blick art store on the way home, Aly and I came across this miniature T-Rex.

It was adorable and we got this great picture of it, so I wanted to share.

Hopefully it can help usher you all into a better night.

Marketing with Brand Recognition

I tried Super Mario Cereal for the first time this morning.

Honestly? Was not a huge fan of it.

For those who don’t know, this stuff was a special tie-in breakfast item for the red plumber’s most recent adventure, Super Mario Odyssey. The box itself acts as an amiibo that gives Mario some bonus collectibles like coins or hearts in-game, though I haven’t used that particular functionality yet.

What I have done is eat the cereal — a combination of little grain stars and marshmallows shaped like Mario power-ups. It’s essentially rebranded Lucky Charms, which makes sense considering it’s a Kellogg’s cereal.

Even though Lucky Charms are a General Mills brand. So I guess it’s more like a competing Lucky Charms?

But I digress.

While I’ll mostly stay away from that cliché of the cereal not looking like it does on the box, the grain cereal bits actually stuck out in that regard for me. Instead of being fat little golden stars like you might see in Super Mario 64, the stars in this cereal are fine pointed like an asterisk.

It’s a bit un-Mario in appearance, but also I get the sense that the quality of the cereal itself would have been better if it were fatter. Because in it’s current state, this cereal is very granular and has some hard-to-chew shell bits in it.

The marshmallows are fine in their own right. It’s kind of hard to make a bad breakfast cereal marshmallow I suppose, though if I were to nitpick it did seem like each different kind of mallow tasted the same. Kind of like raspberry oddly enough, and I might have appreciated more of a variety there.

This little post has to be pretty weird for you all though, right? Because who am I to just be reviewing cereals out of the blue?

It’s not like I proclaim to have an expertise in cereology.

Which I thought was a term I made up until I saw it didn’t come back as misspelled and discovered cereology is the study of crop circles. Consider that my fun fact of the day for all of you linguists out there.

Frankly I wanted to talk about this cereal less for its merits as a cereal and more for its strange position as a marketing tool, because that’s something that I was thinking about while eating it.

I just figured it would make sense to start with a short discourse on my opinions of it as a tangible object before going into more strange psychological places.

See, in my house groceries are a pretty big topic of forethought. While there are impulse purchases on occasion upon seeing something interesting during a trip to the grocery store, more often than not we decide what we need before going.

Usually those purchases fill one of three goals:

1. Replacing a commonly used item for the week, such as milk.
2. Gathering more odd ingredients for a specific meal.
3. Fulfilling some kind of craving.

Because of those general categories most food items fit into, a lot of the ideas behind shopping for specific items comes from top-down processing. Either we know which brand we want because we’ve used it before, or we’ve heard good things about that brand compared to others and decide to go down that route as a result.

When it came to the Super Mario Cereal, however, there wasn’t too much of that.

It’s very much an impulse buy despite the fact that (I at least) had heard of it before, because I never had the desire to buy it. So I never looked into it enough to garner an opinion on how it would be ahead of time.

Yet most items that we haven’t done at least some thinking about ahead of time wouldn’t usually get this kind of immediate pass. I’m willing to bet that 99 percent of the reason for the exception here is because of the Mario branding.

Let’s be honest, everyone knows who Mario is. People who don’t play video games know who Mario is. He’s that famous.

But I love video games. Mario makes up a pretty large percentage of the reason why.

So my family typically knows to buy video game-related things when we see it. If for no other reason than the novelty of the thing being attractive and fun.

I can’t imagine I’m the only video game lover that has instilled that kind of sentiment in his family. I’m willing to bet it’s exactly that kind of sentimentality which drives the (presumed) success of this kind of marketing project.

We buy Super Mario Cereal for the novelty. Because the cereal itself isn’t quite as super as it’s mascot would lead one to believe.

That, in its essence, is the brilliance of the marketing.

But that’s just my opinion on bizarre marketing pushes based on sentimentality and brand recognition. Let me know what you think about the topic below, and if you’ve encountered an item you’ve bought almost purely due to the brand recognition rather than any knowledge about it.

Also, if you really like the Super Mario Cereal, I suppose you can tear me down about that somewhere on the Internet as well. I won’t judge.