I don’t want to grow up… But poor Geoffrey the Giraffe will have to, as Toys “R” Us bids adieu after a 61-year run. (Bankruptcy is causing them to close all of their stores.) I loved TRU as a kid, and my first and only magazine casual has a tie-in. Alas, all good brands eventually die. Something I did not know was that TRU’s origin story begins in our nation’s capital! (Who says #TheSwamp doesn’t produce anything?) The blog Ghosts of DC reports:
Yes, the first toy store run by the founder of TRU is now a bar.
.GIF-based marketing is now a thing. I’ve made a lot of hand-crafted, artisanal .GIFs over the years. (.GIFs, for the uninitiated, are image files that depict motion. Silent movies, if you will…) Mainly, they’re used for reactions on social media, and I’ve created ones from obscure movies, like PCU, that don’t already readily exist on the ‘net. Most people (except me, who has his own redundant cloud storage archives), go on .GIF hosting websites.
Twitter and Facebook now work with these sorts of sites to make inserting .GIF images into posts very simple. In the old days, people would have to search for, download the file, and upload it to respond. Now there are .GIF search engines, like Tenor. As BusinessWeek observes in an interesting report, #brands are now trying to get good placement in the search algorithms:
Six figures(!) for .GIF product placement? Yikes.
Small world, China edition. A married couple in China has discovered that they both were in the same place at the same time, according to family photos. Neat.
How narcissism is killing democracy. Tom Nichols joins “The Opposition With Jordan Klepper” to discuss his instant classic book The Death of Expertise. I don’t find Klepper’s show very entertaining, but Nichols is always worth hearing and comes across even funnier than Klepper does.
The Real Genocide. At the Washington Post, George Will has a must-read on the troubling growth in popularity of aborting children with Down Syndrome.
Family matters. The sister of racist mass murderer Dylan Roof was arrested and charged for bringing weapons and drugs to school. Her social media posts, too, have been utterly despicable.
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