Kevin Rothermel

No Spoilers.

Indie Brand Strategist
Professor, VCU Brandcenter
No Spoilers.
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Three Year Olds are Huggers

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After you get older than three, you forget that three-year-olds are actually tiny people with a tiny culture.

It started when they were two. Dropping off my son at day care, another two-year-old would say hi, and he’d say hi back.

Like they are real people that have any business communicating with each other.

Now we’re at a place where I can’t get near his room without the other kids yelling out that his “dad is here.”

He’s in the back of the room doing god knows what with his friends, and he’s posted lookouts at the front of the room.

But then there is the hugging. These kids like to hug. And they don’t care who you are. Tonight I had to bend down to help my son get his shoes on, and I was nearly pulled under by a room full of toddlers that were desperate to hug me.

If you are pulled under, remember to swim perpendicular to the tide, rather than against it.

DDOS Attack on the Media

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Will Oremus from Slate perfectly captures Trump’s news cycle on On The Media:

The Trump campaign is a denial of service attack on the entire media.
If you have enough outrageous stuff going on at once, there’s no way the media can cover all of it, and all of it gets covered much less than it would otherwise.

The same thing is happening in my brain. I’d love to write about going to see the live Paw Patrol with my family tonight, or post a picture of an awkwardly-worded sign I saw downtown, or even something something brands, but I’m not sure what I could possibly write about that wouldn’t seem frivolous in the face of the badly written, unrealistically-over-the-top movie that’s currently governing the US.

Pastebot for Mac

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I haven’t been using my Mac much since getting an iPad Pro over the summer. It’s just been more fun to use than the laptop.

Then I bought Pastebot, and I’ve been back on the Mac ever since.

Pastebot remembers everything you copy. Then you can paste any of it later, anywhere you want, in any order you want. You can also create filters that transform text in the clipboard into another format.

If you’re anything like me, and you probably are me if you’re reading this, then you’ll appreciate what this means for doing research or trying to put together a document that includes bits of text or images from elsewhere.

It’s the most useful app I have right now.

Highly recommended.

Also, Tapbots is a developer well worth supporting. They make great apps.

Media has become simpler than it should be

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Seth Godin wrote a post about media’s race to the bottom that stuck with me for the last few days.

The opening is a good one:

The bestselling novel of 1961 was Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. Millions of people read this 690-page political novel. In 2016, the big sellers were coloring books.

Algorithms have no care for cultural richness. All they care about is grinding culture into a viscous listicle-slurry that can be measured and sold for fun and profit.

I used to hate it when people made arguments about the Internet being bad for us. It’s not helpful.

So I won’t. Because really this is about media.