Putting the content aside (yes, 'Harvey' is an asshat), I found this commercial riveting because the actors were actually acting and the whole thing was scripted like a play, with a story.

By contrast, most ads today are like having the product thrown in your face (three times, just so you remember), and they're populated with advozombies who are JUST... WAY... TOO... EXCITED.

Of course the subtext here is horrible and manipulative, but at least it feels like they hired writers and tried to tell a story, rather than deliver a hypnotoad blipvert.

I guess this robot won't be travelling to France anytime soon.

Have you seen his video in response to this?

He begs the culprit to stop, which is understandable, but the way he puts it you'd think this was a crime against all humanity and that the release of more pictures would cause the moon to crash into the Pacific ocean.

http://theblemish.com/2008/02/edison-chen-responds/

Sidestepping the issue of how advertising is handled, I'm wondering (as a Windows Mobile user) how exactly the platform is enabling posts like this.

Much as I find the platform useful, support for blogging has always come from third-party apps, most of which have a skeletal, cobbled-together feel. At present, I'm using MobiBlogr, which is pretty good, but with the map link here, I gather Mark is using something else.

Anyone have any insight into what's powering these mobile posts?

It's cute. Although A-R-G's costume is uncomfortably similar to the Heinz tomato ketchup bottle.

Pretty much guaranteed that if this guy is on any grassy knoll, he'll be acting alone.

All her epiloguing in the last book involves characters being married and having bred. So I would chalk this up as a lack of imagination on her part: that's the only sort of happy ending she's capable of imagining.

And thus another generation of gay people grows up ingesting subtle cues from our meta-narrative that they are somehow shameful and that there is no happy ending for them.

Myself, I'm trying to write novels in which one of the lead characters is openly gay. I know this makes me commercially unsaleable, but I figure it's my responsibility to be the change I want to see in the world. So I'm writing novels in which characters who happen to be incidentally gay are caught up in a bigger story. (Usually just one of the characters, but that seems to be enough to relegate the thing to the "Gay Lit" genre.)

There's more fun to be had making up new stories than waiting for table-scraps from people who can't be expected to understand the reality of it because it's not theirs.

HamishMacDonald.com if you want to read them.

Not only are they doing American-style product tie-ins, they've strangely also chosen to use the American word "cookie" rather than "biscuit".