150 entries! It’s been a fun exploring these subjects, but I’m taking an indefinite break. It’s nearly impossible to cover such a niche topic for a year-and-a-half without getting repetitive. For the time being, Not a Real Thing will act as a semi-static, hard-to-search, one-man wiki.
Okay, it’s nothing like a wiki. It’ll just be an abandoned blog.
For fresh visitors, I’ve assembled a top 25 of what I consider to be this site’s most interesting articles and blurbs:
I’ll continue to post relevant links on Not a Real Thing’s Facebook page. There’s a flash box gizmo around here that takes you there. My Twitter account is basically just a mirror of the FB wall.
There’s a new ad campaign on the way for two fictional lines of men’s clothing. Two brands, each lampooning a different flavor of lameness.
Süpar Tool ribs the melodramatic effete billionaire hipster vibe:
Upscale men’s magazines are packed full of ads depicting this jet-set twenty-something fashionista lifestyle that doesn’t actually exist. At least, not in any organic form. However, I imagine there are a handful of young men-of-means out there trying to reenact Kenneth Cole spreads they saw in Esquire.
The other fake brand, Corporado hits the… uh…:
Well, I’m not sure what Corporado is skewering here. While I agree that pleated pants look ridiculous, and golf shirts with prestige insignias are douchey, I’m unaware of the cowboy-corporate drone connection. Is that a real thing?
Perhaps a reader can watch the video and let me in on the joke.
I do love the ol’ “one sec” finger maneuver. Great touch.
Although the punchline has been cut from the end of the ads on YouTube, this is a campaign for Old Navy. Exponentially more watchable than the “Performance Fleece” spots. Yikes.
Winkie’sis a lynchpin location connecting multiple levels of reality in Mulholland Drive, a movie I mentioned earlier here. Lynchpin. See what I did there?
Dream Within the Fantasy
Dream Within the Fantasy pt2
Fantasy
Reality
If you wanna check out the “real Winkie’s”, head over to 1016 W El Segundo Blvd in Gardena, California.
Since this story about false memories implanted by high-imagery ads is in such heavy rotation right now, I thought I’d mock up the fictional product that was used in the reference study.
May it soar on the wings of Google Image Search until the end of time. Or until the story dies down next week.
It’s not uncommon for a forthcoming product to be announced only to slip quietly into the dark chasm of Development Hell before the release date. However, it’s the unreleased products heralded by hype and ad campaigns that have a special place in my heart.
The term vaporware was coined in 1982 by a Microsoft engineer chiding the endless delays of the Xenix operating system. The OS arrived shortly thereafter, but the name stuck, and is now a derisive term for the myriad broken promises of tech firms.
The label is also used to insinuate foul play by companies seeking to slow down sales of an existing product by announcing a fictional competing product in the works. Case in point: after Borland released Turbo Basic in 1987, Microsoft announced the arrival of QBasic 3, which allegedly wasn’t even in development at the time. It worked, and Borland sued. And lost.
Then there was the infamous Colecovision catalog that shipped with the game console. It was full of screenshots of vaporware titles that were simply mock-ups.
Tunnels & Trolls was a heavily marketed example of these titles, as it was to be the first battery-backed role-playing game available for home consoles. It would never see the light of day, but some code for the game’s load screen was discovered a few years ago, and is now readily available, presumably for the purpose of tearing open the cauterized wounds of childhood disappointment.
A more recent example is the Kno tablet. This jumbo-sized iPad was supposed to replace the hefty load of textbooks lugged around by college students. The company took thousands of pre-orders, but never shipped. To this day, Kno continues to haunt the web with their vague promises.
There’s also the Red Scarlet fixed-lens camera, a mythic fetish of slavering indie filmmakers worldwide. This ultra-lightweight, combination still/motion, super-HD rigout has been delayed several times since its announcement in 2008. It makes the occasional demure appearance at CES to inform future buyers that the initial list price has risen by a thousand dollars. Again.
This first-ever public footage of the Red Scarlet has all the shaky hallmarks of a Bigfoot video:
Keep an eye out for Wired Magazine’s annual Vaporware Awards, which since 1998 has been consistently won by Duke Nuken Forever (aka Duke Nukem Never, Duke Nukem Taking Forever, Duke Nukem Whenever, Duke Nukem ForNever, Duke Nukem Neverever, and Duke Nukem If Ever).
At some point in the 80’s the Japanese tried to give The Great Gatsby the pulse-pounding video game adaptation that Fitzgerald had always intended. And we missed it. From GreatGatsbyGame.com:
I really don’t know much about this game. I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. Apparently it’s an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”, but I haven’t found anything about that either. What’s left of the manual was just rubberbanded to the cartridge.
Kyle Chayka wrote an articulate essay about the appeal of this NES mockup game and others like it. From the article:
These pieces of art, visual, musical and written, depend on their relationships with their source material for impact, just as they depend on their viewers or listeners or readers to understand their references. It doesn’t matter that the Gatsby NES game is faked; it only matters that we can approach it appropriately, understanding the piece in terms of its own nostalgia. As another generation of artists and creators comes to prominence, more and more we will see mainstream art making use of digital nostalgia as a potent wellspring of artistic vocabulary.
You can play the “translated” version of the retrofictionalized Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatarihere.
Everyone loves these. There doesn’t seem to be a universally agreed upon term for this kind of art, but some descriptive attempts I’ve read include “over-rendering” and “un-tooning”. These generally take one of two forms.
The first involves applying realistic textures to a cartoonish (or Muppeted) figure, highlighting the absurdity and grotesqueness of proportion. This is the category into which the above “de-muppeted” painting falls.
Incidentally, Photobooth Bert is currently on display just down the road from me at the Orlando City Arts Factory. The booth being referenced is sort of an inside joke around here. Every twenty-something Orlando hipster worth their weight in PBR has at least one shot from Bar-BQ Bar’s photobooth somewhere on their Facebook profile.
Anyway, the painting is very impressive up-close.
Other examples of this style are Tim O’Brien’sChuck Brown:
…and Jax Pixeloo’s HomerSimpson Untooned andSuper Real Mario Brother:
There’s also a fantastic project/book by Dave Devries called The Monster Engine which demonstrates what children’s drawings would look like if painted realistically:
The second form goes in the other direction. Instead of realizing the grotesque form, they attempt to capture the original form that might have inspired it.
Examples would be Spongebob Strangepants by Mike Dubisch:
I’m sure there are dozens more examples of these. If you want to point any out to the readers, then shoot me a linkand I’ll include them in the white space below:
The superhero our country needs right now isn’t a ripped vigilante in tights, but a CEO with the vision to transform the defunct auto factories of detroit into biotech research hubs. Could David Serif be our man?
This ad for Serif Industries, unlike the Aperture Investment Opportunities campaign, doesn’t break the universe. I give [...]
A couple months ago I introduced you to Arthur Eames, PhD (aka “Artie”). His resume is a nonsensical array of fake techno-babble, made-up universities, and meaningless jargon meant to lure in recruiters who don’t actually evaluate resumes before pitching job opportunities to candidates.
It’s worked to some degree so far. He’s gotten a handful [...]
During Episode Five of AMC’s The Killing, a grieving Mitch Larsen ran her fingers over a row of Bits ‘N’ Pieces cereal, painfully recalling how much her late daughter loved the Lucky Charms knockoff.
It’s hard to miss the multi-layered subtext of the brand name Bits N’ Pieces. The story, much like the oft-compared Twin [...]
A year ago I wrote about Ashley Anderson’s Real Soda piece, which was inspired by his romp through an old Nintendo title:
While playing Bad Dudes, I killed a ninja, who upon dying dropped a 5 x 9 pixel powerup; that powerup, despite its incredibly small size, was instantly recognizable as a Coca-Cola can.
The end result of [...]
