"Target has become the Hot Topic of white women with disposable income"

Three Recs: January 11, 2024

Hey! Welcome to three recs, a new feature of the refreshed newsletter.

Three Recs is a sporadic email with three recommendations of various kinds. Sometimes I will recommend YouTube videos. Sometimes I will recommend music. Sometimes I will recommend articles.

What I will include?!

How often I will send it?!

It will be a mystery to us both every time.

I don’t have Twitter anymore, so this is my version of retweeting and sharing things that I like with the few thousand of you here. 😅

I’ll probably include a bit of commentary for the recommendations, too, but don’t hold me to it.

Disclaimer:

I should go ahead and tell you that sometimes I may recommend things that I don’t necessarily agree with in their message or their morals, if that makes sense. So if I include a video or a song or a book in here that has language or themes you think are objectionable, it’s likely I don’t agree with those things, but I think the item is worthy to pass along despite those things.

All of us have different tolerances when it comes to themes in books or language in songs and the like. So, just be aware of that and feel free to unsubscribe if my recommendations violate your sensitivities—no offense meant or taken.

With that, here’s the first ever three recs.

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1) The Stanley Cup Madness

Ryan Broderick, as usual, recognizes how the internet influences mainstream culture in some pretty dramatic ways. Here, he analyzes the Stanley cup craze, which has been boiling for a while but exploded this holiday season.

And the bolded part of the quote is amazing:

After mom internet started buzzing about the tumbler — a corner of the web that is to dropshipping what dads are to Amazon original streaming shows — Stanley hired Terence Reilly, the marketer credited for reinventing Crocs. Reading between the lines of what Reilly has said about his work at Stanley, it seems like his main strategy for both Crocs and the Quencher was capitalizing on internet buzz and growing it into otaku product worship. Or as Inc. phrased it in their feature on him, he uses a “scarcity model” to whip up interest. Cut to three years later, now we’re seeing mini-riots over limited edition Stanleys at Target.

My reference point for this kind of marketing is the Myspace era of music and fashion, when record companies and stores like Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts were using early social media to identify niche fandoms and convert them into mainstream hits. In this allegory, Target has become the Hot Topic of white women with disposable income. And their fingerless gloves and zipper pants are fun water bottles and that one perfume everyone in Manhattan is wearing right now.

2) Awesome Games Done Quick

Around midday Sunday, Awesome Games Done Quick 2024 will commence. What is Games Done Quick? Here’s a bit about them from their website:

Games Done Quick is a series of charity video game marathons. These events feature high-level gameplay by speedrunners raising money for charity. Games Done Quick has teamed up with several charities in its nine-year history, including Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Foundation. We are currently the largest fundraising event globally for both charities!

To date, Games Done Quick has raised over 45 million dollars for charity. We also average over 3000 people in attendance at our events, including staff, volunteers, runners, and attendees just looking to have fun and support the event!

I’ve been watching the two annual GDQ events for about a decade now, and they’re a delight. Twenty-four hours a day for a week straight a bunch of people beat all kinds of video games in near-world-record time. It’s a fun thing to have on in the background of doing some busy work during the day or while cooking dinner in the evenings.

If you have any interest in video games, check it out here starting Sunday afternoon for a whole week!

3) Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

I first heard of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow around its release in July 2022 when John Green recommended it on the vlogbrothers YouTube channel, but I never got around to picking it up. A co-worker gifted it to me this year in our annual Secret Santa book exchange, and I read it over the holiday. The book is tremendous. I really loved it. But frankly I was a little confused by the massive hype around it. Like, it was great. But I’m not sure what made it such a huge hit. I can’t put my finger on it. Anyway, I recommend it to you (and the cover is beautiful):

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By the way, I wrote a book called The Wolf in Their Pockets: 13 Ways the Social Internet Threatens the People You Lead. Would you consider buying it? I’d appreciate it.