It's such a memorable ad. It's like the dream of a child actually brought to life.
I've seen this story discussed around the internet over the last few days and found it interesting how younger generations seemed to only view it negatively (pollution, excess, etc). It's quite sad that something that seems like it could be universally enjoyed at the isn't now.
It encourages consumerism for the sake of consumerism and enables excessive e-waste. Sony has put forth plenty of effort since then to convince you that you've needed yet another new and shiny TV to replace the Bravia, and will continue to do the same.
I truly don't understand the idea of praising a commercial that exists solely to sell you something we could probably, reasonably, be making and selling a lot less of. We only keep going "because growth". When's enough? This is gross.
Edit: And after watching the video, it's extra jarring to me to feel the warm fuzzies it gives you, and then realize, "It's not asking me to be a good person or do something that's gonna match the feeling this commercial is giving me, it just wants me to buy something it's gonna want me to replace eventually". Ick. Get the fuck out of my emotions like that.
I feel like this is a very myopic perspective. It can be both art and a commercial at the same time and appreciable for either or both. As time progresses, it becomes more art than commercial because the commercial utility has expired.
Commercials are interesting as they are a way to support artists financially. Many artists make a living in commercials while also getting a chance to exercise a creative profession.
Conceptually it isn't that much different than church commissions during the Renaissance.
Or 19th century poster art. Many people collect reproductions (or originals if they can afford it) of advertising posters by people like Firmin Bouisset. Yes, they are ads, but they are also beautiful long after the products they were advertising are no longer available.
I visited the Mucha museum in Prague and was surprised by how many of his works were advertising posters. On one hand, I don't care for advertising: on the other hand, it brought us these wonderful works that we admire a century on, divorced from their original context, so I can't really deny their artistic potential.
As an artist, with a ton of artist friends, I wrestle with this idea very frequently. I understand the necessity for those who take that path, and I don't judge them for it (huge Jose Gonzalez fan, btw). Yet the ick remains.
It’s a pattern I’ve noticed with Americans, this bundling up art with the capitalism. Commercial/Ad work can be a lot of fun and a good living for any artist, but it’s just not fucking art. It’s such a cringey pattern - that somehow makes commercial work into chivalrous patronage.
That being said - cool ad! Fun to make and probably good money! Would love to work on something like that! But. Not. Art.
Commercial art? No, can't be art. Illustrations? Only if unpublished during the artist's lifetime. Commissions? Certainly not. Political art? No, just no. Religious art? Are you kidding me?!
Any arbiter of the arts will find that these handy guidelines readily facilitate the elimination and/or downsizing of unnecessary galleries and other non-art collections.
Marketing is just raising awareness for things you might enjoy. I don't think it has to be that deep.
They are doing marketing to get me to buy things. You are doing marketing to get me to NOT buy something.
The iPhone enabled everyone to see consumer buying cycles in that most people don't go buy the 11-12-13-14-15-16, they go 11-16 and 13-17 and the like. It's the same with all products. Most people don't buy every single new model, unless they are an enthusiast, in which case who are you to say what someone's hobbies are?
> Marketing is just raising awareness for things you might enjoy.
If that were all it is, there wouldn't be much problem.
Marketing is also creating a demand where there wasn't one before and exploiting psychological weaknesses to prompt actions not necessarily in a person's best interest.
Where do you draw the line on consumerism for physical to digital experiences? Is it worthwhile to experience the web given the high cost to build, maintain, and access it?
See I don't get that at all. I don't find it selling me something - it's from TWENTY YEARS AGO. It's just a video of 250,000 bouncy balls flying down a hill at 100mph. It's a cool sight. It's something that, if I was 10 and had access to that many bouncy balls, I'd be plotting myself.
OP is not talking about this ad in particular being cancer.
He's talking about a couple million roadside billboards, ads on busses, ads in TV services you pay for, drug companies spending more on advertising than R&D, political machines driven by 24 hours news cycles that are funded from ragebait, social media companies that have us literally addicted to our screens due to their advertising-based revenue models. It goes on... ad infinitum indeed.
It's a fucking cancer and it truly is the root of so many of our problems and we are running out of time to start thinking clearly about the damage the industrial advertising complex causes.
As we speak, there are large groups of people literally shooting each other to death. Advertising might be annoying, but not even on the top 100 list of major world problems.
I hate to say "go touch grass" because it sounds condescending. But please, go outside and have some fun! The dumb billboard isn't stopping that.
> As we speak, there are large groups of people literally shooting each other to death. Advertising might be annoying, but not even on the top 100 list of major world problems.
See, I'd contend that the business models and businesses enabled by advertising, and the combined social impact of ads plus those business models very much are one of the world's top problems.
Taking your question at face value, I would much prefer information be "pulled" rather than "pushed". In other words, I don't want to be informed - I want to search when I decide to search, get reviews when I decide to get reviews, etc. I don't want someone else deciding how my attention is diverted or what they would recommend for me. A notable exception is that I am happy to take unsolicited recommendations from friends and family, but that's because there is a critical distinction: they want to inform me of something for me, rather than for the product manufacturers.
This argument for the theoretical benefit of advertising (being informed about products/services) was probably true at the point in time when advertising genuinely consisted of a dispassionate listing of the features of a product, and maybe a picture of it. Take the commercial being highlighted here for example. It's 2.5 minutes of a very cool visual image of the toy balls bouncing en masse. But how does a zillion balls bouncing down a hill convey anything meaningful about the television model it's an ad for? How do sexy models in a commercial for beer, perfume, etc inform the consumer about the product in any actual sense?
It might benefit you to take some marketing courses to understand why these sort of ads are effective and useful. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean there's no rational explanation for it.
(In general, it's a good rule of thumb to assume that the widespread existence of something suggests there's a reason for it, and to be inquisitive as to what that reason might be.)
He didn't ask how these sorts of ads are effective or useful. He asked how they inform consumers, which was the point someone else previously brought up as a defense.
At this point in my life, I've realized that anything they advertise that is actually a new thing (not a TV or a toaster with slightly better features) is just going to be some consumable or gadget that I don't want or need. Most advertising I see is just for some soda or electronics brand which I already know about and do not want to buy. I don't think I could name a single ad that I've seen that is for a genuinely new product or service that was useful enough to me that I thought, "thank god they showed me this ad!"
I've actually seen multiple such ads in the past year on Youtube. I found myself surprised to actually want to see it to the end while hovering over the Skip button. One was a bed Heater/Cooler gadget, another an ultrasonic cutter. There were also some doozies, like these "model v8 engines" that work very hard to hide the fact that they are powered by electric motors. We'll see how this year goes.
And for literal centuries, you could flip through magazines to look for those neat gadgets when you want to look for them, where they usually had a fairly simple ad that wasn't trying to trick you or play with your emotions or anything. Usually a spec sheet.
When I want to know what kind of neat electronics I can play with my raspberry Pi, I don't sit around and wait for Youtube to show me ads, I browse the fucking store.
When my dad wanted to start a pressure washing business in the early 2000s, he didn't wait for an ad on the radio, or see a billboard, he ordered a catalog from some pressure washing companies and browsed their offerings at his leisure
In the 60s, if you ran a electronics lab, and you needed a new instrument to calibrate your new atomic clock, you would order an HP catalog and flip through their offerings, which included a basic description, a picture sometimes, and some specs.
Notably, the old way primarily required you to start from a point of dissatisfaction, intentionally seek out information, and purchase a solution to an actual problem you have.
The current days, advertising is all about convincing us with evolutionary brain tricks that we actually have so many problems. I'm tired of it.
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. (…)
There no way to find out about anything if people don't advertise. Make a website? Advertising. Wear a band T-Shirt? Advertising. Make a website called Hacker News as VC firm? Advertising.
It doesn’t need every form of advertising, but you can’t start a business if you can’t reach prospective customers, and if you can’t start a business then you don’t have capitalism.
I feel like the current generation will be remembered in the history as "the generation of sad fucks". It's incredibly difficult to escape the overwhelming sense of doom, but sometimes I have moments when I watch the sunset and think "this is cool", or listen to the music and feel comfy.
Seems cool enough to me that it should have been done independent of selling TVs.
I don't think it is wasteful, and to the extent it was destructive, it was well worth it.
We should encourage and welcome more of this, not less. How it is funded does not diminish this, IMO.
>When Conner was checking in to his hotel later that night, a ball bounced by on the sidewalk. He was 4 or 5 miles away.
I have to assume there was so many they never found just left to the ecosystem.
As much as I loved bouncy balls as an 80s kid, anytime I see them now it just reminds me of the sheer amount of useless plastic/rubber waste we produce. Even if bouncy balls in and of themselves are a tiny portion of that overall waste.
For example I live in the South, Mardi Gras is huge here and after every parade it looks like a god damn war zone of trash and waste left behind for prison labor to clean up as best they can. If it was me I would do a ban on plastic beads entirely as throwable parade objects.
> It's quite sad that something that seems like it could be universally enjoyed at the isn't now.
IMO at some point we all have to look back at the reality of past actions and be cognizant of our waste and abuse of the planet even if it was a fun time.
> As much as I loved bouncy balls as an 80s kid, anytime I see them now it just reminds me of the sheer amount of useless plastic/rubber waste we produce.
They're not useless. As you've just pointed out you enjoyed them as a kid. For a few cents in plastic how many hours of enjoyment did you get? What was wasted here?
> after every parade it looks like a god damn war zone
Yea but when you stack up the tax receipts it suddenly looks very worthwhile.
> reality of past actions and be cognizant of our waste and abuse of the planet even if it was a fun time.
Humans are always going to want to have fun. From my point of view have all the plastic beads you want. It's the nuclear weapons and daily war that gives me pause.
I can understand your sentiment, but to be fair, he wasn't talking about write-offs, at least how I read it. He was talking about tax revenue generated by the production and sale of those "pollutants." Revenue generation via people paying taxes on things is kind of the opposite of write-offs.
Ah, I'm thinking of my local understanding that many of the Mardi Gras Krewe's have beads and other objects donated to them for tax write-offs for businesses, or they get the whole float sponsored, etc.
>tax revenue generated by the production and sale of those "pollutants."
The other local problem being from 1985 to 2024 Mardi Gras beads were sale tax exempt, but we've somewhat closed that loophole to more specific circumstances.[1]
It's a little bit of both actually. The point is when you draw in a massive crowd to a city for an event you generate huge amounts of taxes. Airport taxes, hotel taxes, sales taxes, they all take an appreciable jump. Even without the tax on beads, which as a percentage, was never going to be astronomical, it's around $15 million in sales tax increases alone.
The total economic value of Mardi Gras to the city as a whole is estimated around $800m.
This, by the way, is true for almost any successful event. For every $1 you invest you generate at least $2 in revenue.
People aren't buying beads simply because they exist or they have some sort of scripp arrangement that forces them to buy them. It's demand. You can suggest that your moralism requires everyone else to live by an austerity that you're comfortable with but this is flatly inhumane. There's only one bleak outlook here.
Wow, as someone with vivid and fond memories of watching this in college, I'm seeing this in this very thread. Kinda wild, and really makes me feel old and out of touch. And that heartbeats song is a banger and will forever take me back.
“I think our bill was $74,000 on broken windows,” said Ranahan. “And the crazy thing is, everyone loved it. The people, the neighborhood, they still come out to me and talk to me about it.”
"We want to set City Hall on fire, we want to bump a blimp into the Golden Gate Bridge and we want to jump a hook-and-ladder truck over Lefty O’Doul Bridge with Roger Moore on it’ … and they were seriously like, ‘OK.’”
My main question is, where did this San Francisco go? I'd love for the city to create more memorable moments because the city is special. But today, this ad would've been buried in CEQA lawsuits. Hell, parking in the wrong public spot could get your car keyed by some irate millionaire[1].
First the dotcom boom pushed the artists out to Oakland by 2000, but there were still burners and hipsters in 2005. Then the subprime boom/bust took a lot of the hipsters and older businesses out, but the tech busses brought the Silicon Valley nerds in 2010. Then the rise of Uber startups through 2016 pushed the artists into warehouses until the Ghostship fire, but there were still techbros and crypto in the Mission. When the pandemic finally came for the rest of Frisco there was hardly anyone left who cared or they were so old they wanted everyone else to just leave. If you remember Market street and the Tenderloin from the old days, the tents today are kinda quaint.
Yeah, it’s interesting that they have no motivation to separate the art from the commission nor any attempt to understand that it was a very different time. Broadcast television and low bandwidths.
The idea that advertising is a “cancer upon society” fundamentally misunderstands how mass media, telecommunications, and modern society works. It’s about passing and sharing information.
I hate most ads and almost all modern advertising sucks. But this ad ain’t it. It relies on nostalgia, a dream like element. The amount of pollution is, globally, negligible, and they largely cleaned them up. We hear stories of people keeping balls as mementi [1].
Call me cynical but if we are not meant to enjoy even the aesthetically pleasing stuff the neoliberal environmental disaster of the last 40 years creates we are in for a bad time. May as well go back to hunter gathering of subsistence farming.
[1] I know it’s non standard but if “octopi” is cromulent then so is “mementi”
Don't get me wrong: as a piece of advertising, this is one of the few I would be willing to watch again. On the other hand, I am left asking: what is the point? It is not as though there were many venues where you could enjoy the vibrance of it. It certainly looks better on my modern monitors than on my Bravia TV of that era.
As for children, I would be strongly opposed to showing a child that commercial. It isn't hard to imagine them trying to haul buckets of bouncy balls to the roof after being ... inspired.
I was in San Francisco that week. Ecological issues aside, it was the last time San Francisco felt different in a good way rather than a bad one. The “negative energy” is now too much for me and, when I travel to the Bay Area, I pretty much just stay on-track. I wonder if people who lived in San Francisco from 1965-2005 expected it to last forever.
I think this is bigger than just SF. After the great recession the generally positive atmosphere in the western world never really recovered. Any time it even got close to recovering some new horrible event happened.
Positivity has become politically suspect. It's doubly sad to be unhappy about how things are going in the world generally and also to be nervous about enjoying when something goes right. It's sad that making a positive comment about the weather is something I only do with close friends now, and not even all of them. There are people I've known for years, who know what my politics are, who know who I give money to, yet still, if I say something nice about the weather, they have to say "too bad climate isn't weather" or "yeah, but you know in a few months it's going to be terrible, because global warming is real." And none of this drives political engagement or moves anybody's mind in the slightest; it's just a social fashion that arose spontaneously, for no purpose, and which we will enforce zealously until one day it doesn't seem important anymore.
As the world grows more interconnected, the proliferation of news about horrible events happening spreads faster, and even if you personally ignore the news, other people don’t, and this colors the overall mood of society.
There is horror everywhere, and always will be until the end of our days.
Suppose you lived in a village where there was no outside news. You'd learn of about two murders and a dozen deadly accidents in your lifetime. Imagine how safer you'd feel compared to a villager who's getting outside news beamed to her face every hour of the day.
I'm not advocating isolation, but our primitive minds are not able to really understand that what is projected in front of us is not the same as what happens in front of us. I don't know how anyone could solve that.
Would thousands of colored balls careening down streets bouncing off objects and each other and damaging things in their path be an okay metaphor for this?
And how can you support funding this beautiful park proposal when there are children starving in ${country}??
I can’t remember where I heard this, but it was someone questioning joy and frivolity in a time of war. And the answer back was that people need to remember what they are fighting for otherwise what’s the point?
If you don’t allow yourself joy until the problems are gone, there will never be joy and the problems will multiply for lack of it.
I was thinking the same thing. It's surprising how many people don't get this, arguing that poverty, wars or some other pressing matter must be solved first before we can go to space or spend money on non essential activities.
It may seem counterintuitive, but that way of thinking doesn't actually solve problems, it only perpetuates them.
While your point has value, there's also value in the perspective that people should take more responsibility for the damage inflicted on others under their watch. For example, it is my perspective that too many people stood by idly while the U.S. engaged in war for the 90's/00's/10's/20's. Too many people said "I want to go make money on wall street/in law/in consulting" instead of either changing their political system or serving it. There is a fair argument that war, particularly war conducted by your own country, is an exceptional thing and requires re-prioritizing duties over desires. The only other exception I can think of that isn't debateable is genocide.
I mean, you mean after the 2003-2004 Iraq war, 9/11 in 2001, the stolen election of 2000 & the crash of 2000, the Kosovo war in 1999? There’s always a lot of reasons why the atmosphere can be negative every year.
Yeah I'm not sure what they meant by 2008... After 9/11, things werent optimistic.
Coming up to YEAR 2000, the future felt here. I remember watching the TV shows in preparation for YEAR 2000. Then the future never really happened like predicted. We didn't wear silver suits in 2001.
I do mean after those things. Globally nobody cares about most of these after the initial shock. There were definitely long periods of good in between those events.
The San Francisco I experience is full of positive energy. Sure, maybe if you're visiting and stay in Union Square, that's not what you see. But if you live in the residential neighborhoods and work somewhere nice (such as in the Presidio), there isn't another city in the world I would rather be.
It seems to me like working from home has transformed the residential neighborhoods. I recently visited Inner Sunset as was astonished at how many people were out and about.
When I visited in the 90's I remember conversations mentioning seeing the signs and trying to delay the inevitable end. Whether someone sees that as dooming or prescient is probably a matter of if they moved in before or after 2005.
What city regions have better energy, are good economically, and have natural beauty (ocean, mountain, plants)?
It is easy to find faults with the SF bay area (politics, costs, and derivative issues), but is somewhere actually better?
EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes. It was an honest question, and I badly wanted to be informed, having given the issue in-depth consideration over the years. I wasn't being snarky.
Really depends on what you mean by all those. Some would say Sandy Eggo has the beauty, others would contest that Seattle has the economy and mountains.
The people left there are those who like what it has become or are trapped in someway; others have moved.
Yeah, it's good economically in the sense that it's still near top of market, due to having a large-ish existing economy (even if aspects of said economy seem fundamentally whack).
As in: if you want something at decent quality you can pretty much get it pretty easily with a bunch of options (assuming you can afford it).
Caveat - not necessarily the top of everything for all markets is available, but overall stuff is still around -- even as some things are disappearing from the area.
In contrast, other places are just poor, and you "cannot" find as large a variety of lots of goods and services, I imagine. But I could be wrong -- I'll check my assumptions. Thanks.
Are services really easily available in SF? I was shocked when we went to restaurant at evening without a reservation. Server give one hour waiting time for a table! At normal city you just drop into nearest good restaurant, and if they are full (very unlikely) you go to next.
How easy is to get a dentist or masseuse, with a few hour notice?!
> In contrast, other places are just poor, and you "cannot" find as large a variety of lots of goods and services
I think you need reality check on "poor". The place with the widest selection of services and products (for example types of meat in supermarket, or hand made tailored clothes) is Bangkok in Thailand. Places like SF just do not have enough people to provide all those services.
IDK about in the city itself, but in the surrounding metro area I would say yes.
> At normal city you just drop into nearest good restaurant, and if they are full (very unlikely) you go to next.
Right, I was biased toward considering the surrounding cities in the SF metro. I think popping into next open restaurant with seating applies to the healthy downtowns in the area metro area. But the city itself, I wouldn't know.
> a dentist...with a few hour notice
I don't think that kind of dental scheduling is typically found/done _anywhere_ in the US AFAIK.
> meat in supermarket, or hand made tailored clothes) is Bangkok in Thailand
It used to be found in sf, and I've still found it in slc
Back in 2012 I had a raspberry seed work it's way down into my gums and not come out. Made an appointment at Townsend dental and saw him 3 hours later.
A few weeks ago I had a filling fall out. Called up a local dentist here and got it fixed 90 minutes later
Yeah if you’re in a culture where everyone gets a reservation for a fancy restaurant (just like in Paris), you’ll need a reservation, that’s just how the market works.
> How easy is to get a dentist or masseuse, with a few hour notice?!
I mean, everyone who lives here is already affiliated with a dental office and they’ll take you in same day for a real emergency. You can get a Thai massage in two hours very easily too.
The quality of medical care is also stupidly high compared to almost anywhere outside the US. Sure your insurance will pay $$$ for it but who cares?
Because you meet tons of talented engineers whenever you go for lunch, and they just need to cross the street and walk in to ask for a job.
Because you're around a ton of people who are interested in the same thing as you are. Caveat: If you're not interested in the things SF engineers are interested in, that means you're surrounded by masses of incredibly boring - to you - folks :)
Because that introduction you need to make things pop is super-easy compared to other places.
Doesn't mean you _have_ to start in SF, but for certain classes of ventures, it's the place that makes it the easiest.
Subculture wise, SF is barely represented in computer graphics or high performance optimization circles, like gamedev or demoscene, arguably a class of field that produces top quality software engineers.
Any remote job listing gets thousands of applications, with dozens good candidates. I really doubt I could get decent engineer for $80k a year in SF.
> Caveat: If you're not interested ... incredibly boring
Everyone in SF has basically the same correct opinion.
And not just booring, but hostile. People in SF are really not that tolerant. Try to say that Dubai is more diverse, because it has many cultures, religions, people from Africa, India, Philippines... Or someone is not XYZ, but mixed race (whiter than me) and you will understand.
> I really doubt I could get decent engineer for $80k a year in SF.
If you did, they'd be a non-exempt employee, so you'd need to track and pay out overtime. A quick look puts the minimum non-exempt salary for jobs in California at ~$69,000.
Also, honestly? I expect you'd be hard-pressed to find a decent programmer for $80k/year in ANY major metro area in the US... post 2020, housing prices went NUTS across the country and aren't getting any less nuts.
(One of the big reasons I haven't moved out of San Francisco is that my ~50% less than "market rate" rent is not THAT much more than current rents in most other US cities. (Plus, most other US cities don't even pretend to have any sort of useful public transportation.))
I'd say Lisbon, Portugal is probably the closest (including Weather, which places like Seattle are lacking), especially because you didn't mention pre-existing tech industry which is probably SF's main differential versus everywhere else. It even has a big red bridge?
P.S: I'm sorry Lisboetas..you are already getting swamped by Digi Nomads, but it's true.
I visited lisbon last year and was kind of shocked how similar to SF it was, weather, hills, general feel - that it has its own golden gate bridge really just sealed it.
Vancouver, IMO, is a far better developed city than Seattle. Vastly better transit, denser, more walkable neighbourhoods, and just overall very thoughtfully developed.
It’s just an enormous shame it’s become grossly unaffordable— on an income adjusted basis, it’s more expensive than the Bay Area. That, and the weather, although the summers are perfect IMO.
You’re conveniently leaving out how pretentious and insufferable many Seattleites are…
It has been far and wide the least welcoming, interesting, and lackluster food city I’ve ever lived in.
Also, the coffee scene there is worse than SF, Chicago, LA..rare stop for bands and musicians touring, and unpleasant transit.
The only people I know who are genuinely happy there are people who moved from Florida, and wealthy white families with young children who moved there (from California) “because taxes and better education”.
Don’t even get me started on the lack of diversity and casual racism.
SF is far from perfect, but Seattle isn’t even in the conversation for places I’d ever recommend someone leaving SF to shortlist.
Sorry you're not having a good time here; that hasn't been my experience of the city at all. There was a moment back in the late '90s when I could have moved to either Seattle or S.F., and Seattle happened to snag me first; I still enjoy visiting SF from time to time, but I've never had the slightest regret about settling here instead.
For tradition's sake, I feel obligated to give you the classic Seattleite response to such complaints: "whatever, man; if there's somewhere you like better, feel free to go there."
Seattle is another tier above. SF people I find far more interesting and smart vs. the smartest people I met/knew/know in Seattle. Seattle is like a pissing contest for nerd snipers. At least in SF we drink our own pee (at Folsom of course)
It really is surrounded by amazing natural beauty. However, everything to do with humans has slowly morphed into an unfixable nightmare and it's heartbreaking. I think it's time to throw in the towel, evacuate everyone from the city and let it return to nature as a wildlife preserve.
I lived in SF then and picked up a 5 gallon bucket of bouncy balls at a garage sale. I didn't realize until now that this is where they almost certainly came from.
The problem is not "1080p vs 4K on YouTube" but using YouTube at all for quality video. It's always been bad on YouTube, but videos like this make it extra obvious. For example, this shot: https://i.imgur.com/NRT0AOW.jpeg even in 4K it looks horrible, because of the compression YouTube does even to 4K.
I've tried finding some better version (not on YouTube) but been unable to, maybe it is lost to the passage of time.
The description of that higher quality upload says they sourced it from a retail demo disk, that's probably the best quality version in the wild. Maybe there's a direct rip of that disk on archive.org somewhere? Otherwise someone could ask them to upload their copy if they still have it.
Blu-ray was just getting started in 2005, and Bravia TVs were 1366x768[1], so the demo disk is likely a DVD. I think someone would have to persuade Sony to remaster their original film, or release it to an archivist.
> that's probably the best quality version in the wild
Probably not, would be my guess. Uploading the very same source video to somewhere else than YouTube (and ideally a place that doesn't do heavy compression at all) would lead to an higher quality version easily, someone somewhere must have done just that.
That's what I meant, that the source video for that YouTube upload is probably the best version out there, as you say the second-hand re-encoded version served by YouTube is inferior. I didn't word that clearly, sorry.
Try pulling different codec versions from YouTube? Maybe it got upped to Vimeo or something before?
Also YouTube got rid of some resolution options a couple years back and that kinda adds to the problem of compression-rot of sorts.
> that kinda adds to the problem of compression-rot of sorts
I dunno, when even the 4K version (offered by YouTube) shows the very same compression artifacts on a 4K modern TV, then I kind of feel like you screwed up. At least from the perspective of a viewer, of course from the perspective of the business that saves a lot of money from it.
The high contrast edges of foliage breaks it too. It seems like a release from the original source would be very doable. And maybe other versions exist if it was considered for (and won) various awards. And the initial Sky broadcast may have been high quality too?
This was a commercial produced for European television in 2005. Barely anyone even had an HDTV back then. I certainly saw it in standard definition when it aired.
While I also detest commercials as a whole, I think it is worth stepping back and viewing this as art. The concept, the visuals, the original song (not the one you find on most videos due to licensing)... it is beautiful and should evoke childhood joy and wonder. Yes it was wasteful, but if we only do things because they are efficient, I think our humanity suffers.
They made at least one more commercial [1] during the same time period and it was also inspired by awe and wonder. While it did waste paint and likely pollute the local groundwater temporarily, it was conducted in a building that was scheduled for demolition.
I LOVED the Honda Cog video and the story [1] about how they made it along with the purported 100+ takes is craziness. I can't imagine resetting it so many times... especially since the offending item that kept killing it was so late in the chain.
Same guy who made the remaster linked in the article also remastered this one -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY0bxhbPi3Q - seems he had a retail DVD from Sony with a better original source on it
I hadn't thought about this in years. It was absolutely dazzling to see at the time, I can't imagine what it was like in person. In retrospect I would also probably chalk this up as the first truly "internet" moment.
> "There was not a single bouncy ball in any machine in America for a couple months. I felt so bad for the poor children," said Fuglsig.
I find it hard to believe that they really went around for months buying maybe 100 balls each from random dispensers until they had 250,000 - especially considering the design of the balls is mostly consistent in the end. Maybe a bit of fanciful storytelling?
Good point, I guess they probably did mean scour the country for suppliers, rather than ball machines! Even in context you could read it both ways:
> First, they had to scour the country to acquire the 250,000 bouncy balls needed to create the critical mass. “They bought every bouncy ball west of the Mississippi,” said Ranahan. “There was not a single bouncy ball in any machine in America for a couple months. I felt so bad for the poor children,” said Fuglsig.
It’s such a simple setup that you could make it in CGI in 2005 far cheaper than this. The balls barely affect the environment and the physics is really simple. I thought for 20 years that it was CGI because obviously ”who would do that cleanup?”. TIL. Really cool that they did this in real life.
Same. Stemming from my experience growing up in Cleveland, I have zero patience when ad/PR outfits throw garbage everywhere for the spectacle. We’ve already got enough problems with trash everywhere.
If you want to watch the ad. A couple of friends of mine lived in the city at the time and were watching as they filmed it. We all agreed that it was both amazing and insane all at the same time.
At the opposite end we have excess CG, like that iPad ad last year which everyone hated because it depicted real art tools being crushed into a digital substrate.
I had a Bravia 40BX425 (latam model) for several years. I bought it used and after many years I had to sell (needed the money). An astounding TV, much better than some of the new smart cr*p out there.
"The day explosions of colour painted a Glasgow estate: In 2006, Sony set out to create 'Paint', widely regarded as one of the most technically complex adverts ever made..."
Not really, the lava lamp's fluid dynamics are very sensitive to initial conditions and the fluids behave chaotically, whereas the bouncy balls have highly predictable trajectories.
This advertisement was the first time I ever saw an ad that made me think there could be something more to advertisement than being utterly soulless. It literally brings me to tears seeing it because of how beautiful the composition is and how well it works with the musical arrangement. There have been a few other ads throughout the years that are on a similar level, but they are few and far between. It's not just an effective advertisement, it's a cinematic masterpiece.
I thought the opposite - the 'lost cat' sign at https://youtu.be/2UXS6DBD6g0?t=94 is incredibly legible and definitely better than an upscaled 1080p image.
In 2025 this is something a casual YouTuber could do, or could be assigned as a school project. All the pieces are there now. You wouldn't even need to pay for anything, I don't think. Blender should be able to do everything you need, quite comfortably. Getting data from the world back into the special effects software has gotten magnitudes easier since then.
It's such a memorable ad. It's like the dream of a child actually brought to life.
I've seen this story discussed around the internet over the last few days and found it interesting how younger generations seemed to only view it negatively (pollution, excess, etc). It's quite sad that something that seems like it could be universally enjoyed at the isn't now.
Advertising is a cancer on society, just 'cause it's sometimes nice to look at doesn't really change that. IMHO of course.
I'm quite certain a fun video for a Sony Bravia TV from 20 years ago is not comparable to cancer in any way. It's ok to be happy from time to time :)
It encourages consumerism for the sake of consumerism and enables excessive e-waste. Sony has put forth plenty of effort since then to convince you that you've needed yet another new and shiny TV to replace the Bravia, and will continue to do the same.
I truly don't understand the idea of praising a commercial that exists solely to sell you something we could probably, reasonably, be making and selling a lot less of. We only keep going "because growth". When's enough? This is gross.
Edit: And after watching the video, it's extra jarring to me to feel the warm fuzzies it gives you, and then realize, "It's not asking me to be a good person or do something that's gonna match the feeling this commercial is giving me, it just wants me to buy something it's gonna want me to replace eventually". Ick. Get the fuck out of my emotions like that.
I feel like this is a very myopic perspective. It can be both art and a commercial at the same time and appreciable for either or both. As time progresses, it becomes more art than commercial because the commercial utility has expired.
Commercials are interesting as they are a way to support artists financially. Many artists make a living in commercials while also getting a chance to exercise a creative profession.
Conceptually it isn't that much different than church commissions during the Renaissance.
Or 19th century poster art. Many people collect reproductions (or originals if they can afford it) of advertising posters by people like Firmin Bouisset. Yes, they are ads, but they are also beautiful long after the products they were advertising are no longer available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmin_Bouisset
I visited the Mucha museum in Prague and was surprised by how many of his works were advertising posters. On one hand, I don't care for advertising: on the other hand, it brought us these wonderful works that we admire a century on, divorced from their original context, so I can't really deny their artistic potential.
As an artist, with a ton of artist friends, I wrestle with this idea very frequently. I understand the necessity for those who take that path, and I don't judge them for it (huge Jose Gonzalez fan, btw). Yet the ick remains.
I would confirm the ick with my euro perspective.
It’s a pattern I’ve noticed with Americans, this bundling up art with the capitalism. Commercial/Ad work can be a lot of fun and a good living for any artist, but it’s just not fucking art. It’s such a cringey pattern - that somehow makes commercial work into chivalrous patronage.
That being said - cool ad! Fun to make and probably good money! Would love to work on something like that! But. Not. Art.
So you are going with the "No True Scotsman" argument against commercial art?
Commercial art? No, can't be art. Illustrations? Only if unpublished during the artist's lifetime. Commissions? Certainly not. Political art? No, just no. Religious art? Are you kidding me?!
Any arbiter of the arts will find that these handy guidelines readily facilitate the elimination and/or downsizing of unnecessary galleries and other non-art collections.
Marketing is just raising awareness for things you might enjoy. I don't think it has to be that deep.
They are doing marketing to get me to buy things. You are doing marketing to get me to NOT buy something.
The iPhone enabled everyone to see consumer buying cycles in that most people don't go buy the 11-12-13-14-15-16, they go 11-16 and 13-17 and the like. It's the same with all products. Most people don't buy every single new model, unless they are an enthusiast, in which case who are you to say what someone's hobbies are?
> Marketing is just raising awareness for things you might enjoy.
If that were all it is, there wouldn't be much problem.
Marketing is also creating a demand where there wasn't one before and exploiting psychological weaknesses to prompt actions not necessarily in a person's best interest.
Where do you draw the line on consumerism for physical to digital experiences? Is it worthwhile to experience the web given the high cost to build, maintain, and access it?
See I don't get that at all. I don't find it selling me something - it's from TWENTY YEARS AGO. It's just a video of 250,000 bouncy balls flying down a hill at 100mph. It's a cool sight. It's something that, if I was 10 and had access to that many bouncy balls, I'd be plotting myself.
Yeesh
OP is not talking about this ad in particular being cancer.
He's talking about a couple million roadside billboards, ads on busses, ads in TV services you pay for, drug companies spending more on advertising than R&D, political machines driven by 24 hours news cycles that are funded from ragebait, social media companies that have us literally addicted to our screens due to their advertising-based revenue models. It goes on... ad infinitum indeed.
It's a fucking cancer and it truly is the root of so many of our problems and we are running out of time to start thinking clearly about the damage the industrial advertising complex causes.
As we speak, there are large groups of people literally shooting each other to death. Advertising might be annoying, but not even on the top 100 list of major world problems.
I hate to say "go touch grass" because it sounds condescending. But please, go outside and have some fun! The dumb billboard isn't stopping that.
Can you please publish the list so we know what's ok to complain about?
> As we speak, there are large groups of people literally shooting each other to death. Advertising might be annoying, but not even on the top 100 list of major world problems.
See, I'd contend that the business models and businesses enabled by advertising, and the combined social impact of ads plus those business models very much are one of the world's top problems.
What is the point here? Don't complain about the ramifications of the advertising industry because wars exist?
I'd be curious to see this Top 100 list.
There is war, so nothing else is bad.
>Advertising might be annoying, but not even on the top 100 list of major world problems.
Hard disagree. Advertising, in some form, is likely the root or primary facilitator of probably 25 or more of those top 100.
>because it sounds condescending.
Your comment is condescending, yes.
Not sure if I'd call the relentless assault on my attention to convince me to purchase things "happy", but to each their own.
Well, this is a TV add, so no one is forcing you to watch it.
Billboards, on the other hand, are awful as your eyes are drawn to it as you drive down the freeway.
what is your preferred (ideal) way of being informed about possible beneficial proposals?
ps i also hate ads and attention economy.
Taking your question at face value, I would much prefer information be "pulled" rather than "pushed". In other words, I don't want to be informed - I want to search when I decide to search, get reviews when I decide to get reviews, etc. I don't want someone else deciding how my attention is diverted or what they would recommend for me. A notable exception is that I am happy to take unsolicited recommendations from friends and family, but that's because there is a critical distinction: they want to inform me of something for me, rather than for the product manufacturers.
This argument for the theoretical benefit of advertising (being informed about products/services) was probably true at the point in time when advertising genuinely consisted of a dispassionate listing of the features of a product, and maybe a picture of it. Take the commercial being highlighted here for example. It's 2.5 minutes of a very cool visual image of the toy balls bouncing en masse. But how does a zillion balls bouncing down a hill convey anything meaningful about the television model it's an ad for? How do sexy models in a commercial for beer, perfume, etc inform the consumer about the product in any actual sense?
It might benefit you to take some marketing courses to understand why these sort of ads are effective and useful. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean there's no rational explanation for it.
(In general, it's a good rule of thumb to assume that the widespread existence of something suggests there's a reason for it, and to be inquisitive as to what that reason might be.)
He didn't ask how these sorts of ads are effective or useful. He asked how they inform consumers, which was the point someone else previously brought up as a defense.
Effective and useful for Sony. They are detrimental to society as they increase consumption, waste, pollution etc.
At this point in my life, I've realized that anything they advertise that is actually a new thing (not a TV or a toaster with slightly better features) is just going to be some consumable or gadget that I don't want or need. Most advertising I see is just for some soda or electronics brand which I already know about and do not want to buy. I don't think I could name a single ad that I've seen that is for a genuinely new product or service that was useful enough to me that I thought, "thank god they showed me this ad!"
I've actually seen multiple such ads in the past year on Youtube. I found myself surprised to actually want to see it to the end while hovering over the Skip button. One was a bed Heater/Cooler gadget, another an ultrasonic cutter. There were also some doozies, like these "model v8 engines" that work very hard to hide the fact that they are powered by electric motors. We'll see how this year goes.
And for literal centuries, you could flip through magazines to look for those neat gadgets when you want to look for them, where they usually had a fairly simple ad that wasn't trying to trick you or play with your emotions or anything. Usually a spec sheet.
When I want to know what kind of neat electronics I can play with my raspberry Pi, I don't sit around and wait for Youtube to show me ads, I browse the fucking store.
When my dad wanted to start a pressure washing business in the early 2000s, he didn't wait for an ad on the radio, or see a billboard, he ordered a catalog from some pressure washing companies and browsed their offerings at his leisure
In the 60s, if you ran a electronics lab, and you needed a new instrument to calibrate your new atomic clock, you would order an HP catalog and flip through their offerings, which included a basic description, a picture sometimes, and some specs.
Notably, the old way primarily required you to start from a point of dissatisfaction, intentionally seek out information, and purchase a solution to an actual problem you have.
The current days, advertising is all about convincing us with evolutionary brain tricks that we actually have so many problems. I'm tired of it.
I would opt in.
If adverts were for my benefit I would be able to choose them, rather than have to block them.
Yes. Then again, there’s Banksy’s take:
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. (…)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/461383-people-are-taking-th...
There no way to find out about anything if people don't advertise. Make a website? Advertising. Wear a band T-Shirt? Advertising. Make a website called Hacker News as VC firm? Advertising.
Someone has to move the product.
Capitalism has saved billions of people from poverty.
Advertising is part of that trade.
I’m happy it exists.
> Capitalism has saved billions of people from poverty.
Unabated capitalism has more poverty than capitalism with social programs. Social programs save people from poverty.
Also, capitalism can exist without advertising.
It doesn’t need every form of advertising, but you can’t start a business if you can’t reach prospective customers, and if you can’t start a business then you don’t have capitalism.
Capitalism has saved billions of people from poverty.
You meant the EXACT opposite, right? :)
No. Poverty is the default state. Capitalism creates inequality but it also reduces poverty.
+1 IMHO too.
>It's quite sad that something that seems like it could be universally enjoyed at the isn't now.
This happens frequently for a good many things. Collective ignorance gets replaced with the lens of hindsight.
> Collective ignorance…
… and there it is. People knew but saw through it all to just maybe enjoy the wonder of the event.
I feel like the current generation will be remembered in the history as "the generation of sad fucks". It's incredibly difficult to escape the overwhelming sense of doom, but sometimes I have moments when I watch the sunset and think "this is cool", or listen to the music and feel comfy.
This might be usual teenage apathy mixing with rage-bait seeping out into the real world.
General thing of the internet, really. We've all become used to being rewarded for negativity and critique.
There's some irony in this comment. It's also a textbook ad hominem.
I love the ad and the stunt. I would have been as giddy as a child if I'd seen it in person.
It's also rings true to me that it's rather wasteful and destructive in service of selling TVs.
Shrug, what's done is done so I'm free to enjoy it guilt-free while also thinking we probably shouldn't do stunts like this anymore.
Seems cool enough to me that it should have been done independent of selling TVs. I don't think it is wasteful, and to the extent it was destructive, it was well worth it.
We should encourage and welcome more of this, not less. How it is funded does not diminish this, IMO.
Pardon me if "it looked cool" isn't persuasive.
To each their own. I hope there is something that sparks joy for you.
This is the first time I'd ever heard of or seen that ad. I guess my efforts to avoid advertising work really well, hooray!
It is visually stunning for sure, but I have to not think too hard about the implications of it.
It never aired in the US so that could be one reason.
Could be. Although that was well after I stopped watching television, so if it didn't appear as an online ad, I wouldn't have seen it no matter what.
Just a side point from the article
>When Conner was checking in to his hotel later that night, a ball bounced by on the sidewalk. He was 4 or 5 miles away.
I have to assume there was so many they never found just left to the ecosystem.
As much as I loved bouncy balls as an 80s kid, anytime I see them now it just reminds me of the sheer amount of useless plastic/rubber waste we produce. Even if bouncy balls in and of themselves are a tiny portion of that overall waste.
For example I live in the South, Mardi Gras is huge here and after every parade it looks like a god damn war zone of trash and waste left behind for prison labor to clean up as best they can. If it was me I would do a ban on plastic beads entirely as throwable parade objects.
> It's quite sad that something that seems like it could be universally enjoyed at the isn't now.
IMO at some point we all have to look back at the reality of past actions and be cognizant of our waste and abuse of the planet even if it was a fun time.
> As much as I loved bouncy balls as an 80s kid, anytime I see them now it just reminds me of the sheer amount of useless plastic/rubber waste we produce.
They're not useless. As you've just pointed out you enjoyed them as a kid. For a few cents in plastic how many hours of enjoyment did you get? What was wasted here?
> after every parade it looks like a god damn war zone
Yea but when you stack up the tax receipts it suddenly looks very worthwhile.
> reality of past actions and be cognizant of our waste and abuse of the planet even if it was a fun time.
Humans are always going to want to have fun. From my point of view have all the plastic beads you want. It's the nuclear weapons and daily war that gives me pause.
>Yea but when you stack up the tax receipts it suddenly looks very worthwhile.
Bleak reminder that I will never jive with the general vibes of HN and the VC trash types polluting the world for a tax write-off.
I can understand your sentiment, but to be fair, he wasn't talking about write-offs, at least how I read it. He was talking about tax revenue generated by the production and sale of those "pollutants." Revenue generation via people paying taxes on things is kind of the opposite of write-offs.
Ah, I'm thinking of my local understanding that many of the Mardi Gras Krewe's have beads and other objects donated to them for tax write-offs for businesses, or they get the whole float sponsored, etc.
>tax revenue generated by the production and sale of those "pollutants."
The other local problem being from 1985 to 2024 Mardi Gras beads were sale tax exempt, but we've somewhat closed that loophole to more specific circumstances.[1]
[1]https://casetext.com/regulation/louisiana-administrative-cod...
It's a little bit of both actually. The point is when you draw in a massive crowd to a city for an event you generate huge amounts of taxes. Airport taxes, hotel taxes, sales taxes, they all take an appreciable jump. Even without the tax on beads, which as a percentage, was never going to be astronomical, it's around $15 million in sales tax increases alone.
The total economic value of Mardi Gras to the city as a whole is estimated around $800m.
This, by the way, is true for almost any successful event. For every $1 you invest you generate at least $2 in revenue.
Exactly, taxes on that fun is what supports food stamps and medicine for the poor, to the extent it is available.
People aren't buying beads simply because they exist or they have some sort of scripp arrangement that forces them to buy them. It's demand. You can suggest that your moralism requires everyone else to live by an austerity that you're comfortable with but this is flatly inhumane. There's only one bleak outlook here.
Wow, as someone with vivid and fond memories of watching this in college, I'm seeing this in this very thread. Kinda wild, and really makes me feel old and out of touch. And that heartbeats song is a banger and will forever take me back.
“I think our bill was $74,000 on broken windows,” said Ranahan. “And the crazy thing is, everyone loved it. The people, the neighborhood, they still come out to me and talk to me about it.”
"We want to set City Hall on fire, we want to bump a blimp into the Golden Gate Bridge and we want to jump a hook-and-ladder truck over Lefty O’Doul Bridge with Roger Moore on it’ … and they were seriously like, ‘OK.’”
My main question is, where did this San Francisco go? I'd love for the city to create more memorable moments because the city is special. But today, this ad would've been buried in CEQA lawsuits. Hell, parking in the wrong public spot could get your car keyed by some irate millionaire[1].
[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/parking-wars-sf-billion...
First the dotcom boom pushed the artists out to Oakland by 2000, but there were still burners and hipsters in 2005. Then the subprime boom/bust took a lot of the hipsters and older businesses out, but the tech busses brought the Silicon Valley nerds in 2010. Then the rise of Uber startups through 2016 pushed the artists into warehouses until the Ghostship fire, but there were still techbros and crypto in the Mission. When the pandemic finally came for the rest of Frisco there was hardly anyone left who cared or they were so old they wanted everyone else to just leave. If you remember Market street and the Tenderloin from the old days, the tents today are kinda quaint.
I'm sure somebody has a similar timeline for NYC.
I would have so much fun doing various kinds of tit-for-tats with this guy.
That is until he, inevitably, would shoot me with impunity.
Yeah, it’s interesting that they have no motivation to separate the art from the commission nor any attempt to understand that it was a very different time. Broadcast television and low bandwidths.
The idea that advertising is a “cancer upon society” fundamentally misunderstands how mass media, telecommunications, and modern society works. It’s about passing and sharing information.
I hate most ads and almost all modern advertising sucks. But this ad ain’t it. It relies on nostalgia, a dream like element. The amount of pollution is, globally, negligible, and they largely cleaned them up. We hear stories of people keeping balls as mementi [1].
Call me cynical but if we are not meant to enjoy even the aesthetically pleasing stuff the neoliberal environmental disaster of the last 40 years creates we are in for a bad time. May as well go back to hunter gathering of subsistence farming.
[1] I know it’s non standard but if “octopi” is cromulent then so is “mementi”
Don't get me wrong: as a piece of advertising, this is one of the few I would be willing to watch again. On the other hand, I am left asking: what is the point? It is not as though there were many venues where you could enjoy the vibrance of it. It certainly looks better on my modern monitors than on my Bravia TV of that era.
As for children, I would be strongly opposed to showing a child that commercial. It isn't hard to imagine them trying to haul buckets of bouncy balls to the roof after being ... inspired.
Seems like hyperactive concern to me. I would want my child climbing up on the roof with a bucket of bouncy balls. I would even buy them.
Better a child dump a bucket of bouncy balls off the roof supervised than unsupervised, right?
Sure, depending on the age. 5-6 is prime tree climbing age, at which time they should be fine to go up themselves.
Forgot the /s
I was in San Francisco that week. Ecological issues aside, it was the last time San Francisco felt different in a good way rather than a bad one. The “negative energy” is now too much for me and, when I travel to the Bay Area, I pretty much just stay on-track. I wonder if people who lived in San Francisco from 1965-2005 expected it to last forever.
I think this is bigger than just SF. After the great recession the generally positive atmosphere in the western world never really recovered. Any time it even got close to recovering some new horrible event happened.
Positivity has become politically suspect. It's doubly sad to be unhappy about how things are going in the world generally and also to be nervous about enjoying when something goes right. It's sad that making a positive comment about the weather is something I only do with close friends now, and not even all of them. There are people I've known for years, who know what my politics are, who know who I give money to, yet still, if I say something nice about the weather, they have to say "too bad climate isn't weather" or "yeah, but you know in a few months it's going to be terrible, because global warming is real." And none of this drives political engagement or moves anybody's mind in the slightest; it's just a social fashion that arose spontaneously, for no purpose, and which we will enforce zealously until one day it doesn't seem important anymore.
You hit the nail on the head. It's the repeated traumas, year-after-year, with no break.
As the world grows more interconnected, the proliferation of news about horrible events happening spreads faster, and even if you personally ignore the news, other people don’t, and this colors the overall mood of society.
There is horror everywhere, and always will be until the end of our days.
Suppose you lived in a village where there was no outside news. You'd learn of about two murders and a dozen deadly accidents in your lifetime. Imagine how safer you'd feel compared to a villager who's getting outside news beamed to her face every hour of the day.
I'm not advocating isolation, but our primitive minds are not able to really understand that what is projected in front of us is not the same as what happens in front of us. I don't know how anyone could solve that.
> and this colors the overall mood of society.
Would thousands of colored balls careening down streets bouncing off objects and each other and damaging things in their path be an okay metaphor for this?
And how can you support funding this beautiful park proposal when there are children starving in ${country}??
I can’t remember where I heard this, but it was someone questioning joy and frivolity in a time of war. And the answer back was that people need to remember what they are fighting for otherwise what’s the point?
If you don’t allow yourself joy until the problems are gone, there will never be joy and the problems will multiply for lack of it.
I was thinking the same thing. It's surprising how many people don't get this, arguing that poverty, wars or some other pressing matter must be solved first before we can go to space or spend money on non essential activities.
It may seem counterintuitive, but that way of thinking doesn't actually solve problems, it only perpetuates them.
While your point has value, there's also value in the perspective that people should take more responsibility for the damage inflicted on others under their watch. For example, it is my perspective that too many people stood by idly while the U.S. engaged in war for the 90's/00's/10's/20's. Too many people said "I want to go make money on wall street/in law/in consulting" instead of either changing their political system or serving it. There is a fair argument that war, particularly war conducted by your own country, is an exceptional thing and requires re-prioritizing duties over desires. The only other exception I can think of that isn't debateable is genocide.
> the U.S. engaged in war for the 90's/00's/10's/20's.
but also in the 40s/50s/60s/70s/80s
I started to respond with more depressing historical facts and then thought better of it.
Look! Colorful rubber balls bouncing in the sunlight! Fun!
I hadn’t thought of it in this way. Interesting point.
I mean, you mean after the 2003-2004 Iraq war, 9/11 in 2001, the stolen election of 2000 & the crash of 2000, the Kosovo war in 1999? There’s always a lot of reasons why the atmosphere can be negative every year.
Yeah I'm not sure what they meant by 2008... After 9/11, things werent optimistic.
Coming up to YEAR 2000, the future felt here. I remember watching the TV shows in preparation for YEAR 2000. Then the future never really happened like predicted. We didn't wear silver suits in 2001.
I do mean after those things. Globally nobody cares about most of these after the initial shock. There were definitely long periods of good in between those events.
I moved to "the city" in 1989 from England, and people were complaining then about yuppies and it wasn't the same as the good ol' days of the 60's.
SF seems to be a lot more in-flux compared to other cities, so if you don't like the scene now just wait a few years and a new one will be along :-)
The San Francisco I experience is full of positive energy. Sure, maybe if you're visiting and stay in Union Square, that's not what you see. But if you live in the residential neighborhoods and work somewhere nice (such as in the Presidio), there isn't another city in the world I would rather be.
It seems to me like working from home has transformed the residential neighborhoods. I recently visited Inner Sunset as was astonished at how many people were out and about.
Things got significantly darker after 9/11.
When I visited in the 90's I remember conversations mentioning seeing the signs and trying to delay the inevitable end. Whether someone sees that as dooming or prescient is probably a matter of if they moved in before or after 2005.
What city regions have better energy, are good economically, and have natural beauty (ocean, mountain, plants)?
It is easy to find faults with the SF bay area (politics, costs, and derivative issues), but is somewhere actually better?
EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes. It was an honest question, and I badly wanted to be informed, having given the issue in-depth consideration over the years. I wasn't being snarky.
Really depends on what you mean by all those. Some would say Sandy Eggo has the beauty, others would contest that Seattle has the economy and mountains.
The people left there are those who like what it has become or are trapped in someway; others have moved.
SF is good economicaly? Super expensive, high taxes with no matching infrastructure, hiring people...
Weather is cold and moisty...
There are thousands better places around the world. I would like to hear a pitch, why start company in SF today.
Yeah, it's good economically in the sense that it's still near top of market, due to having a large-ish existing economy (even if aspects of said economy seem fundamentally whack).
As in: if you want something at decent quality you can pretty much get it pretty easily with a bunch of options (assuming you can afford it).
Caveat - not necessarily the top of everything for all markets is available, but overall stuff is still around -- even as some things are disappearing from the area.
In contrast, other places are just poor, and you "cannot" find as large a variety of lots of goods and services, I imagine. But I could be wrong -- I'll check my assumptions. Thanks.
Are services really easily available in SF? I was shocked when we went to restaurant at evening without a reservation. Server give one hour waiting time for a table! At normal city you just drop into nearest good restaurant, and if they are full (very unlikely) you go to next.
How easy is to get a dentist or masseuse, with a few hour notice?!
> In contrast, other places are just poor, and you "cannot" find as large a variety of lots of goods and services
I think you need reality check on "poor". The place with the widest selection of services and products (for example types of meat in supermarket, or hand made tailored clothes) is Bangkok in Thailand. Places like SF just do not have enough people to provide all those services.
> Are services really easily available in SF?
IDK about in the city itself, but in the surrounding metro area I would say yes.
> At normal city you just drop into nearest good restaurant, and if they are full (very unlikely) you go to next.
Right, I was biased toward considering the surrounding cities in the SF metro. I think popping into next open restaurant with seating applies to the healthy downtowns in the area metro area. But the city itself, I wouldn't know.
> a dentist...with a few hour notice
I don't think that kind of dental scheduling is typically found/done _anywhere_ in the US AFAIK.
> meat in supermarket, or hand made tailored clothes) is Bangkok in Thailand
Good counterexample, thank you.
It used to be found in sf, and I've still found it in slc
Back in 2012 I had a raspberry seed work it's way down into my gums and not come out. Made an appointment at Townsend dental and saw him 3 hours later.
A few weeks ago I had a filling fall out. Called up a local dentist here and got it fixed 90 minutes later
Yeah if you’re in a culture where everyone gets a reservation for a fancy restaurant (just like in Paris), you’ll need a reservation, that’s just how the market works.
> How easy is to get a dentist or masseuse, with a few hour notice?!
I mean, everyone who lives here is already affiliated with a dental office and they’ll take you in same day for a real emergency. You can get a Thai massage in two hours very easily too.
The quality of medical care is also stupidly high compared to almost anywhere outside the US. Sure your insurance will pay $$$ for it but who cares?
Because you meet tons of talented engineers whenever you go for lunch, and they just need to cross the street and walk in to ask for a job.
Because you're around a ton of people who are interested in the same thing as you are. Caveat: If you're not interested in the things SF engineers are interested in, that means you're surrounded by masses of incredibly boring - to you - folks :)
Because that introduction you need to make things pop is super-easy compared to other places.
Doesn't mean you _have_ to start in SF, but for certain classes of ventures, it's the place that makes it the easiest.
Subculture wise, SF is barely represented in computer graphics or high performance optimization circles, like gamedev or demoscene, arguably a class of field that produces top quality software engineers.
Any remote job listing gets thousands of applications, with dozens good candidates. I really doubt I could get decent engineer for $80k a year in SF.
> Caveat: If you're not interested ... incredibly boring
Everyone in SF has basically the same correct opinion.
And not just booring, but hostile. People in SF are really not that tolerant. Try to say that Dubai is more diverse, because it has many cultures, religions, people from Africa, India, Philippines... Or someone is not XYZ, but mixed race (whiter than me) and you will understand.
> I really doubt I could get decent engineer for $80k a year in SF.
If you did, they'd be a non-exempt employee, so you'd need to track and pay out overtime. A quick look puts the minimum non-exempt salary for jobs in California at ~$69,000.
Also, honestly? I expect you'd be hard-pressed to find a decent programmer for $80k/year in ANY major metro area in the US... post 2020, housing prices went NUTS across the country and aren't getting any less nuts.
(One of the big reasons I haven't moved out of San Francisco is that my ~50% less than "market rate" rent is not THAT much more than current rents in most other US cities. (Plus, most other US cities don't even pretend to have any sort of useful public transportation.))
I'd say Lisbon, Portugal is probably the closest (including Weather, which places like Seattle are lacking), especially because you didn't mention pre-existing tech industry which is probably SF's main differential versus everywhere else. It even has a big red bridge?
P.S: I'm sorry Lisboetas..you are already getting swamped by Digi Nomads, but it's true.
I visited lisbon last year and was kind of shocked how similar to SF it was, weather, hills, general feel - that it has its own golden gate bridge really just sealed it.
Seattle has those things, IMO. (You didn’t mention weather!)
Vancouver, IMO, is a far better developed city than Seattle. Vastly better transit, denser, more walkable neighbourhoods, and just overall very thoughtfully developed.
It’s just an enormous shame it’s become grossly unaffordable— on an income adjusted basis, it’s more expensive than the Bay Area. That, and the weather, although the summers are perfect IMO.
Seattle is awesome and the people are the friendliest I've encountered in the USA. Feels Canadian.
The weather kills me, though. The weather is too British.
Seattle weather keeps strangers away. And drives sunglasses sales.
You’re conveniently leaving out how pretentious and insufferable many Seattleites are…
It has been far and wide the least welcoming, interesting, and lackluster food city I’ve ever lived in.
Also, the coffee scene there is worse than SF, Chicago, LA..rare stop for bands and musicians touring, and unpleasant transit.
The only people I know who are genuinely happy there are people who moved from Florida, and wealthy white families with young children who moved there (from California) “because taxes and better education”.
Don’t even get me started on the lack of diversity and casual racism.
SF is far from perfect, but Seattle isn’t even in the conversation for places I’d ever recommend someone leaving SF to shortlist.
Sorry you're not having a good time here; that hasn't been my experience of the city at all. There was a moment back in the late '90s when I could have moved to either Seattle or S.F., and Seattle happened to snag me first; I still enjoy visiting SF from time to time, but I've never had the slightest regret about settling here instead.
For tradition's sake, I feel obligated to give you the classic Seattleite response to such complaints: "whatever, man; if there's somewhere you like better, feel free to go there."
> You’re conveniently leaving out how pretentious and insufferable many Seattleites are
SF isn't any better on that count.
Caught me mid edit..I agree..to a degree.
Seattle is another tier above. SF people I find far more interesting and smart vs. the smartest people I met/knew/know in Seattle. Seattle is like a pissing contest for nerd snipers. At least in SF we drink our own pee (at Folsom of course)
This is literally the opposite of my experiences :(
The Seattle/Bellevue area.
Ah, Bellevue, for when you want to feel like you live inside of a shopping mall.
How can you watch Logan's Run and not want to live inside a shopping mall??
Go to Bellevue and find out :)
Munich, Germany. Although, the sea is a bit further away.
I've grown rather fond of San Diego.
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It really is surrounded by amazing natural beauty. However, everything to do with humans has slowly morphed into an unfixable nightmare and it's heartbreaking. I think it's time to throw in the towel, evacuate everyone from the city and let it return to nature as a wildlife preserve.
Honorable mention goes to the Old Spice 2010 ad, where a lot was done in camera too, including the horse.
The Man Your Man Could Smell Like: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE
Pitch presentation: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/britton-taylor-7829292a_for-y...
Behind the scenes interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VDk9jjdiXJQ&t=11m40s
It was a big success and a series of similar clips followed; this one has an actual “behind the scenes” video:
Scent vacation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PJKAr1r5zlA
Behind the scenes: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=32TZSXG2y7E
I lived in SF then and picked up a 5 gallon bucket of bouncy balls at a garage sale. I didn't realize until now that this is where they almost certainly came from.
The video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spB4ezsQ6II
Absolute travesty to view that video via YouTube though, as the compression destroys the frames when there are hundreds of colorful balls in view.
Anyone know of an alternative source, ideally without the typical internet-friendly/heavy compression?
Here's a 4k "remaster"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UXS6DBD6g0
The problem is not "1080p vs 4K on YouTube" but using YouTube at all for quality video. It's always been bad on YouTube, but videos like this make it extra obvious. For example, this shot: https://i.imgur.com/NRT0AOW.jpeg even in 4K it looks horrible, because of the compression YouTube does even to 4K.
I've tried finding some better version (not on YouTube) but been unable to, maybe it is lost to the passage of time.
The description of that higher quality upload says they sourced it from a retail demo disk, that's probably the best quality version in the wild. Maybe there's a direct rip of that disk on archive.org somewhere? Otherwise someone could ask them to upload their copy if they still have it.
Blu-ray was just getting started in 2005, and Bravia TVs were 1366x768[1], so the demo disk is likely a DVD. I think someone would have to persuade Sony to remaster their original film, or release it to an archivist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sony_Bravia_television...
> that's probably the best quality version in the wild
Probably not, would be my guess. Uploading the very same source video to somewhere else than YouTube (and ideally a place that doesn't do heavy compression at all) would lead to an higher quality version easily, someone somewhere must have done just that.
That's what I meant, that the source video for that YouTube upload is probably the best version out there, as you say the second-hand re-encoded version served by YouTube is inferior. I didn't word that clearly, sorry.
Try pulling different codec versions from YouTube? Maybe it got upped to Vimeo or something before? Also YouTube got rid of some resolution options a couple years back and that kinda adds to the problem of compression-rot of sorts.
There's a 2010 copy taken from iTV on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/14504562
Similar but slightly larger file from henry.tv at https://vimeo.com/293364002
The high-quality extended version Sony originally published at bravia-advert.com/includes/vid/bravia_150_sec_high.mov was 700x394 apparently.
> that kinda adds to the problem of compression-rot of sorts
I dunno, when even the 4K version (offered by YouTube) shows the very same compression artifacts on a 4K modern TV, then I kind of feel like you screwed up. At least from the perspective of a viewer, of course from the perspective of the business that saves a lot of money from it.
Something's a bit wrong with the colour on that though - it looks really oversaturated.
The high contrast edges of foliage breaks it too. It seems like a release from the original source would be very doable. And maybe other versions exist if it was considered for (and won) various awards. And the initial Sky broadcast may have been high quality too?
Tagging onto this, curious if anyone has preferred AI-based 1080 -> 4k+ upscale workflows.
The same problem with confetti and snow in videos, due to compression:
<https://tensorpix.ai/blog/video-compression-snow-confetti>
Video compression functions best where little of the shot changes frame-to-frame. This is also why rapid-cut video performs poorly online.
I watched it, it's not so bad. Anyway, it's not like TV doesn't use compression, and back then it was more primitive MPEG-2.
This was a commercial produced for European television in 2005. Barely anyone even had an HDTV back then. I certainly saw it in standard definition when it aired.
Tango, a British fruit soda, made their own version in Swansea, Wales, which is delightfully funny:
https://youtu.be/ac_g4opW-UI
They also made one of the greatest British ads of all time:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=odCBml5TuNI
Love that they kept the frog in this one! That part really surprised me about the original.
A 2010 upload to Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/14504562
Sony's 2005 website for the ad: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124203345/http://www.bravia...
Sony's 2005 behind-the-scenes page: https://web.archive.org/web/20051028021817/http://www.bravia...
Fallon's (ad agency) materials: https://www.fallon.com/?s=Bravia
One of the making-of videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOpq2aD5btA
A resident point of view: https://archive.org/details/BouncyBall
While I also detest commercials as a whole, I think it is worth stepping back and viewing this as art. The concept, the visuals, the original song (not the one you find on most videos due to licensing)... it is beautiful and should evoke childhood joy and wonder. Yes it was wasteful, but if we only do things because they are efficient, I think our humanity suffers.
They made at least one more commercial [1] during the same time period and it was also inspired by awe and wonder. While it did waste paint and likely pollute the local groundwater temporarily, it was conducted in a building that was scheduled for demolition.
Paint
(1) https://youtu.be/GURvHJNmGrc?si=syS1ImP0Z2oM1btO
Does anyone have a link to the ad? I couldn't find one in the article, which is a huge shame.
So many iconic adverts from the 2000s. One of my favourite is the Honda Cog: https://youtu.be/bl2U1p3fVRk?si=Z1Oqz8SAMjIAg7Mn
I LOVED the Honda Cog video and the story [1] about how they made it along with the purported 100+ takes is craziness. I can't imagine resetting it so many times... especially since the offending item that kept killing it was so late in the chain.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cog_%28advertisement%29
It's very classy. I personally, still have a soft-spot for the Tango Blackcurrent that nonchalantly slips in three Harrier jump-jets right at the end
https://youtu.be/odCBml5TuNI?si=-pXipIDTLImrFNDo
The follow up ad was impressive, too. Although I'm not sure what why there's a clown in the middle of it.
https://youtu.be/G5tLqb8T5xU
Same guy who made the remaster linked in the article also remastered this one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY0bxhbPi3Q - seems he had a retail DVD from Sony with a better original source on it
I hadn't thought about this in years. It was absolutely dazzling to see at the time, I can't imagine what it was like in person. In retrospect I would also probably chalk this up as the first truly "internet" moment.
> "There was not a single bouncy ball in any machine in America for a couple months. I felt so bad for the poor children," said Fuglsig.
I find it hard to believe that they really went around for months buying maybe 100 balls each from random dispensers until they had 250,000 - especially considering the design of the balls is mostly consistent in the end. Maybe a bit of fanciful storytelling?
Yeah, it might also mean that the suppliers just didn't have balls to restock into those machines
Good point, I guess they probably did mean scour the country for suppliers, rather than ball machines! Even in context you could read it both ways:
> First, they had to scour the country to acquire the 250,000 bouncy balls needed to create the critical mass. “They bought every bouncy ball west of the Mississippi,” said Ranahan. “There was not a single bouncy ball in any machine in America for a couple months. I felt so bad for the poor children,” said Fuglsig.
This is probably a colorful way of saying they bought up a couple months' worth of inventory from Wham-O's western-division distributors.
The cover of Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez is truly beautiful as well. I can't imagine this video without it.
The ad actually sticks out in my mind not only for the visuals but because it introduced me to both Jose Gonzalez and The Knife.
It’s such a simple setup that you could make it in CGI in 2005 far cheaper than this. The balls barely affect the environment and the physics is really simple. I thought for 20 years that it was CGI because obviously ”who would do that cleanup?”. TIL. Really cool that they did this in real life.
First thing I thought of was the Balloonfest '86 fiasco.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloonfest_%2786
Same. Stemming from my experience growing up in Cleveland, I have zero patience when ad/PR outfits throw garbage everywhere for the spectacle. We’ve already got enough problems with trash everywhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_bx8bnCoiU in case anyone wants to see the ad
(I didn't follow all the links, but enough to know it wasn't immediately available)
Their "paint" advert wasn't bad either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ut_2GWIm4 though it can't compete with the music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_bx8bnCoiU
If you want to watch the ad. A couple of friends of mine lived in the city at the time and were watching as they filmed it. We all agreed that it was both amazing and insane all at the same time.
there's a 4K remaster too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UXS6DBD6g0
At the opposite end we have excess CG, like that iPad ad last year which everyone hated because it depicted real art tools being crushed into a digital substrate.
Too many marketing and advert goons on HN, not enough engineers and actual hackers.
I had a Bravia 40BX425 (latam model) for several years. I bought it used and after many years I had to sell (needed the money). An astounding TV, much better than some of the new smart cr*p out there.
Cool article - I was sad to see 'View to a Kill' called the worst Bond film as I must have seen 500 times as a child, it was always on TV.
There was this too, for Sony's Bravia: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-68904040
"The day explosions of colour painted a Glasgow estate: In 2006, Sony set out to create 'Paint', widely regarded as one of the most technically complex adverts ever made..."
Sure beats lava lamps as a source of entropy...
Not really, the lava lamp's fluid dynamics are very sensitive to initial conditions and the fluids behave chaotically, whereas the bouncy balls have highly predictable trajectories.
> whereas the bouncy balls have highly predictable trajectories.
All we need are chaotic surfaces to bounce the balls on. Problem solved :-)
related ad with exploding paint
https://youtu.be/GdEtZK3CE2k?si=TtUn_VB8vBd7Eif5
better quality
https://youtu.be/G5tLqb8T5xU?si=hOTULgz71ilv2nS9
This advertisement was the first time I ever saw an ad that made me think there could be something more to advertisement than being utterly soulless. It literally brings me to tears seeing it because of how beautiful the composition is and how well it works with the musical arrangement. There have been a few other ads throughout the years that are on a similar level, but they are few and far between. It's not just an effective advertisement, it's a cinematic masterpiece.
That … wow that was 20years ago, seamed like 7-9 years.
4K remaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UXS6DBD6g0
Looks to be from original sources rather than upscaled.
No, it's upscaled. The cars have that distinctive smeary look, and the "text" on the road signs is nonsense.
Also, I took this line in the description to mean that it was upscaled: "4K professional remaster and re-grade by Mat Van Rhoon from HD to UHD"
I thought the opposite - the 'lost cat' sign at https://youtu.be/2UXS6DBD6g0?t=94 is incredibly legible and definitely better than an upscaled 1080p image.
Take a close look at the No Parking sign in the first two seconds.
When it first came out I just assumed it's cgi. Because that's how any sane person would do it.
A dump truck full of bouncy balls sounds a lot easier.
As the article explains, that’s because the truck of balls is the easy part.
only if you externalize all the costs
Does it? Think about the permits, cleanup cost, ball cost (lol)
A million dollars of CGI didn’t go as far in 2005 as it does now!
And we wouldn't be talking about it 20 years later :)
In 2025 this is something a casual YouTuber could do, or could be assigned as a school project. All the pieces are there now. You wouldn't even need to pay for anything, I don't think. Blender should be able to do everything you need, quite comfortably. Getting data from the world back into the special effects software has gotten magnitudes easier since then.
You can avoid two of those easily if you’re a bit sneaky. And naughty.
Nothing says sneaky like hilltop mortars firing 25,000-bouncey-ball loads a hundred feet in the air…
> ”[The film commissioner] goes, ‘Here’s two things I never want to see in San Francisco again — air mortars and Barry Conner.’”
Ads, where excess money made in Capitalism is ritually burned
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How did this ever get through committee?
Totally looks like an AI generated video.