Focus: National junk food day- I am celebrating with chocolate pudding with chocolate ganache layer on top. A personal favorite when it comes to overprocessed garbage are pizza flavored Combos. They give me dragon breath and salty farts and are totally worth it. In the meantime we are having a garage sale with the neighbors. I did not realize how much I dislike my neighbors until now. TGIF!
It's also National Scotch Day. I don't particularly care for Scotch, but in the spirit (pun intended) of the day, I do have a barrel aged Scotch Ale that I will put down in celebration.
This woman is my neighbor's friend and she has been here for hours. I can't tell if she's Cajun, drunk, both, or drank so much in the past that her brain is fried and speech is messed up. She looks like a wrinkly overtanned ex meth addict. She looks ancient but I bet she's 40.
Well... seems like MoviePass is tits up... https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/27/media/moviepass-service-outage/index.html Their card processor has pulled the plug, but you may be able to redeem e-tickets, so if you're a user, you may want to jump on that while you can.
They've reverse-split their stock, and it's going full-speed-ahead to the bowels of the Earth right now...
I was quite surprised to find that the major backing play behind Moviepass was data analytics... they wanted to basically capture all the data from Moviepass and then cross-sell, up-sell based on that data. Seems like a bit of a stretch to me, for sure. Can't remember the last time I went to a movie and then wanted to buy something because of that movie... never mind something that needed fancy data analytics to figure out.
That McDonald's fight was here in Vegas, the manager's last name is Chavolla . An excerpt from an article that is hilarious: "Chavolla’s boyfriend, who was seen on the video trying to calm her down, tried to explain why he didn’t intervene. “I was not trying to stop it,” he said. “You don’t stop a big woman like that.”
I assumed it was more user pattern analytics for time & location against demographics and that sort of thing . . . which I also thought was stupid. Everybody (me included) knew the model was not sustainable and users (me included) accepted it was just a matter of time.
It was probably part of it, but I read some of the investment pitches and it seems like their long-term goal was to make purchasing of in-movie placement materials really easy through their scene cards... basically bring the people in to the movies, market stuff via the movie (beyond simple movie soundtrack stuff), and then make it easy for them to purchase via their moviepass account/card/system. It sounds like they were trying to wrap up the "magic" that is "big data analytics" with the need to increase revenue due to piracy and decreased movie turnouts, and that undercutting the price of the movie was seen as short-term incentive to get people out to the show in the first place. They managed step one, but not step 2... so they paid for everyone's movies, but haven't realized the increased revenue tie-in. I'm kind of surprised that they did something this volatile, this young in it's life cycle, via a public company that can be subject to such huge swings, like they've been seeing this week. At least with your typical private investment, it can generally weather the storm a bit better. Oh well, I don't profess to be any kind of a business guy, so who knows...
Jungle Julia showed me that video last night, and we both remarked: " What is he doing? There's no way he's going to stop a gorirra like that." Now we know.
The same dude (Mitch Lowe) that co-founded Netflix and was President of RedBox is CEO of Movie Pass (they're all red, whatever that means). I was an earlier user of Netflix, and it was MUCH cheaper and easier than renting from Blockbuster et al, and then when they added the streaming service, that was no extra cost. So, he has always done this idea that they hook you in with really good pricing, and then you enjoy the service so much you never cancel. (Plus, they put video stores out of business.) Anyway, I just assumed he knew what he was doing and eventually they'd just start raising prices like Netflix.
I think they were taking the Uber approach... subsidize shit so much that you build a client base, and then you figure out how to monetize later. The problem was I think they thought the public investment would be the same financial war chest that Uber has, when it appears that it's not.
I went to see Bill Burr last night. He fucking murdered and it was awesome. Unfortunately, there was a small but loud group from Alabama there and kept yelling “ROLL TIDE” as loud as possible throughout the show. Burr is pretty good at dealing with hecklers but even this was starting to annoy him.
Hopefully he’ll wreck them on the podcast. It will no doubt start with “I tell you people, there were these FUCKING Alabama fans last week...”
There’s always something obnoxious at his shows here. Last time, someone yelled that Caitlin Jenner was a “fucking science project” during his bit about her.
How in the fuck did an Irish Boston asshole like Bill Burr not make absolute mincemeat out of a bunch of 'bamans serving up meatballs like "Roll Tide"? I would have expected a half hour monologue on cousin fucking before he let them leave.