Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 490

The Flogsta Scream: Creepy and bizarre but I kind of love it.

Every night at 10:00 PM,  the “Flogsta scream” can be heard in Flogsta, a neighborhood in the western outskirts of the Swedish city of Uppsala.

At precisely this time, students throughout the region scream collectively from windows, balconies and roof tops.

How the Flogsta scream first began is a matter of debate.

Some residents claim that it was initially a stress reliever that students engaged in during exams and then became a daily occurrence.

Others say it started in remembrance of an unidentified  student who committed suicide in the 1970s.

Either way, it can’t be helping property values in the neighborhood.

Sorry, kid. Easy Bake Ovens are pink for good reason.

Around Christmas, a little girl became a momentary Internet sensation after appealing to Hasbro to make an Easy Bake Oven in a color other than pink or purple. Her brother had expressed a desire for an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas but discovered that this product only comes in pink and purple and is therefore only marketed to girls (though one could debate the gender-specificity of the color purple).

Enter video caption here

The problem is not the color of the toy.

The real problem is that this little boy is one of only three or four boys in the entire country who wants an Easy Bake Oven.

While this may be an exaggeration, I am not far from the truth. Easy Bake Ovens are geared towards little girls because the vast majority of the children wanting an Easy Bake Oven are girls. While the choice of color and advertising may represent gender inequality, it is also reflection of the gender inequality that is inherently present in boys and girls when it comes to this toy.

For the vast majority of children, girls want Easy Bake Ovens and boys do not. While it is unfortunate that the tiny percentage of boys who want an Easy Bake Oven are forced into choosing from pink or purple, Hasbro knows full well that red or brown or blue Easy Bake Ovens would sit on store shelves gathering dust, regardless of their marketing.

It also costs considerably more to expand a product into multiple colors, and the management of production and stock levels would become much more complex. In this case, Hasbro knows that the vast majority of its Easy Bake Oven customers prefer the colors pink and purple, so they are simply maximizing profits by accommodating their primary consumer.

I made a similar argument in regards to an advertising campaign by Carter’s clothing that targets mothers, and I was right then as well. Companies must market to their primary consumer, and try as they might, some products simply skew along gender lines.

Mothers are the primary purchasers of baby clothing. Moreover, they want to be the primary purchasers of baby clothing. 

Similarly, little girls want Easy Bake Ovens.

Some might argue that if Hasbro began marketing products like this to boys, they might broaden their consumer base, but I don’t believe this for a second, and I suspect that Hasbro has done enough research already to know this as well. After all, if it were possible to convince boys that the Easy Bake Oven is a great toy for them as well, why wouldn’t Hasbro attempt to capture that market as well?

It amounts to a chicken-and-egg argument:

Do girls like Easy Bake Ovens because they are pink and purple, or are Easy Bake Ovens pink and purple because girls like them?

Before you answer, ask yourself this:

If Easy Bake Ovens were originally produced in black or brown or gray, would boys be their primary market today? Would the pretend-to-cook market have skewed male by this change in color?

Of course not. Like it or not, girls are more likely to enjoy baking and pretending to bake than boys.

Hasbro is merely acting responsibly to its shareholders by maximizing advertising revenue. The company has no responsibility to promote gender equality, especially when the gender equality would be impossible to achieve and yield no greater profit for the company.

If you truly believe that boys would love an Easy Bake Oven if marketed properly, give it a try. Launch your own toy company. Make your fortune.

If you find a way to make a profit, I will admit that I am wrong and work in your factory for a week for free.

If I’m right, I’ll merely say I told you so.

It’s often reward enough for me.

We need a lot more of super model Cameron Russell, but not for the reasons you’d expect.

The epilogue

A reader sent this to me today.

It’s a photograph of the epilogue of MEMOIRS OF AN IMAGINARY FRIEND, which creates quite a stir amongst many readers.

I love it.

When I finished the book, it had no epilogue. I went to bed thinking that my story was finished, but when I awoke the next morning, these nine sentences were in my mind, almost exactly as they appear on the page today.

It was actually not the way I wanted the book to end, but I think it’s the way the book was supposed to end, so I wrote these nine sentences before sending the manuscript off to my agent.

It’s odd how books sometimes decide things for themselves, even when the author thinks otherwise.

My son is not a USB device

I do a lot of writing with my infant son on my lap.

Yesterday he was chewing on the cord that connects my phone to the laptop. Unbeknownst to me, he eventually worked his way up to the end of the cord and placed the connecter in his mouth.

I immediately received a warning message on the bottom right of my screen.

Here is a closer view of the warning.

While my son is not a USB device, I give my laptop credit for realizing that whatever was interacting with the cord was not normal.

So I guess there’s no practical use for the word then…

Thanks to Twitter, I have been informed that to “decimate” does not mean to obliterate or wipe out. It means to destroy one-tenth of something.

Great. There have been untold number of times in my life when I have needed to describe the destruction of just ten percent of something.

Problem solved.

I might’ve married this guy if given the chance

It’s always slightly annoying when a guy delivers a toast or a wedding speech that is impossible to top, but in this case, I’ll allow it.

I don’t watch many 15 minute videos online, but this one was worth it. 

Lessons and observations from a week of The Clowns.

This evening we will meet to discuss the future of The Clowns, the rock opera that my co-writer and I have spent the last five years writing. With two weeks to reflect on the workshop process that brought The Clowns to the stage for the first time, I had some final thoughts:

1. When collaborating on a project, I strongly suggest that you find a partner who is considerably nicer than you and is willing to put forth 100% effort while gladly accepting 60% from you. It is an ideal situation.

2. When given the freedom and encouragement, actors are like writers without keyboards.

3. Similarly, directors are like editors without red pens. They, however, do not require the encouragement and simply assume the freedom.

4. Watching actors say lines that you wrote and become the characters that you envisioned while listening to the audience around you laugh and gasp and applaud is just as good as seeing your novel on a bookstore shelf.

5. I’ve acted before and thought this while doing so, but two weeks of rehearsals and performances confirmed it: Acting is a form of collaborative, non-competitive sport with much of the physicality of athletics and all of the pressure of a championship game on the line. 

This is why I hate leaving for work.

These are the last images I see before leaving for work each day.

As much as I love my job, the walk to the car is a long, painful one each day.

 

First snowman

She named him Fred.

He’s not impressive, but the snow was not ideal for snowman making. We did what we could with the material at hand.

He’s melted now, but I will never forget him or the afternoon we spent playing in the snow.