Weekend Reads (August 3): Olympic Mascots, Snoop Dogg, Xbox 360 (RIP), “Star Wars,” X Branding Issues
Recommended weekend reading for August 3, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
A panel of designers and illustrators weigh in on the best and worst Olympic mascots of all time.
The first Olympic mascot, albeit an unofficial one, debuted on various tchotchkes during the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France: Shuss, a big-headed character on a lightning-bolt body attached to a pair of skis, created by illustrator and designer Aline Lafargue. Perhaps realizing the marketing gold in the mascot concept, the Olympics debuted its first official mascot, the (charming!) dachshund Waldi, at the 1972 Munich Games.
Every Olympics cycle, the host city’s organizing committee oversees the development of the mascot. They’ve been commissioned, they’ve been chosen from competitions — and they’ve even inspired some fanatical schoolyard voting, not to mention a scandalous live TV reveal in Russia.
In case you were wondering, the 2024 Olympic mascots — the Phryges — are based on the Phrygian cap, an iconic head covering in France. “A symbol of revolution, the French Republic and freedom, the Phrygian cap can be seen on French national icon Marianne, depicted in busts at town halls across the country and on stamps, and is also covered in the national curriculum in schools.”
As for the mascots of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, they’re Tina and Milo, a pair of stoats. “Stoats, with their liveliness and speed, are the ideal animals to best embody the Italian spirit that guides the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Milan Cortina 2026.” (Also known as ermines, stoats are related to weasels, badgers, and wolverines.)
A global event like the Olympics is bound to impact the world’s internet traffic and usage, but that’s especially true in France, where the games are being held.
With the Olympics in Paris, many locals left the city, either for vacations or quieter places, while tourists arrived for the games. Our data shows that two French regions, Île-de-France, where Paris is located, and Grand Est, east of Paris, experienced the most significant traffic drops. The chart below illustrates daily traffic to these regions, with a noticeable decline visible during the weekend before the Olympics in Île-de-France.
Not surprisingly, internet traffic in various countries was also impacted when their star athletes were performing. When Simone Biles did her floor routine, American internet traffic dropped by 6%. Similarly, when the South Korean women’s archery team took gold, their country’s internet traffic dropped by 8%.
Speaking of the Olympics, I don’t think anyone had “Snoop Dogg being a national treasure” on their bingo cards, but here we are.
Since the Olympics officially got underway on July 26, people have taken to social media to share their reactions to Snoop Dogg’s presence in Paris — and it’s been nothing but positive, to say the least. Some fans have even praised NBC for bringing the rapper back to help with coverage, notably after his and Kevin Hart’s Olympic Highlights show for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Related: Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav signed on to become the U.S. women’s water polo team’s sponsor after learning that some of the members have to work additional jobs to fund their Olympic dreams. He also helped pay another Olympian’s rent.
Also related: One of the highlights of the Paris games so far has been the USA women’s rugby team, which won a bronze medal after defeating Australia. After their victory, which represented the USA’s first medal in rugby sevens, investor Michele Kang promised $4 million over the next four years to the team to “grow the sport and provide improved resources to its players and coaching staff in anticipation of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.”
In light of Microsoft shutting down the Xbox 360’s digital store — effectively killing the iconic game console once and for all — the Kotaku staff reflects on the best and worst moments in Xbox 360 history. For example, Halo 3:
While the Xbox 360’s launch titles weren’t great (more on that in a moment) it would eventually make up for those games with some generation-defining bangers, like Bungie’s 2007 classic, Halo 3. It’s hard to explain just how big Halo 3 was in 2007. It was the game everyone I knew was playing. It was all over the news.
Even after all these years, I still think Halo 3 is the best game in the Halo franchise. Sometimes, for relaxation, I’ll just play through “The Ark” and “The Covenant” missions over and over again.
In another example of the woes facing the video game industry, GameStop has shut down Game Informer, the USA’s longest-running video game magazine.
Kotaku has reported that Game Informer staff was brought into a meeting on Friday, August 2, with GameStop's VP of HR. In the meeting, they were told “the publication was closing immediately, they were all laid off, and they would begin receiving severance terms.”
Game Informer magazine content director Kyle Hilliard took to X/Twitter to share more about this shocking news, revealing the team was about “70% done with the next issue and it was going to have a GREAT cover.”
When I was a kid, I loved the Droids and Ewoks cartoons, which expanded on the Star Wars movies in a more kid-friendly — and animated — format. But as the series’ producer points out in his memoir, they faced some interesting challenges.
A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into making the shows great, but neither series rated well. Droids only lasted one season and Ewoks two. I think one of the problems we ran into was that Saturday Morning network TV had too many restrictions on violence. We weren’t allowed to show anything that kids might imitate so our weapons looked more like vacuum cleaners or channel changers than Star Wars weapons. While the Ewoks in the movie were cute, they were also warriors and that tension got in the way of making it into a successful kids’ series. The plan to do multi-part episodes also became a challenge because ABC standards & practices forbade children’s shows from ending episodes on cliffhangers. We had to design every episode to be complete in itself.
After seeing Bruce Springsteen, Michael Hann reflects on the power and value of live music.
Why do people go to gig after gig? For me, in part, it is the unicorn hunt of the superfan, the desperate hope that you’ll get something special you seldom hear, which both Springsteen and The Hold Steady deliver with rewarding frequency. But more important than the fandom, the being part of something, is the internal: the emotional impact of the forces coming together at that moment in time as the band plays. They are the forces we generate ourselves, from whatever turmoil is within us, and the forces imposed on us by the words and the music we hear, and the forces of the crowd we are part of.
The summer’s hottest sound is “hit ’em,” and it’s the result of a strange dream.
When Drew Daniel of experimental Baltimore duo Matmos went to bed earlier this week, he can’t have expected to wake up with a new genre of music rattling around his brain. The next day he shared what had been running through his mind as he slept: “had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called ‘hit em’,” he wrote on Twitter. “That is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds.” He seemed to know that he was on to something, ending the tweet with “thank you dream girl.”
As you might expect, given that high BPM, the “hit ’em” examples so far are pretty intense.
Francine Pascal, who unlocked the potential of young adult publishing back in 1983 with the creation of the Sweet Valley High novels, died this week of lymphoma. She was 92 years old.
Within a few years of its debut in 1983, “Sweet Valley High” had taken over the young-adult book market. In January 1986, 18 out of the top 20 books in B. Dalton’s young adult best-seller list were “Sweet Valley High” titles. Taken together, the Sweet Valley universe has sold well over 200 million copies.
That juggernaut revolutionized young-adult publishing. Though there had been no shortage of books for teenage readers — and teenage girls in particular — Ms. Pascal recognized their limitless voracity for a compelling narrative and developed a way to feed it.
Casey Newton reflects on the “shitpost” nature of the 2024 presidential election.
Of course, there is a long tradition of Americans spreading nasty lies about their candidates for national office. In the 2000s alone we had falsehoods accusing John McCain of having an illegitimate child; John Kerry of having exaggerated his bravery during the Vietnam War; and Barack Obama having been born outside the United States.
What those earlier lies shared is that they were intended to be believed. They were promulgated through whisper networks by actors who sought to conceal their role in spreading them. They were dirty tricks.
With the Harris clip and the Vance couch memes, though, we’re seeing something different. These aren’t dirty tricks, they’re “jokes.” They’re self-evidently false, although no one who is sharing them would mind if people believed them. They’re bullshit, in the Harry Frankfurt sense: they are intended to persuade without any regard for what the truth might be.
A chief criticism of Trump during his first presidential run was that he excelled at bullshit, at just flooding the news with so much — à la Steve Bannon — that it became impossible to keep up with it all, and to sift fact from fiction, truth from lie. The Vance “couch sex” memes are fun and all, but they risk being effectively the same as Trump’s bullshit, and hindering folks from determining the truth.
If all you care about is achieving and maintaining political power, though, that might be acceptable. But when you start eroding the truth, or more accurately, people’s ability to ascertain and care about the truth, don’t be surprised if that comes back to bite you at some point in the future.
The Twitter-to-X rebranding will almost certainly go down in history as one of the worst rebrands of all time. Not only did it cast aside an already iconic — and very aesthetically pleasing — brand and logo, but it’s raised several legal and trademark disputes.
Now a Virginia-based PR firm called Multiply has filed a lawsuit in California claiming that it has been using ‘X’ branding since 2019 and that it owns a federal trademark on an ‘X’ logo. It says that branding of the former Twitter has already caused confusion among potential clients. It’s seeking unspecified monetary damages and wants the court to ban X from using its logo.
A Multiply spokesperson told Reuters that Musk had “shamelessly stole the established identity of our social media and PR agency” and that the company “had no choice but to defend our mark and fight Twitter in court.”
Via TLDR Design.
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