Phineas Bling

International Man Of Ennui
Chief Operative, Immortal Words

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

@_filmcrave I was today year's old when I learned I've been pronouncing Denis Villeneuve and Saoirse Ronan wrong the whole time. But my lameness only adds to their greatness.

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

I have pitched Hof Brau for this list. Then again, I pitch #HofBrau for every list. Anachronistic as some may see it, it is very #SanFrancisco. And due for a comeback.

[Mehul Agarwal @meh_agarwal]

So much love since I've posted this, people have pitched so many but proud to announce 3 new sf-isms!

"sf is cooked", "anti-slop" & "nuke sf" (y'all are violent lol)

read more about each on https://t.co/YeqizLlHkK and follow @sf_isms for future updates on all sf slangs!

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

First sent on the occasion of #ConanMustGo's premier, tonight's Season 3 kickoff means it's time to resurface my ramblings re: the show's inevitable end. There are only so many countries to visit before @ConanOBrien must seek new levels of exploration. https://t.co/bUst9VXAdW

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

@ConanOBrien @HBO My only fear is that you run out of nations to go to. A fear that led me to panic-pen/mail a tragically incoherent fan letter even before the show premiered. 6+ pages of licking toads, new constitutions, failed promises that it would be a great letter https://t.co/bUst9VXAdW

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

@kevg1412 It's a net positive review (2 wash, 1 bad, 2 great). Mostly men=51% (WASH). Nada to do outside work=BAD if true. Employer feeds you=GREAT. Half America thinks you're evil=half America thinks whole other half is evil (WASH). Bust wipes you out=most places never get boom (GREAT).

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

@TIME It seems like the work of Duking and Duchessing Sussex could more efficiently be accomplished in closer proximity than Montecito.

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

@adweak intern

[𝙹𝚘𝚜𝚑 ����𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚢 @jmkelly]

Just backed ROAD RAGE. Think of it as Bullitt with a Waymo :) A 1970s-style car chase thriller set in SF, where a rideshare driver in a Saab is hunted by a driverless robotaxi. One driver. One robotaxi. One city pushed too far. Good news is, you kickstart in too https://t.co/1Z7SKhP4mU

[𝙹𝚘𝚜𝚑 𝙺𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚢 @jmkelly]

I know. Another flag meme. You can plant a flag with any quote you like atop the Empire State Building.

You can prompt AI to generate a giant hairball bouncing through Manhattan.

Tell AI to tuck a furnished house into a billboard over Sunset Blvd.

The world is yours. It's just not the real world. The one people emotionally connect with.

The one where these events actually occurred recently.

Not sure if guerrilla marketers ever left, but now they're back bearing hairballs, billboards, and sky flags.

More and more, we want reminders that people do remarkable things IRL that give us live-source content. We hunt for it, verify it, share it.

Then the internet creates thousands of AI permutations that make us unable to stand the sight of it (see: the now-annoying flag meme example).

Half of Americans now say they'd rather give their business to companies that don’t use generative AI in their content at all.

Sure, you can’t always tell. But the bar is not AI detection, it’s trying to create something that screams REAL enough to win hearts and minds.

There have always been marketing stunts that border on performance art. IKEA had someone live inside a store for a week. Harrods had in-store elephants 100+ years ago.

But #IRL has a new level of face value. Even when 99% of the audience only ever sees the video on their phone, they know someone stood there by proxy. It happened. It was made by humans.

Attention now sits behind a toll booth just a few platforms control. #Meta’s #CPM is up 20% in 2026 (higher in many categories). #Google CPMs now run $90 to $260+. When it costs so much to pay to reach people, you can see the guerrilla allure of going around the toll booth with unpaid ideas that people capture, argue about, and share.

It’s no surprise these recent examples have rebellious themes:

The March: the giant #Tumblehair (conceived by #UncommonCreativeStudio, tumbling through Manhattan and parking outside #Sephora, promoting a hair-loss solution. The revealing thing about this example was the glee with which people shared confirmation that this enormous hairball was, in fact, real. The story itself was whether it was AI or not.

The Occupation: #Netflix (and #ExtraCredit) building a furnished house inside a billboard above Sunset to promote #TheLastHouse. An actor inside communicated with the street below using a whiteboard. Just a guy in a box, waving at strangers. A show to promote a show.

The Trespass: A daredevil couple scaled the Empire State Building, got engaged, and planted a banner promoting the idea “when the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace.” Their altitude was their leverage, so it was funny to watch their flag get endlessly, insufferably memed by copycats who were demonstrably risking nothing.

Brace yourself for the wave. #AI will be part of many things, and you mostly won’t notice or care.

That’s the point. You won’t care.

These examples reaffirm that you’ll always reserve your most emotional attention and engagement for when you can connect to a real life, real risk, real intention. When it’s a story with a pulse, you will care and you will share.

Nothing lives forever if it never lives at all.

So brace for waves of IRL uprisings. Some that will resonate and inspire.

Some that may be desperate, bizarre, even disturbing bids to punch through the AI voidcast.

And who knows what other interventions they may drop into cities and timelines overnight with no permit and no apology. This could get weird. https://t.co/MjDS8GOEts

[𝙹𝚘𝚜𝚑 𝙺𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚢 @jmkelly]

I still think about #TrishaPrabhu's app, #ReThink, every time I see a social media thread run amok. Which is all too often.

She was 13, more than a decade ago now, when she read about a girl who died by suicide after being bullied on social media.

So her idea was to make an app that injects a simple question before you post a nasty comment: Are you sure?

That momentary “cooling off” period caused 93% of those messages to get rethink’d. Such a stroke of empathetic genius!

She even chose a name for here app that gives the commenter credit for thinking in the first place. I would’ve been tempted to name it #Think, which is both more cynical and less catchy.

Perhaps she briefly considered that but wisely asked herself if she was sure.

See, the question has superpowers that prove essential well beyond teen years.

If you think about it, comment threads have become among the largest body of writing humans have ever produced. And they sometimes reveal people are a bit ill-prepared to be publishers (plus, organizations are a bit ill-prepared to comment among people).

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that when you look closely at these threads, many comments are really just reactions wearing comment’s clothes:

- Release — venting, with someone else in the impact zone

- Performance — playing to people who already agree with you, sometimes at the expense of one who doesn't

- Confirmation — a thumbs up in sentence form, sometimes agreement dressed up as insight

- Contribution — okay, maybe this one's a genuine attempt to change/expand how we see the world in big/small ways

Everything swims along when you’re soaking in thumbs ups and high fives. But beyond that, only the fourth one seems worth much of the world's attention. Or yours.

Discerning between these is a core self-awareness skill. Platforms monetize susceptibility to the reaction vortex. And avoiding the bad isn’t just about better reading, writing, or fact-checking. It’s about intention-checking.

From either side of a comment, if the why isn’t good, all the whats, whos, and hows are going to be so much poo to wade into.

Side question: are you even sure you’re not dialoguing with bots?

When the intent isn’t to make a contribution, little good comes from writing, reading, forwarding, or (increasingly) stitching. Avert your eyes. Take a walk and yell at a tree. When you get back you’ll feel you either owe the world a thoughtful contribution or nothing at all.

The tree, however, may deserve your heartfelt apology.

The intention check is good time and mental health management. It’s why before bothering to engage, I keep returning to the immortal words Trisha Prabhu built an app for years ago:

Are you sure?

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

@ConanOBrien That is a remarkably clean, well-lighted alley. I would eat meals, and read books, and make friends that are in bands in that alley.

[𝙹𝚘𝚜𝚑 𝙺𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚢 @jmkelly]

@ConanOBrien Incredible, you have most certainly aced the critical first “standing in alley” test of being a cool band

[𝙹𝚘𝚜𝚑 𝙺𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚢 @jmkelly]

Four film projects we're supporting this year because of their potential immortalness:

Nimrods (In Theaters NOW!): Three friends, one shot at opening for Green Day, zero backup plan https://t.co/QE69Iy0a1M

- Loma Prieta: two cousins, a daredevil skateboard trick, and the ‘89 San Francisco earthquake https://t.co/kxpQOrmvMT

- Road Rage: a new era San Francisco car chase. Think Bullitt but with a WayMo https://t.co/wjlaZ6nH3G

- American Flake: A charismatic small-town drug dealer avoids grieving the death of his mom by searching for a lost bag of his favorite potato chips https://t.co/RhOX8IjHYh (debuted at #DancesWithFilms, should screen/stream more widely soon)

Some common threads: #SanFranciscoBayArea #Technology #Relative #AwesomePremise #GreatTeam #PersonalStory

[𝙹𝚘𝚜𝚑 𝙺𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚢 @jmkelly]

There have been many great #TheOnion headlines since, but not sure any will ever top this one. #supremecourt https://t.co/mA61zqXLeU

[𝙹𝚘𝚜𝚑 𝙺𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚢 @jmkelly]

The Cracker Barreling of the new Instagram wordmark is afoot!

Some love or hate it so much they simply must share their strong feelings.

But this one’s getting sort of a “mixed” review. So it's more like some feel so strongly the world is eager to hear their opinion that they must share even their most middling insights.

That’s me!

These refreshes now inspired countless posts and articles, along with a backlash of posts about how annoying the countless posts and articles are.

In some ways, it's the cultural ritual of the brand identity refresh reaction that’s becoming the interesting part:

1) We should all be so lucky to work on a brand that means so much to the world that people have any reaction at all to changing the identity, let alone a reaction that’s widespread enough to become as annoying as the ubiquitous #CrackerBarrel and #Instagram threads.

2) It's clear very few experts actually know squatdiddly about what goes into refreshing a global #brandidentity, from a design, operations, or messaging/meaning perspective. They’re all, “mwah, the R looks like a Z” or “peak blanding!”. They mostly forget to even guess what matters to users and lovers of the brand.

3) It doesn’t matter whether users and lovers of the brand know what's involved, because they still have a valid reaction. They’re not going to deconstruct the typography lines, note the “more intentional approach to color” or “a cleaner visual language, minimal, confident, and more mature” they’re just going to feel what they feel. And feel is most of what matters.

I think the new mark and system is good FWIW. It refreshes the decade-old scripty system and retains some of its recognizable distinctiveness. It gets out of the way visually. Review over.

And, yes, the R looks like a Z. Maybe they’ll tweak that. But it doesn’t matter because there are yet-to-be-conceived children who already know what Instagram is and how to say/spell it.

It��s why people like me are posting about it at risk of being annoying.

{snarky visual of Instagram reverting to old Cracker Barrel identity not created without the use of AI}

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

File under First World problems. But the noise made by the chairs at my #Starbucks when scooted in or out resembles nothing so much as a 19th Century steam locomotive screeching into a station. Fear not, I have suggestions for the CEO to rectify forthwith! https://t.co/pGJDYUawPL

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

Why did no one inform me of the existence of this item, The Comfy? No matter, I now own one. It is easily the greatest of all American things to own and wear. https://t.co/KAgI5kCpHn

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

I have wandered. I have wondered. More importantly, I have waylaid my password for 17 years. Until just now rescuing it from the greasy confines of a wadded up Tommy's Joynt napkin. Now back on #Twitter after so long that the brand deleted its name for an algebraic variable #X

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

I have a stack of orders that would fill a bottomless Inbox. Not that they would ever be misplaced, but to show diligence I am #backingupnow

[Phineas Bling @phineasbling]

This weak, PAX. A PAX is upon us. A PAX upon you all. I shall tarry forth and garner intelligence.