The vibes are bad | This Week in Business

gamesindustry.biz:

Existing as they do at the intersection of "brevity is the soul of wit" and "a picture is worth a thousand words," social media posts and memes can be great for drawing easily graspable parallels between complex subjects and situations, with the capability to get across insightful comparisons in humorous shorthand.

And as evidenced by that lead, editorials like this are perfect for spelling out jokes at cumbersome length, articulating those complex parallels and draining them of all humor.

Hrm, let me try that lead again.

So I saw this thing on Twitter.

It was a picture of the Los Angeles Convention Center, long-time home of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, with a Spirit Halloween banner strung above the entrance.

(The tweet has since been deleted, but the concept endures.)

It instantly evoked a complicated emotional concoction. It was hilarious, and sad, and felt fundamentally true, even if E3 had not yet been cancelled at that point and Spirit would probably never rent out the LACC to hock costumes, much less in early June.

For anyone unfamiliar with the North American chain, Spirit Halloween is a harbinger of doom, a hallmark of suburban blight, a seasonal retailer that swoops into vacated storefronts each September with a fly-by-night operation that sells various costumes, props and decorations before shuffling off the mortal coil in early November, appropriately leaving a spooky vacant retail space to molder for the other 10 months of the year.

In a nature documentary about the demise of mighty brick-and-mortar retailers that once ruled the planet, Spirit would be the carrion-eater in time-lapse footage of the fallen giant, the fungus thriving in the woods atop a shallow grave.

Wherever you see a Spirit,