KFC Mascot Col. Sanders Talks Malbolge Programming on General Hospital

https://esoteric.codes/blog/kfc-col-sanders-talks-malbolge-general-hospital

by asjo • 6 years ago

103 83 6 years ago

KFC has got a zany marketing team.

mbg7214• 6 years ago

It seemed like Burger King was headed that direction when they released their line of (surprisingly playable) Xbox games, but I guess they've backed away since then.

monocasa• 6 years ago

That was because they hired CP+B, but then CP+B were too much of classic problematic ad bros for them, so Burger King backed out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin_Porter_%2B_Bogusky

TigeriusKirk• 6 years ago

Their Subservient Chicken website was one of the strangest pieces of marketing I've ever seen for a major corporation.

kevin_thibedeau2• 6 years ago

Probably shrinking their marketing team like they did to their sandwiches.

glaugh• 6 years ago

The BK bumper car game has turned into a weird little christmas tradition in my family. Actually a very fun, easy-to-learn/hard-ish-to-master game (basically 2D Rocket League)

kyle-rb• 6 years ago

Burger King created WhopperCoin, but only for Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhopperCoin

Apocryphon3• 6 years ago

Maybe big tech companies aren't the only ones who try to expand their moats with entries in random product categories and moonshot projects.

marktangotango• 6 years ago

I had this thought as well. "Sneak King" and the commercials back then were brilliant. Too bad the BK nearest me is nearly unedible.

dawnerd• 6 years ago

W+K (not sure if they were part of this) is pretty good.

eindiran3• 6 years ago

On the topic of zany and bizarre KFC marketing strategies, there have been several I bumped in to in the last few days.

This dating simulator is published by KFC, starring the Colonel himself: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colone...

Another bizarre one I encountered in the last few days; there is the new Lifetime movie about Colonel Sanders starring Mario Lopez, entitled "A Recipe for Seduction"....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGUMA2LwskQ

[EDIT] Apparently the whole mini-movie is available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0e7Bj_7T3k

tclancy2• 6 years ago

Is Steam compatible with the new Coolermaster? https://landing.coolermaster.com/kfconsole/

munificent3• 6 years ago

As consumers naturally learn to tune out advertising, advertisers must constantly adapt in order to get past their cognitive defenses.

isaacimagine• 6 years ago

Beautiful.

smoyer2• 6 years ago

While watching college b-ball with my son last night, I noticed that the field-house at Louisville is (now?) named the "KFC Yum! Center". I can't really eat KFC but do appreciate brands that can poke fun at themselves or otherwise advertise with some humor. The melting Colonel Sanders snowman was a little creepy though!

[0] https://www.kfcyumcenter.com/

dekhn• 6 years ago

Wasn't clear if you knew this, but KFC is owned by "Yum! Brands"

smoyer2• 6 years ago

I did not though I did remember that they were somehow related to Pizza Hut.

modzu• 6 years ago

i find it kind of unsettling how the colonel lives on as a cartoon

at_a_remove• 6 years ago

It is interesting to see how much of human parsing of language depends on prior probability, probably expected pairs of concepts, because I had double-take on that sentence, since my brain really was not expecting to find combinations of KFC, Malbolge, or General Hospital in a single sentence.

motohagiography2• 6 years ago

Seriously thought the whole thing was generated by a connector between GPT-3 and a new deepfake engine. Still think that's what it is. This is mind breaking.

dane-pgp2• 6 years ago

Ah, you beat me to writing a comment that mentioned GPT-3, but I promise I didn't see yours when I started writing mine. Perhaps human thoughts are more predictable than we like to believe.

Anyway, to make your suggestion of "a new deepfake engine" more concrete, let me include a reference to DALL-E, the recently announced text-to-image engine from OpenAI:

https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/16/openais-text-to-image-eng...

scrps• 6 years ago

That was my first thought as well until I saw the tweet, though the possibility of it being an acid flashback was a close second.

dane-pgp2• 6 years ago

I had a similar experiencing when reading it, and now I'm wondering if there is a way to use a language model like GPT-3 to measure how unlikely a given string of words is, relative to other headlines.

siegecraft• 6 years ago

I don't think you need something that heavyweight to do this (although maybe for an entire headline). Amazon has had the "Statistically Improbable Phrases" feature for books for quite a while now.

Liquid_Fire• 6 years ago

I was not aware that General Hospital was the name of a TV show, so not only the headline but the article itself made little sense to me initially - it read like randomly generated spam.

jandrese2• 6 years ago

The Venn Diagram of people who know about Malbolge and people who watch General Hospital has to have little to no overlap. Was this reference made for exactly one guy or something?

SkyMarshal• 6 years ago

Maybe it was just an experiment with viral marketing, estimating a 1%-10% chance it would make it into programmer social media circles and make them hungry for KFC instead of pizza or avocado toast.

The inclusion of Malbolge is obviously intended to cause them to look up how it works, resulting in acceleration of both their mental fatigue and physical hunger.

mywittyname2• 6 years ago

Might have also been included because Malbolge is included in a listicle that is the top search result for "weird programming languages." I wouldn't be surprised if show writers did a search for something close to that phrase, found the article, immediately got the literary reference and included it in the show for that reason.

Also, you probably can't say brainfuck on daytime TV. None of the other languages had interesting names, i.e., glass, whitespace, chicken, lolcode.

Edit: They've probably done something similar with other technical topics, but we don't watch the show to know. Such as, having a rocket scientist on the show talking about building rocket recovery wadding or something after looking through a GIS for "rocket parts."

mbg7214• 6 years ago

Perhaps the people writing General Hospital would rather not be doing that, but it makes too much money to cancel and the audience is inelastic, so they decided to have some fun.

notatoad• 6 years ago

Was this reference made for exactly one guy

probably yes, and that one guy works as the technical consultant on the show.

igpay• 6 years ago

A google search for "most obscure computer language" (with "computer language" being the terminology they use in the episode) returns this article as the first result https://blog.payara.fish/6-of-the-weirdest-most-obscure-prog...

My guess is that they just skimmed through that and picked "Malbolge" because it sounds the best.

bokchoi• 6 years ago

Well, we are discussing it so apparently the marketing worked.

perl4ever• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS would be the obvious choice...

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

FWIW the title is probably the best part of this story. I watched the video clips and it just seems no different from any other cheesy soap opera.

kevin_thibedeau2• 6 years ago

This is a new frontier for native advertising. Instead of a few gratuitous product mentions, the entire script is co-opted.

Apocryphon3• 6 years ago

This is like the modern equivalent of the Max Headroom signal hijacking. Bizarre mashups of tech, television and corporate icons. It's definitely a form of culture jamming.

munificent3• 6 years ago

...except this time it's literally just marketing material for a giant corporation hawking junk food. The opposite of culture jamming, I guess.

Apocryphon3• 6 years ago

The commodification of culture jamming!

krrrh• 6 years ago

The guy that named gifs may insist on a soft g, but he’s obviously wrong or a troll because graphic isn’t pronounced /jrafik/, and everyone other than a few pedants pronounce it the correct way.

Similarly, Kalle Lasn‘s perspective was limited by ideology when he coined “culture jamming”. The term’s usage has expanded to encompass a wider range of mashups, thumbs-in-eyes, and appropriations than what its creator intended, and is frequently used in ways that raises the hackles of old school readers of Adbusters.

In some ways its modern usage has become a meta-commentary on itself.

vessenes• 6 years ago

KFC’s current marketing team is on fire. My teenagers sat us down recently and forced us to watch the kfc lifetime special, and have been asking for their gaming console (comes with a warming bucket for chicken, natch). HBS cases are going to be written about these mad geniuses very soon.

Melting_Harps3• 6 years ago

KFC’s current marketing team is on fire. My teenagers sat us down recently and forced us to watch the kfc lifetime special, and have been asking for their gaming console (comes with a warming bucket for chicken, natch). HBS cases are going to be written about these mad geniuses very soon.

What the absolute fuck is this... I can't wrap my head around what seems like an AI based structured sentence, that I presume you wrote, and is starkly reminiscent of that story written about an app based darknet economy that is really just an AI meant to kept Humans addicted to devices and plugged into 'the matrix,' but I can't help but be intrigued.

Can you provide links to this console and this series... I want to give myself a reason to stop being on the internet for a few days and I'm sure this would do it.

eindiran3• 6 years ago

Console: https://landing.coolermaster.com/kfconsole/

Lifetime movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0e7Bj_7T3k

Bonus round -- the KFC dating simulator game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colone...

dharmab2• 6 years ago

The "Console" is just a gaming PC in a novelty case.

xnyan• 6 years ago

It's marketing copy, not some sacred text they are desecrating. Their goal is to be a little silly and maybe elicit an emotional reaction, judging by your reaction it seems like it worked well.

dharmab2• 6 years ago

If only they sold a decent product.

jrowen• 6 years ago

Arguably this started decades ago when they successfully established the KFC Party Barrel as a traditional Christmas meal in Japan.

craftinator• 6 years ago

I lived in Japan for 2 years, and found it absolutely insane how strong the following of the Party Barrel is. The KFC in a town near by had sold out their availability 4 months in advance one year.

Klonoar• 6 years ago

That wasn't something that they outright did, it just kind of happened.

I would also be _shocked_ if that team had any relation to the team doing their current ad work.

Nition2• 6 years ago

I highly doubt anyone will ever actually be able to buy the KFConsole. It's "real" in the sense that they've made one, but it's not actually for sale.

bduerst• 6 years ago

Sounds like a challenge for Etsy

frombody• 6 years ago

They've done stuff like this in the past and followed through with it.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/11/20/16679480/...

snake_plissken• 6 years ago

I love these commercials (and the Dr Pepper Fansville ones). So stupidly clever.

But man KFC makes me feel so very ill afterwards. I'm not sure what exactly it is: I can eat Chik Filays and Burger King fine (the ~3-4 times a year I get fast food). But KFC, it's been like 7-8 years and I just steer clear now. It's nostalgically saddening because I remember loving the stuff when I was a kid, especially those mashed potatoes.

mywittyname2• 6 years ago

KFC probably does not today taste much like it did when you were a kid (unless you are very young).

especially those mashed potatoes.

Their potatoes are made from those dehydrated potato flakes and powdered gravy. You can make a decent facsimile using Idaho Spuds and Heinz jarred Homestyle Chicken gravy.

Answerawake2• 6 years ago

I agree with you. I also feel ill after eating KFC. It seems more greasy than something like Popeyes. My body feels like it has had a sucker punch after eating KFC so I try to stay clear. My theory is that it is a combination of something in the breading they use + the method of frying.

KFC uses a Pressure Fryer: https://youtu.be/9ZLKj2a_OPM?t=546

Wendys and Chickfila also use a pressure fryer but notably their sandwiches are not dripping with oil when you order them.

Here is the same pressure fryer Wendys uses but to fry chicken wings instead of sandwich patties, noice that they are dripping with oil: https://youtu.be/7owZz26W1_U?t=176

Popeyes uses a standard fryer plus a thick coating of buttermilk(as seen earlier in the video) and their chicken seems to come out cleaner: https://youtu.be/31dGYRnhS8k?t=113

Seems like Pressure fryers + breading might be the culprit but really, this is just a wild guess. If there are any fried chicken masters here, feel free to jump in.

phaedryx3• 6 years ago

My takeaways:

1. Colonel Sanders is cannon in General Hospital

2. He knows how to code; in Malbolge

3. He doesn't know how to pronounce Malbolge

4. He was cursed by a warlock

5. Some Syndicates cannot be reasoned with

https://twitter.com/generalhospital/status/10153849081921904...

wyldfire• 6 years ago

1. Boom!

and: 6. "Stay crispy and stay humble" - sounds like a good new slogan for KFC.

phaedryx3• 6 years ago

Haha, nice

klyrs• 6 years ago

3. He doesn't know how to pronounce Malbolge

That's actually the curse

phaedryx3• 6 years ago

LOL

ravenstine• 6 years ago

They should bring back the actual secret KFC recipe. Sanders actually said that, after he sold the company, they changed the recipe and he thought it sucked.

Aloha• 6 years ago

Anyone who has read anything about Col Sanders, would know he would have actually done this sort of thing, he was success at marking himself, as his brand.

ggm• 6 years ago

Well.. I'm now thinking about fried chicken. So, while I am not going to eat any, they kind-of succeeded.

stuart78• 6 years ago

What I loved about this article was the feeling of being dropped into a completely foreign world. The visual and acting style of the soap is so weird. The presence of Sanders is so unexpected. Not being familiar with Malbolge, it was all especially esoteric.

While there are many things in this world that I don’t understand, I few like this whole thing was a kind of delightful puzzle for five minutes. Nice to remember that off kilter feeing.

KFC Mascot Col. Sanders Talks Malbolge Programming on General Hospital

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