Adding New Meaning to Viagra Spam

Well, my head is pounding and I've been crunching Tylenol like M&Ms, but it's hard for me to complain. Today must be a sort of a yang to yesterday's yin. But I won't let that stop me, oh, no! I'm still in such a good mood that I don't even think I have it in me to genuinely make fun of anything. At least, that's what I thought before I ran across this:


This, certainly, is the product that mankind has been waiting for! If only I had a quarter for every time I sat around and thought, "if only my e-mails could be the bikini clad women that I always envision them to be!" Certainly, such a world would be a paradise. While it's certainly true that the novelty of such an approach is worth noting, one has to wonder: If your e-mails assume avatars of comely visions of your favorite gender, what action, exactly, is entailed when you read these poor polygonal souls? I mean, you open an e-mail. What do you do to your beach e-mail? I'm slightly aroused and very disturbed by the implications. In the name of science, I must know. I, dear readers, will throw myself upon the sword of wtf and find out what horrors lie in this interface. And once I'm satisfied with my assessment of the product presented, I shall endeavor to return here, with knowledge!

Also from the front lines of the culture war, I receive news that Lifetime, a network whose insipid gender-centric marketing/message drives me nuts, is teaming up with RealNetworks, whose insipid crap-centric software drives me nuts, to produce insipid, crappy looking, "games" for women! Because the games that are out there apparently aren't for women, they needed special ones. Special ones like a game where you manage a beauty salon. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a salon managing sim could be great fun. I'm just as sure that by saying "this is a game made specifically for women," there are some marketing folks that sat down somewhere and had a conversation something like this:
Marketing Guy 1: Lifetime is interested in giving us some money to make a game especially for women... what kind of game should that be?
Marketing Guy 2: I dunno... what do women like? Um... they like looking pretty, right? How about a make-up application sim?
Marketing Guy 1: Think about what you just said! Make-up application? They do that shit every day. We need something that allows them to do what they've always wanted to do!
Marketing Guy 2: How about a salon? Then they could put make-up on other people
Marketing Guy 1: Holy shit, Jim, that's genius! We need to get the code monkeys on that right away.
Marketing Guy 2: Think we should come up with a compelling gameplay mechanic?
Marketing Guy 1: Mechanic? Ha! Screw that, it's got make-up. Plus, we could have them style people's hair! What else could they want?

Maybe it's my paranoia, but I can't imagine any good coming of this. Then again, what do I know? I'm certainly not a woman, perhaps Lifetime has really channeled to the core of what it is to be a woman and placed it in video game form. Or perhaps not.

The last bit I'm going to mention, I'm not going to say much about. All I think really needs to be said is this is either the luckiest kid in a while, or the unluckiest. Depending on how badly someone wants it all back. Of course, the kid did pay almost $200 for something that can be bought new for $120 in the States, so I have no idea what he was smoking in the first place.

--Ak out