Read, Play, Avoid Ads

posted on may 25, 2002, tag: web

I suggest you download and read Manual, a new jointly-written "book" by some of the Internet's greatest webloggers. You can find it here (requires Adobe Acrobat). I've only read about 3/4 of it, but I am really enjoying it.

With the money my mother gave me for my birthday, I purchased a Nintendo GameCube today. I bought it for one reason: the Resident Evil series. I love those games. And the remake of the first one is amazing. I've only played it for about five minutes, and I am blown away. I can't wait for the next few. Also, the Cube is very neat looking. It's very compact, and the games are on mini-compact-discs. Remember when you were a kid and you saw a mini-cd in a movie, and you knew that was something we would have in the future? Well, the future is now apparently.

Nothing on the Internet is free anymore. I know I'm not the first person to state that, obviously, but I've just been feeling it more and more lately. Today I had to pay for a year of access to GameSpot "Complete," which really just means I'm paying money to see stuff that a month ago was free. The content isn't any better, I just have to pay for it. The one good thing is they've removed all the advertisements from every page (including commercials before video clips). At least that's something, I guess.

The whole thing got me thinking about how much I despise advertising. Don't get me wrong—if a commercial is entertaing, I enjoy it. But I hate how annoying ads are getting. The Internet is one thing (fucking pop up ads everywhere... thank god for PopUpKiller), but do I really need a SprintPCS logo on my cell phone? Fuck no. And do car dealerships really need to etch their location into the back of cars they sell? I mean, for Christ's sake, I see more advertisements in a given day than I see people! My point is that for some reason, we have come to accept that ads are just a part of everything—we let them appear everywhere—and it's got to stop.