Why I read Metafilter, Part 2

saulgoodman reminds us about why laws permitting abortion were passed in the first place.  It wasn't that women didn't get abortions beforehand.  It's that far too many did, and the results were horrific.

Annoying web ads 1

Lately there's been something of an ad blitz among certain web properties that have become nearly unavoidable in internet advertising.  As one of the few remaining Firefox users who doesn't just block the hell out of all of them, I figured I should note them for posterity before they vanish, unseen, unloved, to make way for whatever schlocky virtual product web marketers will try to convince us we need next.

1. CIVONY, now EVONY

An online flash game (I think), at first these annoying flash ads would try to put the imperative on the viewer (an annoying advertising technique that makes ads sound bossy) with text like "Save your queen NOW, My Lord!"  Since then they seem to have mellowed a little, but only a little.  Currently there's an ad in rotation that reads "SAVE YOUR LOVER!  Play Now  Free Forever." 

The Pede says that it's a simulation game not dissimilar to Civilization, a fact that the original name played up; the "O" in CIVONY was a globe, which drew attention to the "CIV" part of the title in a way obviously engineered to make the game seem like a Firaxis product.  Evidently Firaxis thought so too, for not long after the game was suddenly renamed to EVONY.

As for the game itself?  I wouldn't know; I've never clicked through.  Following flash ads is only slightly lower, in the great hierarchy of noob actions, than forwarding Obama fear screeds.

2. 1 rule to a thinner stomach: OBEY

Speaking of casting imperitives....  These extraordinarily domineering ads tell people to OBEY one (or sometimes two) rules in all-caps, and sometimes in red letters, while displaying before-and-after pictures of weight loss success stories.  The before pictures are vaguely disgusting, but oddly, so are the after ones, which bring to mind surgery more than an attractive physique. 

Why I read Metafilter, Part 2

This thread is still on the front page over at MeFi.  If you go through and read the comments, you'll learn about Al Jazerra and the relative lameness of U.S. cable news, about Overton windows, and the real reason (even greater than the math behind our two-party-oriented election process) that third parties haven't done well in the United States.

There are days when I feel reluctant to post on Metafilter because I feel overwhelmed by the general quality of the comments.  But it's usually around that time that something bizarre and inexplicable makes the Blue, like the Japanese meme about anthropomorphizing WWII fighter jets as anime girls, and I feel qualified to post once again.

It also helps that they linked Peanuts Roasted to the front page recently.  Yay!