Advertisers: prepare to die!
Dec 28th, 2008 by handolio
Right, listen up. I’m digging Hicks out of the cold earth and we’re going to work on some advertisers.
Why? Reason the first is that I’ve met a couple, and at least one of them is without merit as a human being. But the second reason – and the point of this rant – is that they’re wasting valuable seconds of my life.
I know what you’re thinking, “Here goes Handby on some predictable tirade about advert breaks or the other” but wrong. No. In fact it’s more complicated. You might want a hot drink.
So here’s the thing: like most of the stuff I write from home, I’m typing these words on Nobby: a laptop I was lucky enough to win about four years ago. He’s getting a bit grumpy in his old age, and has recently developed the habit of overheating and shutting down when he has to think particularly hard.
Now, given that I mostly use him for typing and viewing web pages, you might think that this wouldn’t be a problem, but you’d be wrong, and the reason is fucking adverts and, by extension, fucking advertisers.
Here’s why – adverts are shit and we ignore them, so advertisers are making them more attention-grabbing. For the most part this means animation, with many using flash to effectively play films at you. No problem (apart from the obvious and laughable waste of everyone’s time) if you have a decent computer, but a huge pain in the cock if you’ve got an ageing laptop without a graphics accelerator: the processor’s left doing the work. Busy processors use more power and create more heat.
To keep Nobby stable I’ve had to manually slow down his processor, which means I’m now doing the things I want more slowly in order to prevent the things I don’t want crashing my PC.
So come; join me and my favourite dead comedian as we welcome 2009 from atop a heap of twitching agency creatives.
Merry fucking new year.
Of course, there are other good reasons to perpetrate random and barely discriminate acts of violence against an entire section of the workforce. Here are two more of my favourites:
1 Adverts are shit
(from my Last.FM profile)
2 Adverts are offensively shit
This one’s for the hilarious Achmed the Dead Terrorist (catchphrase “I kill you”), a character, used in some kind of mobile phone download, at whom I’ve been staring in spluttering indignation ever since I first spotted him earlier in the year.
This particular appearance was on a YouTube page, the day after the Mumbai attacks.
I’m with you, comrade. The worst offender recently has been Vodafone’s ad for the Storm. I have a little set of system monitoring widgets in my Mac’s menubar, and I can guarantee then whenever the processor’s at full tilt and I can’t think of a reason why, it’s because Safari’s eating up all my cycles to display a brace of fucking Flash ads for the Storm.
OK, my GMA950 is a bit of a crappy graphics card, but there is no way in hell an ad whould be eating up all the spare processor capacity of a 2GHz Core Duo.
My little three-year-old laptop can cope with this better than Nobby, but it’s still piss-achingly irritating.
Why don’t you install an ad blocker and save your processor / blood pressure / general anger levels?
I’m with you dude, I have the voodoo book open and ready, we can get him back in an instance…… “now if we can all join hands and close our eyes, Mr Hicks will be with us in a second”
Ooh, that bloody Storm advert – wrecks my work computer every time, and to make matters worse it was running on our home page. Argh! But yes, ad blocking is the way forward.
@Antony – because it would be like cutting off a dog’s balls.