I watched a Burger King commercial with Steven Tyler being stupid. I had no idea what the Hell he was doing, but after looking it up, I discovered he was promoting chicken strips. How the heck was I suppose to know that from what went on, and why would chicken strips need to be advertised? Chicken in strip form! Until now, I would have thought such a thing to be inconceivable! What an original... ok, that's enough of that!
Looking over the ads I grabbed from the mailbox, it makes me wonder why more people haven't realized that those deceptions are insulting to our intelligence. Dish Network's "America's Top 120" package for only $24.99*! The * being that this price jumps up another $20 after the first year, while the "Top 120" seems to include a bunch of niche Sirius radio stations, another bunch of DishCD music channels, the Liquidation Channel, Jewelry Television, TV Guide Network, and Buy!. This is America's Top 120? I've never even heard of Three Angels Broadcasting Network, and why would that American list include Russia Today? Is Horseracing Television really that popular? Seriously, Dish, why? I would imagine the response to be something along the lines of, "People are buying the package, so the ads must be working!" You know, because it's not like people actually buy it because many of them still like to watch TV. Many view television as a necessity. It's the same with buying a vehicle. If a car commercial shows off the brand new 2012 Overpriced GT going down an empty road while someone talks about all the award-winning this and that associated with it's company, there's a good chance that a person bought it simply because he needed a car. He didn't see it during the commercial breaks of his favorite show on Dish Network's Earth channel (which, I'm told is also one of the top 120 channels in America) and say to himself, "I must get that right now with the $40,000 I have burning a hole in my wallet!" Of course, this situation is even less likely to happen for those of us who are just trying to make ends meet, but, either way, this isn't the same thing as an impulse buy available at the checkout lanes. The stuff we see on TV, in papers, online, and hear on the radio are constantly resorting to the same tricks we've been exposed to for decades now. I can't be the only one who gets angry at the idea that these people actually think I'm so stupid that stale marketing stunts are what drive me to make my purchases. What pisses me off even more is that individuals are being paid to come up with it all. "Steven Tyler in a Burger King being a burden to the working staff? That's brilliant! It ties in perfectly with chicken strips!" Some marketing genius earned his money with that gem. Let's not forget that it's 2012, so there's also the oh so wonderful mud-slinging campaign ads to endure until November. Presidents can serve two terms only. If a president gets that second term, what incentive does he really have to try and help America? Give the commander his four years and just move on to the next guy. I don't care about what he did right and what he did wrong. That's going to be the same for everyone we elect. That second term should be given to the select few who go above and beyond to help this country. As election time nears, I'm guessing two-thirds of our commercials will be about politics:
1. "President Obama hates you and here are a list of reasons we came up with by taking various actions and comments he made and using them out of context."
2. Papa John's Pizza is reminding me that better ingredients make better pizzas, but they can't prove that the pizzas I buy at a particular location utilizes these "superior" ingredients, nor can they verify that the pizzas I eat will indeed be better than what they would have tasted like had they been made with merely good ingredients.
3. "Obama can do no wrong. He is more glorious than a double rainbow made out of Skittles and treats every other American as a loving member of his family."
(-___-) Please, just tell me the basic shit and let me make my own decisions. No sugarcoating, no vilifying, and, in the case of Burger King, don't assume that people like myself are going to be buying chicken strips because the Demon of Screamin' vaguely told us to do so. Just say, "Here's what we got now. Get some if you want." I like chicken. I'll probably buy them at some point, because I like chicken. I highly doubt I'll hear Livin' On the Edge and go, "Holy shit! I needs me some BK chick strips pronto!"
Less importantly, and completely off topic, why does Diablo 3 have such tiny font for it's channels? Someone, if not everyone, playing it in beta must have mentioned this issue on the forums. I can barely read it. Raynor and I were conversing in all caps, though I felt silly doing so. I love the changes to everything else, with exception to the barbarian class. It wasn't so bad in Diablo 2, but Blizzard has somehow managed to transfer nearly all the shortcomings of WoW's warrior class to this hack and slash. I was getting my butt kicked in the last two acts of the normal difficulty whenever I tried to experiment with each of the new abilities and their runes. Nearly every situation calls for my survival talents. Breaking away from this to increase damage and build upon my killing combos for even short period of time typically resulted in Juppiter's painful demise: screaming as his body falls over while the mob around him backs away to avoid stepping in the mess he makes when his muscles relax and the remains of his last meal empties onto the floor... strips of fowl he was coaxed into purchasing by some aging, spoony bard with bad hair he met in Act I who was carried off soon after by a group of zombies who had mistaken him as being one of their own. I was having fun changing the combination of talents in the first three acts. Now I have to always carry a shield for added protection or else my ass will get banged like a drum that Todd Rundgren mentioned in one of his songs that the old people I work with have never heard of before, so they assumed it was something brand new and complicated that all the kids are into nowadays, just like that Pac-Man fellow I once mentioned. I guess I could go back to Juppiter on WoW, but the only fun I get out of that now is PvP, and literally everyone who is a legitimate PvPer has said that warriors are the worst choice for arenas. Many forums even claim warriors are only useful in BGs as flag carriers. Sigh. Perhaps I'll just go back through Golden Sun 3 again and type up something about that on here which also won't be read because everything I say is nonsensical, long-winded, and boring. A post about my long-awaited sequel would, of course, be one more added to a long list of ideas I've been kicking around in my head for years now. It's just difficult to focus on something like that when there's the combination of work, sleep, anime, and video games taking up the bulk of my time. It used to be TV, instead of anime, until Boston Legal was taken off the air. America is airing too much other crap (different from my crap) on television. Well, Japan is doing the same thing, but most of that changes every three months. If The Big Bang Theory was only 12 episodes long, even I could tolerate it. Oh, I do have Mario Galaxy 2 to finish! Paul honoured me with his permission to play through the first one. I had never experienced a Wii game before Galaxy that involved utilizing motion detection (I don't count Wii Sports, because the controls on that were brainlessly simple). My moments with the Wii only involved Gamecube titles, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and playing Punch-Out! by turning the wiimote to it's side and using it like an NES controller. Once I got the hang of it though, Mario Galaxy was a lot of fun. Nintendo still manages to create a challenging platformer without making it feel unbearably difficult. Paul told me Galaxy 2 is suppose to be a bitch. I'm sure I'll have feelings of regret once I get into it, and not the kind of regret I had while playing Farm-, City-, and Castleville to help send crap to my dad. I'm typing about that other sort of regret that will be replaced with pride once I finish the game. As for Zynga and their library of -villes, everything about them is just abominable! The tactics they use in their games are blatant. A complete disregard for any sort of subtly in their pursuit for more wealth, it's the business equivalent of clubbing you over the skull with a blunt object while screaming, "Stand still while I club you over the skull with this blunt object!" Even now, I go to Castleville and I get "Hey, Jerod! For a limited time (with "limited" meaning until the company finally dissolves), if you give us $100, we'll give you 1000 crowns, instead of 800!" What justifies this as a sale? Because Zynga gives me an added 200 bits of fictional currency for my money that involved no added effort on their part to accomplish? And why do I need it? Because I can only buy diseased, in-bred mutant livestock and hideous, tacky decorations with the gold I acquire within the game, or is it to provide me with some form of alleviation from the headache of the constant stream of inane "quests" I'm expected to complete while my eyes are treated to the same few pictures of the characters over and over again, because it would cost the company an extra fifteen bucks to have a person draw just one more unique image of the Duke? "This treasure chest is cursed! It'll take at least 8 quests to break it, but for now, I need you to grow 100 plots of carrots to attract bunnies, then plant clovers all over the kingdom, and craft enough glasses of bubbly grog to turn my liver to stone within one day. This grog is for me just in case the rabbits' feet and four-leafed vegetation aren't strong enough and I suddenly wish to drown the sorrow I'll experience from your failure." Wow, these tasks are going to take forever. Wait a minute! For ONLY $100, I could buy crowns and use them to help me skip these daunting steps. Thank goodness for Zynga for providing me this inexpensive alternative from the grief of these ongoing quests that they were the creators of in the first place.
I think I've rambled enough for tonight. If anyone actually reads this whole thing, feel free to email your complaints to my yahoo account of dpamaregoodtome so that your comments don't divert attention away from those charming bits of spam that half of my old posts are already infected with.
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