User Abuse: American Airlines will do anything for money

When I went to unsubscribe from the American Airlines Reward Network's annoying email updates, which are basically just ad spam (complete are paid links to Rewards Network sites), I was met with the following:

The text: "If you unsubscribe from email updates, your benefits will be reduced to 1 mile per dollar spent." It continues, "only members who have signed up to receive emails and provided a valid, deliverable email address will be eligible for our top dining reward levels."

That's right -- they've followed the law in allowing people to unsubscribe from their ad spam messages, but doing so removes most of the users' benefits!

I guess this is what they have to do to make money, since Virgin America, Jet Blue, and Southwest are wiping the floor with their pansy asses.  American Airlines, you'd better cross your fingers for a corporate welfare check, you no-business-plan-having wastes of space.

Diverse users demand diverse products -- Nintendo of Japan

More women than men play Nintendo in Japan.

According to the Fall 2007 Nintendo Conference, more than half of Japanese Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS players are female. Since Japan is to the video game industry what the Bay Area is to the web -- that is to say, it's the undisputed innovation center -- this is great news for those of us who care about video game diversity.

In 2008, I'm far less excited about playing my 50th menu-driven RPG than I am about finding another genre-shattering, barrier-breaking masterpiece like Katamari Damacy was and Spore hopes to be. And it seems that these unique games have much larger rapport with female audiences -- if only because they represent a new consumer base for games and as such are not entrenched in taxonomical comfort zones such as "Platformer", "Shooter", and "Beat Em Up".

Maybe this diversifying player base helps to explain why the last few years have included such paradigm shifting games as Brain Age, Cooking Mama, Trauma Center, and Elebits. It's not that unique games never existed before (a statement that would be logically fallacious anyway), but it seems to me that in my lifetime, unclassifiable games such as these have ever been nearly successful as they are at this moment. One can only hope it continues.



source
"13:56: For each household, the DS has 3.0 users, the Wii has 3.5 users. DS has a 53% female user base. Wii has a 51% female user base."

World War VII Watch, edition 1 (December 6, 2007)

Sarcos, a company who doesn't seem to have chosen sides in World War VII: Humans vs. Androids, has just thrown a Deron-esque dime for the latter faction: humanoid robots (or Androids) that could totally own the Humans in Joust (pictured):



These androids come with a pretty pimpin' backpack and are capable of keeping their balance when punched, shoved, or kicked -- presumably even when a bowling ball is thrown into their chests. They're pretty cuddly now, and lack offensive abilities, but a strict biotechnological analysis reveals that they may be able to attain offensive powers easily:


That's right. They Have Fingers. This means one of these metal badasses could fire a gun or tank -- and it could pull the trigger even if people were trying to kick it over.

Score one for the Androids.

Watch the first five minutes of The Golden Compass

I'm not sure how this got online, but I hope it was intentionally leaked to YouTube in a brilliant guerrilla marketing move. I'm far more hooked by this five minute intro than by any pre-opening ad campaign in recent memory.

Whether it was intentional or not, I'm making this mofo viral. WATCH!




YES. MORE HIGH DOLLAR MAGICAL FANTASY MOVIES PLEASE.

Host on Fox News exemplifies their "fair and balanced" slogan (with surprise twist ending)

Check out the surprise twist ending! You'll never see it coming.