For the Easily Amused (e.g., Me)
SitePal is absofrickinlutely hilarious. (Note: The full effect requires audio, so you can see just how abysmally the animation’s lips are synched to the speech.) For only $10 a month, you too can have your own creepy animated character on your Web site, to boss around and terrify unsuspecting visitors. If you plod through the Overview, you are eventually rewarded with the opportunity to create your own test character, which resulted in about an hour of hilarity for me. I recommend it without reservation to those who are, like me, easily amused.
I think my favorite bit is how the characters roll their eyes in an attempt to follow the mouse around the screen. They look positively demented. If you click on the “Try Demo” button, the resulting character is even funnier. Try making her eyeballs rotate as far as they’ll go, and then make her head waggle around. (Pausing the animation may help, because she becomes more mouse-attentive* when you do that.) Making her go cross-eyed is also worthwhile. The fact that the Demo Host character reminds me a lot of Janet on “My Hero” –especially when her eyes are rolled to the extreme corners of their sockets — just makes it funnier.
I know, I shouldn’t mock. I could not create such animations myself, and these things are probably very advanced examples of technical wossnames. One of the creators will probably eagerly hunt for links to their site and be absolutely crushed that I laughed at their heartfelt strivings to create something exciting and beneficial to humanity. If that happens, I apologize, but I do ask that they perhaps consider testing their models in future to limit the eye-rolling and mouse-following behavior. It’s just not fair to ask visitors not to play with these features. It’s like putting someone in a room with a cat and a small, high-powered flashlight, and expecting them to resist the urge to play chase-the-spot-of-light-until-kitty-throws-up.
Also, given a choice, I’d prefer Max Headroom. (Or Bryce Lynch, but that’s a whole other story there.) Damn, I miss that show. ::whimper:: I will personally nominate for sainthood the first person who releases non-bootleg DVDs of that series. I stupidly lent out my tapes to someone maybe seven years ago, and never got them back. One of the greatest mistakes of my life.
Great, I’m all sad now. I’ll go play with my SitePal character, whom I’ve decided to name Bryce. That’ll cheer me up.
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*Is it just me, or did that sound rather rude? Maybe I need to get out more.
Update: Here’s a screenshot of Bryce. Hope he’s at adequate resolution:
I should just go to sleep now. I’m probably getting slap-happy at this point.
