I don’t have a long list of sites that I check daily; it’s probably just Weather Underground, TD Ameritrade, Wesleying, the New York Times, LiveJournal, Facebook, and AppleInsider. The ads on most of them are nonexistent or manageable. I’ve been using Wunderground for so long that, although its pages are plastered with ads, I can easily skim right over them without giving them a thought. TD Ameritrade and Wesleying and LiveJournal have no ads, and the ads displayed by Facebook and the NYT are also pretty easy to ignore (although, I must admit, the singles ads that Facebook hosts occasionally include photos of some pretty hot women).
But that is not the point of this blog entry.
No. The point of this entry is to complain about the banner ad that you see above, which has lately been appearing at AppleInsider and—I’m quite sure—contains the most annoying and irrelevant animated image that has ever plagued my computer screen. Perhaps that’s somewhat of an exaggeration, but something about the banner and its animation always pisses me off, not least because I’m sure I’ve seen it all around the Internet.
You may have seen it, too. The silhouette of a woman’s side, frantically zoomed in and out, over and over again with no end. It’s constantly moving, and unavoidable. My eye is drawn to it every time, and then my brain inevitably becomes involved. How does this animation apply to a bachelor’s degree? Is this woman clothed? Why is the simulated camera darting forward and backward? Why is she touching herself? Does she ever get an RSI? And why are the clouds moving so fast?
And why, oh why, does it have to be so ferociously distracting?
