Yes, there's banner ads on my site now. It turns out they don't let you stay on .edu servers for very long after you're no longer enrolled. Go figure. So I looked around at free hosting services for one that didn't completely suck. I'm not about to put up with pop-ups or crap like that. Terrashare's nice, just one banner at the very top, and they share the ad revenue with you (which amounts to about 2 cents a day right now, but it's the principle of the thing). So I'm not complaining about the banners, just this one.

Oh, the myriad ways in which I hate it. Let's start with persistance.
I see that banner on my little "random" billboard space at least Ten Times more often than any other ad in the rotation. So I have to see it almost ever time I update and check my work. Constant exposure increases hatred. Give me an Etch-a-Sketch and I'll show my work. End result: bitter overweight hatred.

Next we must turn to the ad itself. It's designed to resemble an error message.
Now, maybe I'm no marketting executive, and maybe I don't have a big detailed graph about user demographics... But how many of you are THAT stupid? Can I get a big show of hands here? Who's dumb enough to click on the banner because they think it's an error message? I mean, I know people are dumb, and WebTV and AOL are letting bigger idiots access the net every day, yet somehow I still think that ad is insulting the viewers' intelligence.
Then of course I realize that somebody must actually click on this sort of thing or else they wouldn't keep spending money to put it up, and that makes me hate it all the more.

Speaking of stupidity, I was so annoyed at that banner today when I was double checking the new comics in my little fort that in a particularly spectacular moment of idiocy I actually clicked on it. Not only was I dumb for doing it I've become dumber just by looking at that page. Now I REALLY hate the bastards.

I guess their ad campaign aimed exclusively at morons is actually a good idea, since anybody with more than a shot glass-ful of functioning brain cells isn't likely to pay these guys for a product that just changes a couple of settings in windows. Not that hate them less because of that, mind you.

Wouldn't it be nice if enough people really hating something would make it just go away? Like if the universe had some kind of democratic self-correcting method. So our righteous hate would serve a purpose. Once something builds up enough justifible hatred from enough sentients it just ceases to be. Come on, everyone, hate it with me! hate. Hate. Hate! HATE!!!