The Shamelessness Of Advertising

I don't get spam.
Well, I don't mean to say I never receive spam, quite the opposite. I don't understand spam. I used to, I mean, if you've got a communication medium like email at your fingertips that can potentially help you reach thousands, nay, millions of new customers, you'd be a fool not to use it. But honestly. Take a look at what spam is nowadays. Spam filters have gotten so effective that the only things coming through anymore often don't even contain advertising messages anymore. They contain random picks of words and sentences, probably picked from either dictionaries or novels, pieced together to form completely illegible bits of prose.
Of course, I generalize. I still get the usual bits of spam, but the completele-bollocks emails have conquered quite a bit of the field. Don't worry, though, you are still reaching my inbox with information on how to get my penis enlarged. How to make 'my lady' cum with exquisite shrieks of orgasmic delight, how to get a university degree by the press of a button, how to get software at prices that couldn't mean anything but 'illegal', and where to get the best pornographic images of underage tits and ass. It all reaches my inbox. And then the checkbox in front of it gets checked, I press 'delete', and even 'empty trash'. This may come as a shock to you, but that's the fact of the matter: I don't read your spam. I delete it. Without a second's thought. Every last email that doesn't look like I should read it gets wiped off the electronic freeway without even the slightest moment of regret.

Yet people keep sending them. To gazillions of addresses, world-wide. Every day. I'm inclined to say every minute. And we at Probeersel.com receive them as well. By the thousands. And the ways around the spam filters seem to get craftier and craftier. I can't help but wonder if that's the only reason they get sent at all anymore. To find clever ways to get around the spam filter. Like viruses (virii ?) are created as sort of anarchistic ways to bypass security, only to, in turn, challenge security builders to fight them again. So, in essence, sending illegible email to just to see if it reaches the addressee.
That has to be the reason. I mean.. show of hands: who even reads spam anymore ? Do advertisers really think that their messages of clearing our debts, ordering Viagra, helping to smuggle a large sum of money out of a country in war, and meeting fresh, young mail order brides online are reaching us ? I mean, hell, I only read them today as a slight bit of quick research for what I am writing here. All the rest goes straight into the digital shredder. And it seems like such a stupid waste of time, money, network bandwidth, storage space, server power, engineer intelligence, and whatever else is wasted on this.
No one reads spam anymore. Except perhaps some 90 year old dimwit who just got his first online connection and is happy with any email he receives. Spam has changed a perfectly good advertising channel into a public nuisance. No respectable advertising company should even consider advertising via email anymore - it has simply lost all effect and can even harm the impression the addressee has / had of the company you're sending it for. I for one wouldn't want to deal with a company that bothers millions of innocent email address owners with this crap. Even if I'd want a penis enlargement (and I don't, I'm quite glad to report no one with actual experience regarding my penis has brought up the suggestion) I would consult a doctor. Or if for whatever desperate reason the internet was my only resource for scheduling such an operation, I'd friggin' Google for a respectable-looking company that handles these things. And doesn't flood half the web with garbled Dickens regurgitations.
But then again, the logic of advertising have always sort of been beyond me. I just saw an Opel commercial where images of babies clapping their hands were supposed to sell me a car. And to think I'm actually considering going back into that world.

Amazing.

Ain't No Sunshine is currently the 8th most popular comic on Probeersel.com and only has three unique readers to go before it's 7th. Before long, it'll probably be in the top 5. And that without doing barely any advertising for it, without featuring it in the 'Pick of the week' section or in 'In the spotlight', without mentioning it on most forums, etc.
It has also already harvested, in its three weeks of existence, more enthousiastic and other positive feedback than The Grim DotCom in it's nearly three YEAR run has !
Good grief, folks, it's a comic featuring pictures of my excrement !

Grim DotCards

I'm more and more seriously considering sending out an order for a special Grim DotCom-set of playing cards. Sure, it'll cost me nearly 2 Euros per deck at a minimum of 1000 decks, but it'll be so cool and totally sellable. Even if it takes me hundreds of conventions to push - hell, that's almost an argument FOR them, because then I'll never have to worry about having to arrange for something to bring. I'll just bring the stash of buttons I still have, perhaps produce a few up-to-date eBooks, and a bunch of those decks. Worst comes to worst and the convention is practically dead, then we can still PLAY cards.

Buttttttt.. the real headbreaker is how to fit in the characters.
Ok, the colour schemes are easy enough: all the red colours (hearts and diamonds) go to The Grim DotCom and all the black colours (clubs and spades) go to Netscythe. And for each 'level', you'll only have one character per company. So the Ace for both Hearts and Diamonds is the Grim Reaper, and the Ace for Clubs and Spades is the crazy inventor boss from Netscythe. Needless to say, I want ALL the pictures to be unique, so the two images of the Grim Reaper will differ from one another.
So far so good. This wasn't the difficult part.
The difficult part is who goes where. And with Netscythe, the total cast hasn't been introduced yet, and I'm not even entirely done character designing them. Argh !

To illustrate how difficult this is, here's the total list of 55 cards that should be in such a deck. With the characters I had mentally assigned to them. The ones in italic bold are the ones I'm already sure of, the merely-italic ones I am much less sure about...
Grim DotCom set:

JOKER I............Casey 1
JOKER II............Casey 2
ACE HEARTS.........Grim Reaper 1
ACE DIAMONDS.......Grim Reaper 2
KING HEARTS........John 1
KING DIAMONDS......John 2
QUEEN HEARTS.......Eileet 1
QUEEN DIAMONDS.....Eileet 2
JACK HEARTS........Jack 1
JACK DIAMONDS......Jack 2
10 HEARTS..........Kent 1
10 DIAMONDS........Kent 2
9 HEARTS...........Yvette 1
9 DIAMONDS.........Yvette 2
8 HEARTS...........Jim 1
8 DIAMONDS.........Jim 2
7 HEARTS...........Morale Officer 1
7 DIAMONDS.........Morale Officer 2
6 HEARTS...........Reaper's secretary 1
6 DIAMONDS.........Reaper's secretary 2
5 HEARTS...........Annoying guy 1
5 DIAMONDS.........Annoying guy 2
4 HEARTS...........Jesus 1
4 DIAMONDS.........Jesus 2
3 HEARTS...........a computer 1
3 DIAMONDS.........a computer 2
2 HEARTS...........the building 1
2 DIAMONDS.........the building 2

And the NetScythe part of the set:

JOKER III...........The Devil 1
JOKER IV...........The Devil 2
ACE CLUBS..........Crazy boss 1
ACE SPADES.........Crazy boss 2
KING CLUBS.........Luke 1
KING SPADES........Luke 2
QUEEN CLUBS........Cynthia 1
QUEEN SPADES.......Cynthia 2
JACK CLUBS.........Pete 1
JACK SPADES........Pete 2
10 CLUBS...........Jake 1
10 SPADES..........Jake 2
9 CLUBS............Mark 1
9 SPADES...........Mark 2
8 CLUBS............
8 SPADES...........
7 CLUBS............
7 SPADES...........
6 CLUBS............
6 SPADES...........
5 CLUBS............
5 SPADES...........
4 CLUBS............
4 SPADES...........
3 CLUBS............
3 SPADES...........
2 CLUBS............
2 SPADES...........

I still have a lot of deciding to do...