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Magazine People Are Bad Avatars |
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Magazine People refers to a particular style of Comic Chat avatar. These avatars
are not comic characters, but rather photographs of people (celebrities are almost always
the victim). Magazine People are also known as Photo Avatars.
As stated numerous times in the Reverse Engineering Avatars tutorial, the goals of those who designed Comic Chat was to make a superior visual IRC client that brought social interaction from real-life conversations into the chat room. These social interactions are poses from the avatars that convey certain emotions or actions about what the chat room participant was saying. That is the true genius of Comic Chat. Text chat can only do this through emoticons, which isn't much. According to the New Hacker's Dictionary, an emoticon is:
These avatars don't follow any of the conventions for a legitimate Comic Chat avatar because their authors don't care or understand about the social interaction aspects. Nostrodomos has gotten reports of these avatars having as few as 2 poses! Some poses are even blank! What is up with that? How embarrassing. These Photo Avatars also eat up the computer disk. They are 10 times greater in disk size, sometimes more! A sibling of the Magazine People is called the Sleazy Toons. These are avatars made from copyrighted so-called erotic graphic art. These are usually female characters, more often than not a boob and butt showcase. These avatars are particularly annoying because in addition of not having poses that properly represent the emotions of the Emotion Wheel, not all the images are of the same person. The neutral poses rotate to different looking women, which is confusing in the chat room. Another step-sibling is the Nude Avatar. These avatars are also designed without any consideration of what a character should be capable of doing in the comic strip. |
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In the Magazine People images above, the pose showing Brad Pitt was the Point-to-Other pose.
Certainly, that was obvious. The Sleazy Toons demonstrate how many random images of different
women can be added to neutral poses. The Nude Avatar demonstrates how implants can defy gravity
in many poses without social interaction capabilities. Nostrodomos doesn't think the developers
of Comic Chat had in mind adding a visual element to chat room cybersex. Although this may
be some people's kink, these avatars have been seen in PG-rated and even G-rated rooms.
The whole thing about Comic Chat is this: Comic Chat is unsupported, dead, call it what you wish. The program is available at several locations across the Internet, including, ironically enough, Microsoft, and there are several flavors of IRC servers that support it. Getting people to use it, however, is the challenge. Promoting it to a large group of potential users is difficult, which means new users of Comic Chat are scarce. How can we, as a fractured and fragmented Comic Chat community, attain a larger user base? There are many ways. But if a new chatter comes into a Newbies or Newcomer or Lounge or Help room, and is shown a bunch of photographic images with few poses and sleazy pictures, and they don't see the true power and genius and fun of Comic Chat and why it is superior to text-based chat, the likelihood of retaining new users is dismal. That, in essense, is why Magazine People, Sleazy Toons, Nude Avatars suck. According to a study Nostrodomos once read while doing research into Comic Chat, people preferred the photo-unrealistic comic characters over photo-realistic picture characters. The comic characters were preferred 89% of the time. If this was indeed true, why have these Magazine People become so popular? Nostrodomos speculates that:
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