Electronic Greeting Cards

Bringing triteness and insincerity into the digital age

Like most people who have an e-mail address that is known to other humans, you've probably been inundated with "Electronic Greeting Cards" at this time of year. What is the attraction of these time- and bandwidth-wasting abominations?

• Pre-printed paper cards with clichéd slogans not quite mass-produced enough?
• Enjoy forcing friends, relatives to divert from fast, convenient e-mail to slow, clogged Web?
• Overwhelming desire to participate in cynical marketing ploys of web-based companies?
• Not getting enough junk mail, want to invite spam to self and others by giving e-mail addresses to unscrupulous marketers?
• Get secret kick out of having one's banal holiday platitudes automatically thrown in the trash by recipients' autofiltering programs?
• Searching for other ways to inconvenience and aggravate people than forwarding huge operating-system-specific binary mail attachments, while retaining nauseating kitsch qualities?

Akin to their tree-slaughtering precursors, these electronic nuisances are used in two ways, both of which are inferior to sending a simple personal e-mail or nothing at all. Either no personal message is added, in which case it's difficult to fathom what the sender expects to be going through the recipient's mind as they clear out their mailbox--"How lovely, they gave the gift of spam this year!"--or something distinctive is included, leaving one to wonder whether the perpetrator truly thought that that tacky, poorly rendered image of a smiling cartoon sheep added enough to the message to warrant the above impositions? Perhaps it might, depending on what is making it smile--disregard as appropriate--but in the vast majority of cases, a standard mail would mean much more than a soulless piece of merchandise whose only raison d'être is as a tool for companies to attract attention to their dull websites. Though traditional greeting cards are just as much a consumerist racket, at least the victims need not have the corporate image thrust in their faces. It is yet another indictment of our cattle-like society that this tactic can be successful at all.

However, always on the lookout for ways to improve the quality of online life of the average netizen, we now present you with the means to fight back! Simply respond with the URL of one of our Generic All-Purpose Holiday Electronic Greeting Cards:

Design 1:

          http://fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.samh.net/AXTPGQZOPHQZUPWO.html

Design 2:

          http://fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.samh.net/YSAAFYAFKJWCUOEZ.html

Remember, 'tis better to give than to receive!