Yahoo! Avatars

Remember paper dolls? There used to be these books on the spinny racks at the five and dime that had a cut-out two dimensional doll inside them. She stood there on the first page, perforated, half-naked, and beautiful, waiting for me to flip through her different historical, multi-cultural outfits and dress her up for any occasion, folding the little white tabs around her waist and over her shoulders. She had clothes that I would never have: saris, ball gowns, police uniforms, lab coats, flapper dresses... unfortunately, I never got to dress her up, because I was too poor. I just got to look at her in her underwear, count my change, then go back to the ice cream parlor/laundry mat where my mom was and get a fifty-cent scoop of rocky road.

Wow, it really sounds like I grew up in the fifties. I swear I'm only twenty-three, it was just a realy small town. Heard of Guerneville? (If you're a gay northern Californian male your answer doesn't count.) Yeah, that's what I thought. Well, anyways it's 2007 now and we have Yahoo! Avatars! OK, they've been around for awhile, but today I looked at mine, wondered if my hair was still like that, decided I didn't like those red earrings anymore, and suddenly became inspired to write a review.

What a weird, weird phenomenon. I think I first created my Yahoo! Avatar about three years ago. Even though I knew it was stupid and pointless, I felt totally compelled to make a little cartoon Thea for everyone on Yahoo! to see. Have you ever answered a Yahoo! question? I have. You know what I noticed? Every freaking person on Yahoo! has a freaking avatar. It seems like everyone tries to make it look actually like themselves, too. How weird are we? We feel this urge to make sure people who interact with us know what we look like. And we need to know what they look like too, dammit. But of course, the world is full of ugly people, so what better way to do it than with a cartoon avatar that only vaguely resembles the person it represents?

When I first made my avatar, there were only like seven outfits, and ten backgrounds, and a hairstyle that sort of looked like what I usually did at the time. Now, there's like a thousand of everything (but still not the right pair of jeans) and the really creepy thing is, my hair now looks almost exactly like what my avatar wears. It's like... I've styled my hair in order to more closely resemble my avatar.

Of course it's a fun advertising tool for Yahoo! too. They have all kinds of branded tee-shirts, backgrounds with Jeeps in them, and new outfits that strongly resemble those coming out in the latest historical movie. I bet they make some decent ad money from that stuff. The best part about the advertising, though, is that it makes Yahoo Avatars free! Otherwise there's no way I'd pay to waste time dressing up a stupid non-dimensional paper doll. I could be spending that money on an ice cream cone - I mean paying off my student loans. Stupid college.

Ah, so, yeah, Yahoo! avatars are like free paper dolls, only you get to make them look like yourself. So they're more fun. And they don't get wrinkly when you've dressed them up too many times.

If you have never seen one, it looks like this:


Well, mine looks like that. The rooster represents my boyfriend, Keithen. He was born in the year of the Rooster. And I like just like chickens, OK?

So you can also zoom in and make sure the face resembles your own as much as possible. For some reason my zoom button hasn't worked for a few months. I don't know if they screwed up their programming or what, but now I can't see close enough to know if the eyes I picked still look the most like mine, or if I should use one of their new pairs. Of course none of them really look like mine, but it's just frustrating having a button there that doesn't work. WTF, Yahoo?

Now, I know Yahoo! isn't the only company to make these creepy online you-cartoons. Some readers, for example, may have seen the absolutely-terrifyingly disturbing Zwinky commercials. I can't use Zwinky because I have a Mac, but I imagine it to be the same idea idea as Yahoo! avatars except with private-information-gathering, government-operated mind-control programming embedded somehow. I don't trust free programs that can somehow afford to run 30-second ads during prime time. It's freaky. It's wrong. At least Yahoo! avatars are honest about how they pay for themselves - with branded outfits and accessories.

So as a way to kill time on the internet while waiting for the Star Wars: Force Unleashed preview to download, I give Yahoo! Avatars a 5.6 out of 10. I mean, I could be reading the BBC science news instead, but sometimes I've just seen one too many mutant baby animals.