I don’t care what Miranda Kerr selling – I want to give her my money. Even if she were trying to Kickstart a new terrorist cell I’d be hard-pressed not to become a backer.

In this case, she’s selling a new line of sneakers for Reebok and it’s a great example of the kind of marketing campaign sought like the Holy Grail (and found just about as often) back when I worked in PR and advertising agencies.

At a high level, they were always looking for ways to hook into sub-conscious emotional or sexual touchstones to ensure mental persistence of their message. In this case, it was an incredible success on me because the first time I saw the ad was for a second out of the corner of my eye – but that was enough for the hook to set and I don’t even buy women’s sneakers.

In the past, marketing relied on broad-stroke assumptions of the audience – all men preferred blonds, all housewives stayed at home, etc. – so the sexual touchstones that beer commercials, for example, tried to latch onto were largely hit-or-miss. (For instance, I prefer redheads so a blond in a beer commercial isn’t going to engage me nearly as strongly.)

What we’re seeing today – nearly perfectly reflected by this campaign by Reebok – is the mass-market embrace of sexual fetish:

While past marketing had to employ a scatter-gun approach to hooking into emotional or sexual touchstones, society’s new-found acceptance (and even embrace) of fetish allows modern messaging to not only be laser-like in focus but also nearly impossible to ignore for those whose fetishes are being targeted.

In fact, the recognition of the psychological power of fetishes seems to have become so prevalent in the modern marketer’s toolbox that it’s being leveraged even for products not typically associated with fetishistic content – even more so than women’s shoes:

Perfume

Purr by Katy Perry

Credit Cards

Visa Black Card

Travel

Priceline

Television

American Horror Story

Energy Drinks

Hype Energy

Alcohol

Skyy Vodka

Movies

The Dark Knight Rises

GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Sports

NHL Canadiens

Computer Games

Sin Episodes

Mass Effect 2

Bayonetta

Tomb Raider

This shift in fetish marketing isn’t always so obvious, but once you recognize the tools used you’ll see how commonplace and pervasive it is – and then only thing left is to figure out what fetish is being targeted.

For example, the respective prominent placement of these two attractive red-headed women is more likely the result of careful calculation than not:

If you fetishize red-heads, the Wendy’s commercial will be automatically flagged when you see it and your likelihood of watching Mad Men no doubt increases because of Christina Hendricks.

To sum things up: if you’re human, you have some fetishistic aspects to your behavior.

You might keep them private, you might wear them on your sleeve, or you might deny to yourself that they even exist – that’s been true since of humans since the dawn of time.

What’s changed, however, is that now acknowledging their existence and power over our behavior is no longer a social taboo.

The discreet silence collectively used to shield our fetishistic triggers has been broken, fetish is now on marketing’s radar as a valuable tool, and the game is afoot.

I can’t say I mind one bit.

I played Diablo when it first came out and was happy with its evolution of the Nethack games of my college days.

Diablo II came out right after I left the hospital and had a couple of months to burn while recuperating at home. It took what was good about the first Diablo, gave it polish, and that’s how I spent that summer.

Diablo III is now out, and while it has the same elements of the first two there are some new ones in the mix that I’m not yet entirely sure how I feel about.

Does Diablo III have the same frenetic mouse-clicking game play as the first two?

Does Diablo III present you with sometimes near endless amounts of monsters to turn into small bits of goo?

Does Diablo III have the same Monty Haul sensibilities with regard to loot and upgrading your weapons and armor?

So, if it sounds like Diablo III continues the Diablo tradition what am I unsure about?

In Diablos I and II, Battle.Net only came into play if you wanted to play online with other people. Fair enough.

In Diablo III, Battle.Net connectivity and authentication is a requirement even for single-player. It’s not only used for initial authentication when you start the game, either: if you lose connectivity to Battle.Net at all while playing you’re kicked from your own game.

It wouldn’t be so bad if connectivity to Battle.Net hasn’t been so hit-or-miss, but the way things are it’s just damned annoying. If Battle.Net drops you better hope that you’ve just passed a checkpoint or you’ll be unhappy.

Note to Blizzard: put checkpoints everywhere.

I understand why Blizzard designed things the way they did and they have every right to not only protect their product but to also curb online cheating. I just wish they could have made it a bit friendlier.

For example:

At the beginning of starting a new Hero, let there be a one-time decision made for that character if it’s single-player or online.  There’s no going back without rolling a new Hero once you’ve made your decision.

If the Hero’s been flagged as single-player, don’t require Battle.Net after logging in.

If the Hero’s been flagged as online, keep Battle.Net on all the time.

That’s simple, easy, and wouldn’t annoy folks who don’t want to play online.

All that said, when Battle.Net is working – and lets you play the game you paid for – Diablo III is a blast.

I consider some of their games – the Baldur’s Gate series, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Dragon Age: Origins – to be high-water marks of the CRPG genre and have played each of them multiple times. In fact, there’s only one game of theirs that I didn’t love but merely liked and that was the original Mass Effect.

I can’t say for certain what it was about Mass Effect that didn’t grab me, but whatever it was the game just didn’t gel for me.

In many ways it felt unfocused, like a proof of concept for a better game. Now I know that that’s exactly what it was and that better game (extraordinarily better, in fact) is Mass Effect 2.

I won’t go at all into any spoilers, but from the opening sequence to just about twenty hours in the game’s story has grabbed my interest in a way the original never could.

At this point I’m convinced that Bioware has an advanced Canadian ass simulating and modeling supercomputer because for as good as the graphics are elsewhere in the game they’re nowhere as lascivious as the obvious loving attention they paid to Miranda’s butt cheeks.

Now I’ll grant that I’m a pretty low-brow fellow in some respects and there’s a part of my mind that cruises the gutter like an Everglades air boat, but the entire game comes to a stop for me when she sachets across the screen in her catsuit.

It’s positively hypnotic – and it’s clear I’m not in the minority opinion here given all the hot cosplay Miranda has spawned:

At this point in the game, Mass Effect 2 is definitely worth picking up – especially if you like Bioware’s style of games.

And Miranda’s ass.

Of the two positive male role models I’ve had in my life, the first is my step-father and the other was Brother Joe.

In many ways, I’ve come to think that my step-father poured the foundations of the person that I’ve eventually become and Brother Joe was the one that helped me imagine what I could build on them.

I first met Brother Joe in the Fall of 1989 when I transferred to Marist College from New York University and declared my intention to pursue a French degree.

We met in his tiny campus apartment and I was distracted by the fact that books were literally everywhere in the cramped, tiny space.

He asked me why I left New York University to come to Marist and he slapped the top of his bald head with both hands when I told him that I transferred to be with my then-girlfriend.

“Love!” he exclaimed, and then proceeded to spend the next hour talking about how love brought out both the best and worst aspects of human nature.

He then asked me why I wanted to study French and slapped the top of his head again when I told him that it was the best way I could think of for why I would need to study in Paris.

“Paris!” he exclaimed, and then proceeded to spend another hour talking about how his own studies took him there and to Bordeaux as his love of Medieval Studies took root as a young Brother.

Late in the night he finally stood up, looked me up and down, then shook my hand.

“Welcome to the French program,” he said.

I stared down at the short, bald man whose eyes were glistening with the thought and intelligence behind them and said thank you.

The night concluded with a statement that I’ve always felt was the distillation of everything about Brother Joe:

The French program was very small at the time – there were only three full-time students in my class – so I got to know Brother Joe very well over the years.

By turns fascinating and infuriating, Brother Joe consistently demanded the best from each of his students and it was only years afterwards that I began to see why: it wasn’t to please him, but rather it was for our own benefit.

To Brother Joe, the true value of a college education wasn’t just to get a job – it was to learn how to think. He taught us how to impose structure on the way our minds organized thought and to use that structure to express ourselves successfully and intelligently.

It’s a lesson that I’ve used every day since, almost twenty years on.

Brother Joe helped me achieve my goal of studying in Paris, making it his personal mission to get both myself and then-girlfriend over to the Sorbonne to study French Literature at the feet of those he considered the masters.

I think of my time in Paris almost every day and I have Brother Joe to thank for what I consider some of the best memories of my life.

In the time that we were in Paris, Brother Joe retired from teaching and the French program passed to others.

As Brother Joe’s pursuit of “ma retraite” loomed large, personal issues overwhelmed me and I ended up turning my back on my time at Marist and the people I knew there once I had graduated.

Life took me in directions I had not planned, but as the years passed I found myself often thinking of Brother Joe and the Yoda-like wisdom he tried to impress upon his students. For many years, Brother Joe was the only part of my time at Marist that I could think of without resurrecting ghosts that I hadn’t yet developed the strength to face.

Once in a while I’d Google Brother Joe to see what he was up to:  an occasional interview about Marist Brothers history and his trip to China around the time I got married – but then he disappeared.

A few years ago, after a personal turning point I found myself reaching out to those I’ve harmed and searched high and low for Brother Joe but not even Google could find him. His was the only name on my list of people that I wanted to make amends to that I could not find and felt great regret that I could not reach out to him.

About a month ago, I started to find myself thinking about Paris more often than usual.

My desire to revisit Paris builds every couple of years and, when it does, my wife and I invariably find ourselves on a plane for another visit. I mentioned to my wife that I was starting to get itchy to go back, she asked what brought it on this time, and I said I didn’t know.

I thought about it for a couple of weeks as I found myself returning over and over to Paris in my mind when, one day on the train, the thought “Brother Joe!” burst into my mind.

Deep in my heart I knew what I would find as I pulled out my Blackberry and Googled Brother Joe and I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks as his obituary was the first search result.

Right there, on the train, I knew that I had to go visit him to say goodbye no matter where he was buried and decided that I would go the very next Saturday. I was expecting to have to drive up to his hometown of Lawrence, MA and was surprised to find he was buried on the Marist Brothers Retreat in Esopus – more or less right across the river from Marist.

I got home, told my wife that I was taking Saturday for myself to say goodbye to Brother Joe, and she agreed without question as she had heard countless stories about him over the years.

Saturday was a beautiful day:  sunny but neither too hot nor too cold.  As I drove up to Esopus I hoped I wouldn’t have trouble finding where he was buried because the maps seemed to show the retreat grounds were rather large. I was also worried that I wouldn’t be allowed in, but figured that all I’d need to say was “Brother Joe” and I’d be given carte blanche.

The entrance was a large gate that reminded me of the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, and as I slowly drove through it and into the grounds I was struck by how pretty it was and how it reminded me greatly of an English garden in its layout.

The single-lane road was winding as it made its indirect way through the grounds and I started to worry about not being able to find Brother Joe because there were neither any signs indicating where the graveyard was nor was there a single soul that I could see to be able to ask. I drove on.

The road eventually looped behind a large building and off to the side was a small lake with a fountain in the middle. There was no traffic so I slowed down to enjoy the view and across the water and into the pine trees beyond I could make out low stone markers and saw the graveyard.

I drove to it, parked my car under the stand of pines, and as I started walking toward the graveyard I felt my chest seize when I first saw the fresh grave off to the left-hand one side.

Even though I intellectually knew that Brother Joe was already dead it wasn’t until I actually saw the grave that the undeniable emotional knowledge of his passing finally hit me. At first I thought I was having an asthma attack, but then realized all I was doing was gasping to try to stop myself from crying.

I looked around and hoped that no one was watching me as I walked to the grave and looked down at the little white sign with Brother Joe’s name on it on a peg at the head of the grave.

The dirt was compacted from the rains the week before and had started to crack as it dried out.  Scattered around on top of the grave were some browning palm fronds and a couple blackened roses. For some reason, I was expecting more.

I stood there and stared down and found myself at a complete loss for words. I couldn’t remember a single thing I wanted to say to him even though I thought of a million things on the drive there.

I couldn’t decide if I was supposed to be quiet or just talk to myself and hoped he could hear me. I started to feel self-conscious and looked around hoping no one was watching me.

“Fuck it,” I finally said to myself and started to talk.

Once I started talking the words began to flow and I ended up staying there for over an hour, sitting, pacing, or circling the grave, as I explained what my childhood was like and why it made me the way I was when he knew me, how I’ve worked hard to overcome it, and all the things that happened in my life since we last spoke.

Most importantly, I thanked him for being a great friend and teacher.

I felt great regret that I hadn’t the strength to tell him these things before, but I figured that it was better late than never.

I said my goodbye and walked around the small graveyard to burn off nervous energy and just as I was starting to feel like I was abandoning my old friend alone in the woods I started to read the names on the headstones.

As I walked up and down the rows of graves the names began jumping out at me. One after another, the history of Marist College was underfoot as I realized that nearly every single building on campus were namesakes of those in that small, quiet spot.

I knew that Brother Joe was in the best possible place he could ever be and left him with a happy heart.

My wife and I are waiting to adopt a child, and as I drove home thinking of my old friend I knew deep in my heart that my child would grow up hearing stories of Brother Joe and that one of the lessons they will learn from me is “I’ll faut s’agir.”

I can’t think of a better memorial to Brother Joe than that.

I finished Bayonetta over the weekend and I have to admit I was more motivated to see Bayonetta’s hyper-sexuality in action than I was in playing (or finishing) the game. For her part, she’ll never get boring.

Once the game was over – and the five-minute Bayonetta pole-dancing routine that ran during the credits was over – the unhappiness that I felt growing over the last half of the game really began to crystallize in my mind.

In short, there were long sections of the game that just weren’t fun and that’s how I’ve felt with just about any game that I’ve played originating from Japan.

I’m not saying that Japanese game designers are bad, however I do believe that their goals are different because they seem to design games for their own enjoyment and not necessarily that of the customer.

With Japanese games I’ve often felt that the designers were more focused on achieving their design goals and whether or not the player found the game fun was secondary.

Here’s a quick list of the game’s cons:

You simply can’t play through the game and enjoy those elements without having a much different definition of fun than I.

Here’s a quick list of the game’s pros:

Also, on the plus side, Bayonetta has spawned a laudable amount of sexy cosplay:

To sum things up on Bayonetta:

In spite of all this, my first opinion about Bayonetta remains unchanged: she is a seriously hot character design.

Sorry, Ben Franklin, but you only talked about beer because Costas hadn’t invented the Club Sandwich yet.

I was born and spent the first nine years of my life living in a part of Pennsylvania that could charitably be called poor and even by that place’s standards we had it rough.

It was just Mom and I and it was a struggle for her to keep us both going. Things you’d never think of were luxuries then and even simple things like cinnamon-sugar toast was a splurge.

In the midst of all that there was something that would allow me to escape if I could manage to scrape together $0.25: the Costas Club Sandwich.

Made by a local candy company the next town over from where Mom and I lived, the Club Sandwich is a simple thing: two peanut butter and saltine sandwiches side by side and covered in milk chocolate to make a short, thick candy bar.

It was chocolate, delicious, and cost a quarter – more than a bit cheaper than things like a Hershey or Reggie bar at the time.

When I was seven Mom moved to Florida, I went to live with her two years later, and the Club Sandwich became the only happy memory of an unhappy time I tried hard to forget.

Decades later, one day I found myself in a conversation about the best things we ever ate and my mind drifted to the Club Sandwich.

Afterwards, I spent some time searching the web and – to my huge surprise – not only was Costas still alive and well but the Club Sandwich was, too.

I stared a long time at their antiquated online order page, wondering if I should let the Club Sandwich live forever in my past as the sole comfort of a hungry and lonely child or if I should order it as an adult and risk it not being nearly as good as I remembered.

For a week I went back to that page, stared at it blankly, and felt paralyzed.

Because I’ve overcome the lingering demons of my childhood in therapy doesn’t mean I wanted to revisit them, but I eventually felt that it was necessary to order the Club Sandwiches to reclaim even that tiny shred of my life. When they finally arrived, the box lay unopened on our dining room table as the same paralysis took hold.

I eventually gathered my courage, opened the box, and the wrapping was exactly as I remembered.

It felt like I was having an asthma attack as I could feel my chest constrict but after a moment I realized it was just a momentary panic attack – definitely not the reaction I had hoped for.

I started breathing normally and I seized my chance – before the panic could return I ripped open the yellow and clear plastic wrapped, bit down hard, and saltine crumbs flew everywhere.

For a moment, I was that lonely and hungry child again, but then realized that I was an adult eating the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.

The first Club Sandwich was gone within seconds and the second didn’t last longer. Deep inside of me was that young child now fully aware that he could buy as many Club Sandwiches as he could ever want and, for the first time perhaps ever, enjoyed pure happiness.

I had just wrapped up eating the third Club Sandwich when I began to wonder if it was just sentimentality that was making me enjoy them so much. As I was mulling this over, my wife walked in as I reached for a fourth and began unwrapping it.

She looked at me, the empty wrappers and the mess of crumbs on the table around me and made oinking piggy noises.

“Whatcha eating?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said, closed the box, and pulled it over to me.

She walked over to the table, opened the box, and picked up a Club Sandwich to read it.

“It’s a Club Sandwich,” I said through a cloud of crumbs. “Peanut butter, crackers, chocolate. I ate them as a kid. Cost a quarter.”

She turned up her nose and I was happy. More for me.

She stopped walking away, though, and came back and took it from me. She sniffed it and took a nibble.

I saw a look in her eyes that caused my chest to seize again as she started eating my Club Sandwich and wouldn’t give it back.

I had my answer about whether they really were as good as I remembered but at the unfortunate cost of now having to share.

Damnit.

Proust had his madelenes and I have my Club Sandwiches. Having tried both of them, I’m the better off of the two.

I‘ve been making my way through Bayonetta for the past week and it’s been a blast and really sexy in places – but also really frustrating due to game-play design decisions that make me shake my head.

On the topic of design, Bayonetta is a genuinely arousing character.  The catsuit, glasses, lollipops, and English accent are an unbeatable combination and there’s so much happening on-screen at any given minute and I would be hard-pressed to have a single bad thing to say about the game.

Hard-pressed isn’t the same thing as unable, unfortunately.

Bayonetta is a great example of what I believe is one of the cornerstones of Japanese game design:  the punishment of failure.

Where American games typically focus on rewarding skilled players, Japanese games actively punish bad ones or those struggling with steep learning curves.

Whether it’s a cultural difference between the US and Japan or the manifestation of the tolerance (or even enjoyment) seen in Asian gamers for time-consuming, repetitive tasks, having to play the same parts of a game over and over and over doesn’t make for an enjoyable time – at least to this American.

To illustrate my point, I present the Jeanne boss fight – an almost literal brick wall:

A challenge I can deal with but Jeanne is just an exercise in frustration.

The game is fun despite the frustrations, but there have been times that I was left wondering if I was playing the game because I enjoyed it or if I wanted to see just how far they could push Bayonetta‘s hyper-sexuality.

In the end, it’s probably irrelevant because I’m playing the game regardless.

So, why is this site using the Canvas theme from WooThemes? It’s two things combined, really:

Now that I’m at the end of my first week playing with Canvas and the WooFramework all I can say is “wow.”

It’s not so much that Canvas can do things that Thesis can’t do – it’s just that you can do them so much more easily.

Things that would normally be done in Thesis by adding new code to the custom files are built into the Canvas options and I can remove about five or six plug-ins because of the included bells and whistles. If you know anything about WordPress, reducing the amount of plug-ins you use is always a good thing.

In addition to that, Thesis does not seem to play well with things like Edit Flow and just about any kind of nice WordPress e-commerce solution.

On my wife’s website, for instance, Thesis’s inability to gracefully support e-commerce or shopping cart plug-ins forces me to pass customers over to Google Checkout to shop – not exactly the elegant solution I was looking for. Going further, as my wife’s need for integrated e-commerce grows Thesis risks becoming less and less relevant for her business’s future plans unless something changes drastically.

Finally, the price was right. The WooThemes licensing structure is far more attractive than that of DIYThemes and between that and the rest I’m sold.

So far, that is.

I’m going to spend the next couple weeks going nuts and the layout of the site, pages, and posts are subject to change with no warning as I play around.

Normally I’m not a fan of games that rely heavily on Japanese-style storytelling for the simple fact that they’re almost always incomprehensible and told with a sense of gravitas normally reserved for things like funerals or natural disasters .

Bayonetta, however, is joyously nonsensical and doesn’t take itself seriously for even a millisecond.

At an hour in there are two things that have struck me:

• Bayonetta is seriously hot. For crying out loud, she sucks on lollipops to gain health and power-ups.
• There is zero point to trying to make sense of the story as it’s essentially like a bad acid trip in its narrative structure.

Lisa watched me play for about a half hour and I have to admit some of the blatant titillation was a bit squirm-worthy knowing she was watching me enjoy them. (In retrospect, it’s not a bad thing to remind her just what kind of man I am and that she knew what she was getting into when she married me.)

The game design in Bayonetta is pure Japanese button-mashing, with hundreds of combos and some that are ridiculously complex. The game is also heavily reliant on cut scenes because it’s from Japan but – on the upside – they rapidly devolve into pure T&A with a lot of lollipop sucking so I’m good.

All that said, the game is gorgeous and I greatly enjoyed Bayonetta once I realized I wasn’t supposed to understand what the hell’s going on.

A bit longer: I decided to merge all the different blogs I write into one.

Longer still: I’ve always used this website as my test bed for various things I’d like to try, so as well as the blog consolidation I’ve decided to wipe the slate clean and rebuild this site from the ground up on WordPress Multisite. Later this year there will be call to expand my wife’s commercial website and Multisite seems to be the best way for me to go and I want to familiarize myself with it.

In addition to the switch to WordPress Multisite I’ll also be playing around with new WordPress themes and theme frameworks. I’ve been a happy and loyal user of Thesis for years, but it’s becoming more and more difficult for me to do what I need to do in it without serious programming.

There’s other technical stuff I’ve got planned but I’ll write about those things later.

On the content front, my plan is to migrate the best content from all the different blogs to Signs of Sanity – but there’s a lot to go through so it’ll take some time.

(Update:  Getting WordPress Multisite to successfully work on GoDaddy is more trouble than it was worth.  I’ll revisit the idea if/when the time comes to move to a different hosting company.)