kylewebs

According to the New York Times, AOL has fired everyone on it’s AIM team. Well, besides a couple employees who fall under the “support staff” banner. As Gizmodo says, “support staff only means no more developers. No more developers means no more new software. No more new software means AIM stops growing and changing forever, frozen on the decline—we’ll never know if the new client could have been great.” AIM is dead. It’s over. Say goodbye.

Let me explain….for people of a certain generation, AIM was, in many ways, our first social network. Remember when we popped that disk in and loaded it on our computers? I’d spend hours chatting with friends - friends in the same place as me, friends across the country. It was so goddamned cool.

Oh and cybersex. Remember when that was the big scary thing the kids were doing and it was going to destroy the world? That was before the web was loaded with horny delivery guys delivering more than just pizza. So why do I even bring this up? Going in chat rooms to get people all horny and then suddenly throwing fucked up shit at them, like the fact that you’re a 12-year-old boy, or really, whatever other fucked up shit you could think of that would get a laugh. Anyway, it’s over. And that makes me kind of sad.

Scientists have discovered that not only do men get dumb in the presence of women, but that just the mention of a woman’s name can have the same effect.

Psychologist Johan Karremans and author of the study, Sanne Nauts, distributed the Stroop test (just a basic cognitive test) to 71 men and women and asked them to respond via instant message from a “monitor” that would pop up either a guy or girl’s name. While womens’ cognitive skills weren’t affected either way, the guys, although completely unaffected by a fellow guy’s name, failed in their cognitive skills miserably after they heard a woman’s name.

During a second experiment, all the participants were told that a man or woman would be IMing them. Even though no IMs were sent, the guys still got all flustered, and again failed. The reasoning for it is unclear, but Naults’ explanation is that men just may be more likely “to perceive relatively neutral situations in sexualized terms” than women. Ha! Thanks Mr. Obvious.