Cultural cannibalism must be

getting ravenous when the

Peachy's Puffs Girls make a

comeback. These modern cigarette

girls have been strutting their

trays around San Francisco bars

for over a decade. In 1986 they

were merely retro-cute; now,

with swing dancing, stogeys, and

martinis all sweeping the

nation, they're in the red-hot

vanguard of a craze for all

things pre-JFK. The only problem

is trying to sell this crapola

to people born post-Nixon. More

seriously, the politics of our

less spacious age demand such

concessions from Peachy's as

fielding Puffs Boys as well as

Girls, and selling candies and

trinkets in addition to

smokables; so the key points of

'50s chic - male chauvinism and

lung cancer - are lost. If we're

going to have nostalgia,

shouldn't it at least be for

things that actually happened in

our lifetimes? Even the Donner

Party knew enough to eat only

fresh corpses.

Twitch games are the cigarettes

of interactive entertainment:

Because they're all founded on

the same search-and-destroy

premise, the most effective way

a company can differentiate its

products from the competition is

through marketing. Thus, the

"Cyberdiversion Movement,"

SegaSoft's remarkably

choreographed campaign to

promote its new Heat.Net online

gaming network. "Fast free

guiltless killing," the Heat.Net

site announces; it's the core

philosophy of Dr. Bartha, the

mysterious founder of the

supposed Cyberdiversion

Movement. According to Dr.

Bartha (who is rumored to be

played by Jon Katz), the more

you kill on your computer, the

less you'll kill in real life.

With its cultish overtones and

prurient appeal to players' most

violent urges, the campaign,

which will include fake Dr.

Bartha lecture notices posted on

college campuses and other

faux-guerilla marketing efforts,

is a particularly transparent

bid to pique the ire of the

Technology-Is-Evil crowd. But in

case the self-appointed censors

fail to respond accordingly,

SegaSoft is also creating its

own anti-Heat.Net Web site. No

word yet as to the validity of

rumors regarding SegaSoft's plan

to stage a Heat.Net-inspired

murder and subsequent lawsuit

against itself.

Armchair generals bombard us with

palaver about the C++ future of

armed conflict, but for those

who actually fight the wars of

the 1990s, things still look

pretty Basic. Consider the

Hizbollah Web page. What with

dodging artillery shells,

ambushing convoys and launching

suicide missions, it seems Party

of God guerrillas don't have

time for anything but

fundamental - very fundamental -

HTML. Even without a live email

link, the page has received a

warm response, according to the

Saudi newspaper Asharq Al Awsat.

About 80 percent of the

correspondence is supportive;

the remaining fifth is of the

"kill all arab natzi pigs"

variety already available in

abundance at soc.culture.israel,

or even in a xeroxed Kahane Chai

pamphlet. Some hightech

exchange. No doubt the Pentagon

will continue to gear up for the

insanely great future, if only

for the morale boost that smart

bombs give to American

masculinity. But our hunch is

that the universal constant of

war will always be nervous

soldiers accidentally shooting

donkeys.

If there's anything we at Suck

are more fond of than

scantily adorned hypertext, it's

scoring a fat pipe of crack.

Never did we imagine that a

single site - a service, we'd

have to call it - could satisfy

both joneses at once. Hold all

calls, we'll be visiting Big

Rock Candy Mountain.