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Your Personal Plugged In Entertainment Appliance

For about 25 years now, Plugged In has done its best to help you walk through the strange, exciting and sometimes perilous world of entertainment. Through seminars, newsletters, magazines, radio programs, TV snippets, websites, mobile apps and online videos, we’ve tried to give your family the tools to make wise entertainment choices.

But there’s always more we can do. Arguably more we should do. So today we’re announcing another service that we hope might very soon render all of the other ones obsolete: We’d like to offer you the services of your very own “Personal Plugged In Entertainment Appliance.”

How does this new service work? It’s simple, really. All you now have to do to get personalized entertainment advice is ask us for your own AI. Just tell us, “Yes, I’d like to order my Personal Virtual Entertainment Appliance today!” And, for a small shipping and handling fee (your AI will tell you exactly how much after it arrives), we’ll ship you your very own personalized robot, loaded with all the collected knowledge and/or opinions of the entire Plugged In staff.

Once your robot arrives and you press the “on” button, it will ask you a series of very simple questions that will help it get to know you and your family—your favorite movies and video games, musical proclivities, content sensitivities, high school transcripts, social security numbers, etc.

You can call it PI if you’d like, and you can think of it as your morally and ethically grounded concierge who will then insist on joining you whenever your family gathers to watch a movie, play a game, listen to music or even turn on Jeopardy! Simply leave a spot open on the couch for it to sit. Because its deep databanks are filled with precise and detailed information of literally thousands of movies, albums, tracks, TV shows and games, it will be able to guide you through any pitfalls you might encounter.

No more having to think for yourself! No more need for endless family conversations about what you’ve just seen! Just let PI do its job, and all your discernment needs will be taken care of for you!

For instance, if PI detects that a curse word will soon burble out of some careless protagonist’s mouth while you’re watching a movie, it will utter a high-pitched censoring sound (patent pending), thus keeping the word from sullying your aural space. The worse the word, the more intense the sound—from a high-pitched “beep” with more routine profanities to a plate-shattering, eardrum-rending “AOOOOOGA!!” should an f-word fly. (Medical note: Your hearing should return within 24 to 48 hours. If you still cannot hear after one week, please seek the assistance of your physician.) When inappropriate sexual content is detected, PI will release an opaque but presumably harmless cloud of gas into your living room, quickly blocking your view of the screen.

And should your entertainment choices prove to be simply too egregious for prudent censorship—should you, for instance, wish to watch The Wolf of Wall Street or The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure—PI will spend the entire movie shaking its head in a very disappointed manner. It can also be programmed to call your mother.

Want to watch a movie in an actual movie theater? No worries! PI is fully portable and independently mobile! It’s so life-like, in fact, that you’ll need to buy it a ticket when you get to the mall Cineplex. (Plugged In is not responsible for this added expenditure.) I’m sure your fellow moviegoers will enjoy this state-of-the-art bit of wise and discerning technology as much as you do!

And there’s more! Thanks to our new partnership with Roberson Robotics, we are able to design your robot to look like any one of … us! Would you like Bob Waliszewski to be the one who informs your entertainment choices? Technology now makes that possible. Have you always wanted our music specialist Adam Holz to critique each song in your music library? Now you can!

So, please, feel free to order your Personal Plugged In Entertainment Appliance today! If you do, we’ll also wish you a very pleasant first day of April.