The tease is everywhere. Booth babes. IGN babes. Wii Fit Girl. Bikini models playing Guitar Hero. Jo Garcia. Tera Patrick sexing up Saint's Row. And this freaking site, of course. So I'm not coming to you remonstratively, or remorsefully even. Geeks are no strangers to porn, but I'm wondering if posing a nude girl in the act of sharing your interests — on a giant 20-sided die, humping a Halo helmet — represents an emotional tease that is more powerful than the most explicit picture could ever hope for. Especially since we are, as a class, very easy to separate from our disposable income.

Because that's what this is about, monetizing the tease. (Granted, this post could be said to do the same.) Gamer Fetish, for example, is a cookie-cutter free-porn blog — 10 free pics, link to the for-pay provider, and hope that the subject trips your trigger enough that you'll beg (read: pay $19.95) for more. Even at tiny conversion rates, that kind of subscription charge allows the paysites to throw off enough dough to make sites like Gamer Fetish worth the bother. The site's tone, of course, is to read like your standard geek-interest blog. But the banner ads and the links to paysites are unmistakable in intent.