Adam Fields (weblog)

Kottke asks:

As members of the human species, we’re used to dealing with the death of people we “know” in amounts in the low hundreds over the course of a lifetime. With higher life expectancies and the increased number of people known to each of us (particularly in the hypernetworked part of the world), how are we going to handle it when several thousand people we know die over the course of our lifetime?

http://www.kottke.org/05/06/death-in-the-celebrity-age

Interesting question. I think, like everything else, the lack of novelty will acclimate us to the experience and we’ll just get used to the fact that lots of people we know will come out of our lives as easily as they entered.

I’ve been reading over the specs and thoughts for the new consoles, and I haven’t seen any discussion of some things I REALLY want out of the next generation of console games:

1. NO LOAD SCREENS ONCE THE GAME STARTS. Just stop that right now.
2. Profiles! Multiple people in my house play games. There’s no reason for single-player games to make it difficult to figure out who saved which game. Also, don’t make me sit through a load screen before making my choice. Different cards for each person aren’t a good answer for this.
3. Varied controllers. The gamepad is okay for many kinds of games, but hands down, one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had was playing Tie Fighter two handed with an F-16 Combatstick and a separate throttle. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to get this kind of experience in my living room. Similarly, you can’t play RTS games with a gamepad. The controls just don’t work. Give me some innovation here.

This thing has been making the rounds:

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/06/idea2005/source/60.htm

It’s a new Rubbermaid product called the “Paint Buddy”. The idea is that when you paint, you leave a little left over in this thing for making touchups.

Didn’t I see this in a Lillian Vernon catalog, like 20 years ago?