zimbabwe

So is Facebook's. ;-)

30 years ago, my father and his brothers played Atari. I grew up with parents that both understood video games, at least somewhat. There's nothing objective about the way we view video games, or any other form of media.

For instance: I primarily look for media with some sort of emotional power, which is all-but-impossible to find in video games. I can think of perhaps five or six video games that had any emotional impact on me. I can name far more movies that have had a similar impact. My secondary search is for polish, and there movies also have an edge over modern games. The things I look for aren't what you look for, though - they're subjective. I remember having much more fun on an SNES than I did with, say, the Xbox. Your milage varies.

There's a big movement towards emulators among the gamer scene I'm able to observe, because a lot of gamers are realizing that games haven't become fundamentally better in the last decade. Yesterday evening at a friend's, the Wii was forsaken for a Genesis; it's surprising how entertaining those games still are, because we've been conditioned to think you can't have fun without being cutting-edge.

I'm guilty of playing this game along with everybody else, but at some point we'll realize that we don't need all of what we've got, and we'll start being satisfied with it. Hell, I can see myself sticking with the laptop I've got right now for a decade.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to get in on the business. Seems like a high-risk high-reward situation.

I've never once had a problem I couldn't solve by a quick search of Ubuntu's forums/documentation and editing the config files myself.

That's a lot harder than what the average computer user wants. When I used Ubuntu, I was terrified of the config files, and I hated forum searching to solve problems. It seemed like such an inelegant solution.

The perverse Apple fan in me, of course, doesn't even care about this upcoming technology as much as he cares about how awesome the keynote announcement will be.

Perhaps there's no "wrong" way to live life, and the people who die young and the people who die old are both happy with the choices they made.

There is NOTHING worse than a web browser that can't scroll correctly. It makes the Internet feel fucked-up.

Then again, many people who don't want fame become famous anyway. Fame is hard to avoid.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that you can work hard at something you don't like and become a legend. Find what you love, what you don't mind working hard at. Do that. If you want your work to be separate from your life, expect cognitive dissonance.

My advice, from life experience: Try everything. Do what feels natural. Give the relationship a try; if it falls apart, then continue with your work. Not everybody succeeds young. Not every girlfriend turns into a wife.

The conversations I had with my readers led to a lot of self-growth and peace. I grew up a lot writing about the experience. There were also some moments of personal vindication: After writing about a particularly assed argument with her re:music, I got a message from somebody who works on a major music site that vindicated my point of view a little. (I'll also say right now how astounded I am that the people I was reading stories about at fifteen I get to talk to and attend events with at eighteen.)

But why not? Morally it would have been wrong to allow a leak of something that wasn't rightfully theirs when they had such a simple system set up to fix it all. It would have been wrong if they hadn't emailed every person who owned the book. It would have been wrong if they hadn't offered a refund. But they did, and they did. Amazon's been transparent about all of this.

Any penalties (if proper) to be born should have been born by and only by Amazon.

And they bore it, offered a refund, and sent out an apology. What sort of punishment do you expect them to have suffered otherwise? "Amazon must hang its head and look guilty cos it did a bad thing"?

But to go off on that tangent, no one should have the ability or right to delete anything or deliver any form of "punishment" without a judge being involved, and once it got to that point then simply deleting the files wouldn't be nearly enough.

I said on a separate thread of comments that I don't hold a very firm belief in ownership of data, unless there's money involved. In this case, Amazon gave me the data, encoded to work on their hardware, so I hold that they have the right to do whatever they want with the content on it so long as they don't take my money needlessly. They didn't.