Its an achievement in itself that she already had one, used it, and liked it. The thing about technology these days is that it’s accessible and desperate to please, iPod being the pinnacle of such servitude. So, after much persuading, she decided to get an iPod touch instead of an iPod classic.

After a few lessons, she loves it. The first day I told her everything that it did, and she said very little. The next day, she pretty much asked me to tell her all those things again, but she was catching on this time. The second time I explained Pandora, she understood and became increasingly interested. “This is like the time you took pictures of my shoes.” she says.

I should explain: my mother’s qualifying act of life getting better though the use of technology is grounded upon one birthday when, as a present, I took pictures of every pair of shoes she had, printed those off and tapped them to the front of shoeboxes, so she could see all the shoes she had without opening the boxes. To her, this use of digital photography was the first step towards worthwhile modern technology. She is a avid watcher of classic TV shows, she still buys VHS tapes but now she also has an iPod touch and is excited about Pandora.

I showed her Tunein radio and Netflix, that she can check her email and view store ads, that she can manage her bank account and take pictures, that the pictures she takes can be instantly uploaded and printed. And now, she is finally beginning to see what all the fuss is about.

All those games I haven’t been playing… when I walk by them, when my mind wanders, I hear them calling. I suppose like any addiction, you can kick it out of sheer will for a while but your motivations wanes and you can’t help your thoughts drifting back…

I still have the feeling that game playing will not breed productivity, but I also have the feeling that the first feeling is not so important. I spied a good number of games on my shelf that I never really got the chance to play. I always wanted to play back through some game series, such as Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy. I’ve written about those very goals on this blog more than once. Work and life always got in the way. I finally have the time to indulge in such things but I feel guilty for indulging. Certainly there is something more worthwhile I could be doing with my time. And all the same, I can hear them calling.

You know, I kind of like it. The organization is sort of mediocre, even though the groupings are nice. I like that excite bike is free, but excite bike is also rather boring. Why this couldn’t have been available on day one, I’m not sure. Why they didn’t wait until this summer to release the entire thing… I’m not sure about that either. But! The shop is up, and it’s decent enough. I have made a wish list as well, which is a helpful way of keeping up with worthwhile titles. I just wish they had a few more app like things, like lists and notebooks, money trackers, etc, since the system lends itself to it. You know, maybe I don’t really care for it. I guess I’m still undecided.

I am not enthused by 3D. I think my disinterest stems from the type of 3D found in theaters. Often using polarization, these techniques first boomed in the 1950s, and obviously haven’t maintained their popularity. My issue is that it never looks truly real. Instead, it looks like a paper pop up book of moving images. The benefit to this, however, is wide angle viewing, provided that everyone has glasses.

Now that 3D is growing in persistence as a sign of our evolved technological achievements, it is getting harder to ignore. There are many 3d televisions for private homes and 3D games, moves, and sporting events to enjoy. For the most part, this is still by polarization. And it is still a pricey endeavor.

Despite my reluctance for 3D, I did by a 3DS. Instead of polarization, it employs stereoscopic 3D. Unlike movie 3D, which attempts to pop out at you, stereoscopic 3D delivers depth of an image to create 3D. Before you see it, you would think that the basic nature of a camera and pictures allow you to understand the dimensions therein, so while you watch something or look at something you can tell the depth of that on screen. The same is true for games, where they take place in a 3D world, and you may not feel that depth will be that different from how you interpret images already.

You would be wrong.

Movie 3D has something definitively unbelievable about it. In reality, when you want to look at any one thing, your eyes bring it to focus, near or far. A standard motion picture dictates what is and is not in focus, which is sensible enough. Designating focus is part of how the movie is directed, and tells you want you should be looking at and when. When this transfers into 3D, it creates a slight problem that I cannot help but notice. You know have things at exaggerated depth, trying to pop out at you, but when the object of focus, such as a person, is moving through the screen, the focus does not accurately adjust itself, so a defined object is moving about in a sea of blurriness, because it’s just a created effect anyways.

Stereoscopic is also a created effect, but since it is projecting to perfectly clear images, you can shift your focus to anything in the screen and it is in focus, which is more logical for 3D than the focus system of 2D. Today I watched the Green Lantern trailer on my 3DS, for the first time seeing a cinema quality film in auto-stereoscopic 3D. It was amazing, even on that small screen. My brain didn’t flag it as suspicious because the effect was more natural. I hope that if 3D has moved truly past revival and is here to stay, technology will allow stereoscopic to take over other methods.

To say that the Wii U is not at all a new system and simply a repackaging of the Wii is easily in troll territory, but I think it is a valid argument. The power does not surpass other current systems, HD is something they could have done from the get-go and Nintendo has used handhelds as second screens in the past (Zelda and Crystal Chronicles on Gamecube). Now, they are just giving you the handheld with the system. They are selling the Wii for a mere $150, and we know that Nintendo always makes a profit. Wiis are so cheap, and the market so saturated with them, they might as well introduce a new system that includes the obvious omissions of their last. By staggering their release, they are competing with essentially no one. If the Wii U can last past the hypothetical Playstation 4 and Xbox 720, it will not have to compete as it did last time. It may not be the best strategy in the minds of gamers, but it is certainly profitable. Such a similar system with improvements to match years old technology may seem like a hard sell, but we have to remember who we are dealing with. Can we really doubt that Nintendo will have a hard time selling a dual screened gaming system?

It was a liberating experience, but also a little frightening. Just the feeling of missing out, when I absolutely could have watched everything as it happened for the first time since I cared about E3 was sort of shocking. But, I was doing a very worthwhile gaming free thing, and I don’t regret that. I do have a passion for it, and I have pretty much every worthwhile current gaming thing. I will probably go the Gamefly route from now on, but I am slowing slipping back into the gaming world.

My departure was aided by the new Gawker sites… they work better now, but they were rather broken. It seemed irresponsible to be for them to have a mediocre site that they were pushing over one that, despite its shortcomings, worked just fine. I stuck on past more deserters, but when I could not get any RSS reader to stream it to my phone, well, it was the last straw for me. I left it on my phone screen, with it’s sad “no recent updates” message for a couple months.

I do think that gaming is in a lull in general. It’s been years since a major console release, and we are just coasting along. The games are all packed into fall, and then spring is inevitably boring, and in summer they just tell you what you can’t have till the holidays. If there is anytime to lose interest in gaming, this is it. E3 is a well placed and now well publicized event that helps renew an interest and faith in a cyclical, money hungry industry. I think that the challenge of Apple and Android have allowed for some needed new competitors. The shenanigans that have earned Nintendo a lot of money have also proven to stretch the idea of who a gamer is and what a gamer plays. Nintendo’s success has disallowed other companies from ignoring that oil field. And Apple, surprisingly, is beginning to challenge Nintendo’s long rein in the realm of handheld gaming. . All of this is making the news from E3 (that I am now catching up on) a little more interesting.

In 1994, it was hard to say what the “inter-net” was. I don’t think I really remember using the internet until 1996 or so. It was then that the internet was introduced to me as “what you write papers with at the last minute.” In ’96 there were about 2 articles on most truly important things. Like wars and such. But in 1994? There probably wasn’t much there. This conversation still happens today, albeit less frequently. Nice to see newspeople still a little unsure.

Violence at NBC? It sounds misleading.
And some people even had wi-fi then! How nice.

As seen on Gizmodo.

I suppose a small introduction is in order.

This is my blog. It’s mostly about gaming. There are some old posts before this one, no need to worry about them. They were written as long as two years ago. I just wanted something to post to make sure everything was working right. They may be gone soon anyways.

I operate under this name on many sites and places. If you’ve seen 100tacks somewhere, that’s probably me. However, there is a blog with the domain 100tacks.com. That is definitely NOT me. I imagine that person is more than a little annoyed that I have taken the name “100tacks” on mostly everything.

And that’s all. Thanks for visiting.