Left-handed Complement

MUDGE’s Musings

So, I’m not a Digg virgin any longer. This story, encountered at Salon.com today, hit me right, so I Dugg it. Surprise! I was the first. So, I submitted it. Google Street View seemed cool at the time I first read about it this week, but thanks to Machinist, I’m rearranging my attitude. Before, I was disappointed that Google’s Argus hadn’t yet hit my corner of the planet; now, just as well.

Spotted Lumosity at TechCrunch this week. Tried it out. Failed utterly. Not a videogamer, not at all. I’d like to think that I have a reasonably supple brain, but now I must reevaluate that position too. So I guess I’ll need to take more than a cursory glance at this site, and see if there are ways to measure and increase my mental acuity that don’t require the reaction time and coordination of a gamer. Hope so. I joke (on the square?) that it’s more concrete than sponge up there these days — but I’ve always hoped that it wasn’t really true. Sigh.

But, I go back to the videogame thing. Just never really got the hang of it. 10th percentile hand-eye coordination, reaction time, etc. Guess I’m the reflective type. Wonder if there are videogames for tortoises? Role-playing games — never got them either. I kill a lot of time on my computer; I kill a lot of time watching the tube; I kill much time doing both simultaneously, but what I need to learn (about myself?) is apparently not to be found in the silicon and code of Madden NFL 2008 or Grand Theft Auto. And the entire phenomenon of MMRPG has escaped me. Not just a curmudgeon, but an elderly one, apparently. Sigh.

Recently my son reminded me that one summer he and I were immersed in an “adventure” game called Wishbringer. As I recall from 22 years ago(!), this was a typical for the time cave/maze exercise, and it was perhaps one of the first games we bought for our shiny new IBM PC (640K RAM, 2 floppies what’s a hard drive — aren’t they those washing-machine size monstrosities attached to room-filling computers?). In fact, during our family vacation that summer, I had a rented Compaq “portable” (a small suitcase weighing, in retrospect, at least 40-lbs. — the old style luggage handle allowed them to call it portable. Makes me happy that my laptop I lug home daily only weighs about 7-lbs.) on which I was fine tuning a business plan, but my recollection is that my 11-year-old and I spent much time Wishbringing and I spent all too little time business planning. Typical behavior, then and now. Wishes and planning — looks like a topic for another day. Anyway, we solved the game, basically by saving it after every successful move (not a speedy process on a 5½-inch floppy disk!), and restoring back to that point after any ensuing poorly chosen path. And as Wikipedia has just reminded me, this was one of the more easy games.

So, even in my salad days, I was not much of a computer game player. But, fortunately, there’s more to computers than games.

It’s it for now.

Thanks,
–MUDGE

Tags: Digg, Street View, Lumosity, videogames, MMRPG, Madden NFL 2008, Grand Theft Auto, Wishbringer, IBM PC, Compaq portable

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under Internet Culture, musings, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.