Sara and I were in Blue Hill sitting on a picnic table with a five year-old girl, a seven year-old boy and their grandma waiting for the fireworks to start. It had gotten too dark for me to read my book, so I was playing Tetris on my cell phone -- a game the kids found fascinating and had apparently never seen before. The girl asked if she could try. I wasn't quite sure what to say, but grandma interceded on my behalf "no, that's not a toy." RIght, I thought, except it sort of is. "Well," said the boy, "it's a toy for grownups." This seemed very wise and I don't even have my iPhone -- the real toy for grownups -- yet.
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Wise Words
04 Jul 2007 10:12 pm
Comments (17)
good story. that the children had never seen tetris before speaks, i think, to the decline of American civilization.
Wow, what a douche. How old are you? 78?
I let kids play with my Treo all the time. Tetris, solitaire, battleship, chess, pacdude, sketcher, animate, marbles2, minefield, zap.
What the hell can a kid do to your phone?
Can you imagine how much more fun the iPhone would be if you could play Flash games on its browser?
That's funny, I can't imagine anything more juvenile than playing Tetris on a cellphone.
Well, trolling's pretty juvenile...
Great post. Wistful, almost.
I wouldn't let some little kids I don't know play with my cell phone, even if it is a toy.
What!? Why didn't you let her play? Just being selfish?
What struck me was that rather than chat with Sara, people watch, or just share the silence together, MY chose to kill time playing with his cell phone. I guess she must be used to that.
Adult toys
Just watch out that the kids don't turn the phrase into "adult toys". Once, after taking my two little nieces to their toy store in the mall, we went into a game store. This was the sort of store that had expensive little Dungeons and Dragons/Lord of the Rings figurines, as well as the board war games I was interested in, so I had to explain to the nieces that this was a "toystore for adults", in which they were not supposed to touch the merchandise. Of course they later reported to their mother that I had taken them shopping for adult toys.
Little kids pick their noses a lot. Maybe that's what Matthew was afraid of.
I would have told my grandchildren not to talk to strangers and moved to another table.
Blah- everyone here seems willing to subject everyone else to their personal opinion on these matters, so I guess I'm going to express mine to you? Are you kidding? Kids should be wary of strangers when authority figures are not present. But if they're your grandkids and you're actually present you can monitor the situation to insure that MY is not a child molester. Your attitude just leads to more social isolation. Are you trying to teach them to be afraid of anyone outside their tribe?
"Can you imagine how much more fun the iPhone would be if you could play Flash games on its browser?"
Can you imagine how much more the iPhone would suck if you had to endure flash ads (with, at least so far, no way to mod the software to block them)?
I think Jobs definitely called this ome properly.
Not to mention that the implementation of Flash is by morons.
It doesn't use the CPU efficiently, or the GPU at all, so would probably run like sh*t on the iPhone, as opposed to Apple's carefully honed H264 code; and, of course, Flash is notorious for astonishingly bad AV sync. I mean, honestly, have you ever in your life seen a YouTube video where the sound wasn't at least a frame or two off from the video, and often a second or more off.
That comment wasn't funny at all, mpowell.
Yeah, I'd have let the kid play. You want children to grow up ignorant of Tetris. I want my great-great-grand nieces to be playing it on the inside of their skulls with their iBrainplants in 2107.
Sitting in the dark with your girlfriend and you whip out Tetris?
You romantic devil.
Comments closed July 18, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
That's funny, I can't imagine anything more juvenile than playing Tetris on a cellphone. I guess "grownup" is a subjective thing.
Posted by Anonymous | July 4, 2007 11:18 PM