With so many of them I suppose there’s bound to be more than one that does the same thing, leaving us to decide which does it best. Case in point: I’m torn between the official $2.99 Wikipedia browser, a field of free alternatives and just using Safari. Maybe an offline dump is the way to go for that authentic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy experience.
Then there are some doing only one thing that leaves us wondering why do it at all, best illustrated by World 9, whose developer, to his or her credit, demonstrated the ambition to expand a simple noise-maker into “a network-based mapping project, that shows where everyone is jumping around the globe. Doesn’t it make you feel happy to imagine that somebody on the opposite side of the earth is jumping around the street just like you?” Also from the description: ‘Some say life is like a game. The difference is that life is going on and on. There is no such thing as “the final stage” in life.’ May Jovial Race never die.
And didn’t I come up with the idea behind Urbanspoon like ten years ago? (Though in my last サラリーマン job I suggested we put all our usual choices on a spinning prize wheel, like Elvis Costello once joked he would do with this songs on tour.) Except, of course, I didn’t conceive of geo-tagging, and still think it’s better implemented as an account-based service that stores your selections so that you’re not choosing from Carl’s Jr. every other day. Unless you want to.
In any case, I’ve always held to the belief that the well never goes dry—at least until the blood-brain barrier does—so here goes:
• Cheat Sheet™, which, no, isn’t meant for classroom use, but rather to help in awkward social situations as an under-table teleprompter, serving up conversation starters and, should the going get rough, subject-changers. Would be nice, too, if you could work on your lines in advance and bring them up when appropriate, so as to avoid any lost “jerk store” moments.
• Washing Dishes™ to make use of that touted accelerometer and take you back to the good ol’ days of Lucy-on-the-assembly line games like Gumball and Tapper; the plates pile up and you pick them up one at a time, twist & turn it under a fixed faucet, rubbing away at the more stubborn stains. Work faster, yeah, but smarter, too, because you can see what’s up next.
• Organization Chart™, admittedly a quickly cobbled attempt to incorporate the camera as well (3G’s performance I’m not convinced of yet to rely on for an online app), with which you can arrange your pictures into charts or with labels such as “wife of” or “boss of” so as to remind you who the fuck they are when you run into them.
…And these, from just looking around my desk and taking my empty 弁当 boxes to the kitchen. What am I doing here.
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