Crashing By Design

A few weeks ago we read Luke(who's three)a book about tall buildings and the like. One of the pages was about the Statue of Liberty. He took to that one, and for a few days he would go around with a book and a "torch"(like a remote control, for instance), and say, "I'm the Statue of Liberty!"

About a week after that, we were playing with Play-Doh. For a long time, with Luke, this consisted of him hanging you Play-Doh and asking you to make things--all the Clue weapons and all the Monopoly tokens in turn, say. But he actually seemed interested in making something himself, with perhaps a little bit of help. At Simon's suggestion, he made a knife. Then he held it over his head and said, "I'm the Statue of Knife-ety!"

All The Lumber You Can Carry

I've mostly noticed them on Neopets, but I've seen them on Underdogs, too. You may have seen them too, and perhaps they annoy you as much as they annoy me, but I doubt it. I am, of course, talking about the iPod sharks.

By now I'm used to the various "free iPod" banners, "click here for free whatever-it-is"...but the sharks are particularly nasty. They were written by someone who assumes that everyone throws out their computers after a year and buys a new, state-of-the-art one. They were certainly not written for a Celeron 433.

I used to always open a new tab in Neopets whenever I clicked on a link. No reason to close them, I thought. In retrospect, that's probably why the Flash games always ran so slow, since each Neopets screen has a flash banner on the top, and a smaller one on the side. But with the coming of the sharks, that all changed. No more tabs than necessary. Because those sharks slow everything down to a standstill. The little Neopets Standard Time clock in the sidebar stops running, and forget about any of those games. I reload the pages when they come up, and sometimes that helps, though sometimes it doesn't.

I've thought about complaining, but wonder if it's worth bothering about. Six-year-old computers may not be the norm, I may be just an outlier on the lunatic fringe. But man, do they drive me nuts.