Hey kids! Thanks to the magic of technology, I can now literally spin in my grave.
Like so many things over the years, Hallmark has once again channeled their creative and marketing forces to ruin our lives and spread apocrypha throughout the world. I am speaking of the new Hallmark Interactive Storybooks and Storybuddies. That’s not the way they spell storybuddies, but by leaving out the space I can also leave out the ™.
As a geek, one of the things that keeps me interested in modern technology is to see the evolution and expansion of cutting edge gadgets come together to provide everyday solutions that proliferate into the realm of being ordinary. This is usually a good thing: the Internet, high speed packet switching, advanced video decoders on a chip, and movie rentals all came together to give me Netflix in a cheap set-top box. Rejoice.
Hallmark combined sound compression, miniaturized flash memory, and advances in speech recognition to give you story books that make animal noises when you read key phrases. Twenty years ago, being able to record and play back sound on a desktop sized computer was the cutting edge of the modern PC. Ten years ago, recognizing spoken words without training was still something that got proof-of-concept demos at IEEE. Five years ago, cramming a gig of data onto a quarter-sized NAND chip was still pretty nifty. Bring them all together and what do we get? Well yes, Apple gave us Siri, but Hallmark also brings their offering to market.
Age has done little to reshape my underlying goals in life; just as it was on the playground in kindergarten I would prefer we keep the cool toys away from the assholes. The field of medicine has a familiar lament: a world of cancer and HIV that has a pill for erectile dysfunction. The field of technology has found its analogue, though it may sound like a field full of douchebags (and it is full of douchebags – most of them have headsets and hang out on Xbox Live) – we live in a world where the PC still relies on BIOS, DRM still lives in our movies, and Hallmark gets access to speech recognition.
A Story Buddy story…
"Do you like games, Bobby? Sure you do and so do I. Let's play a fun game together, OK? You're my bestest friend! Mommy's not home, is she? Let's go to the kitchen. You know the drawer where Mommy keeps all the knives? Sure you do – what a smart friend! Open the drawer and get the biggest knife, okay? I know Mommy told you not to play with the knives, but would I ever tell you to do something wrong? Don't you trust me, Bobby? I know you do. Is Daddy reading in the living room? Daddy spanked you because he said you were bad, didn't he? Mean Daddy. Well, we're going to make him part of our game and everyone will be happy. Don't let Daddy see you. He's facing the TV so tiptoe behind his chair. Be quiet as a mouse – that's part of the fun. We're going to make sure that mean Daddy never spanks you again, aren't we? That's what the knife is for, right?…"
I would like to remind Techie, with all due respect, that even men with cancer and/or HIV would appreciate regaining the ability to have an occasional erection…
Particularly after having their prostates removed.
<facepalm>
As always, Charles, I applaud your ability to gloriously miss the point.
That was on purpose, right?
I was responding to what I thought was a social commentary on "noble" versus "frivolous" applications of modern technology and all its miraculous offshoots. A pill to restore the ability to gain an erection is good fodder for a locker room snigger between young, virile 20-something guys, and may seem a frivolous way to ration medical R&D resources when more dire maladies remain uncured (just as voice recognition in a child's storybook is breathtaking overkill when compared to life-and-death scenarios where accurate hands-free control is needed).
But mainly I was giving a wink-and-a-nudge to the AT brain trust, who, with only one or two exceptions, are depressingly much more youthful than I, and probably far less concerned about the efficacy, price, and availability of those precious blue diamonds (or tan almonds).
I worked in Canadian Tire back in the mid-eighties when Teddy Ruxpin (and Cabbage Patch Kids) came out. It was fun as a teenager watching grownups try to wrestle toys out of each others' hands and almost come to blows. When we were cleaning up at night we used to put AC/DC and Black Sabbath tapes into our own Teddy Ruxpin and rock out. We also came across a See N Say that insisted, "the cow says, 'fuck'". Those were my favourite experiences with that kind of technology.
Please tell my you or one of your friends bought the See 'N Say with the bovine cursing.
Our dumb-ass manager heard us laughing hysterically, ran over and grabbed it off us and sent it back to the manufacturer.
there was something recently about a talking baby doll that got some parents riled up because they thought in its baby talk that it said "crazy bitch". On a related note, my wife has a Powepuff Girl doll that says something that sounds like "Somethings fucking the cow!" We've never been able to figure out what it was supposed to be saying
[youtube NO0cvqT1tAE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO0cvqT1tAE youtube]
Some things are best left in the dustbin of history.
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Will we see Teddy Ruxpin toy V?