flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)
And Finally...Last week, I arrived home from a funeral and decided to pop into my home office to make sure everything was prepared for the return to work day ahead. As I sat down to log-in my laptop, still feeling a bit wobbly from the day I had, I was greeted by the Nintendo Talking Flower toy informing me that "wasn't life great."
That was the point where I decided it was time to take its batteries out.
Can the Talking Flower connect to the internet? Will it receive updates?
No, it cannot connect to the internet, and there are no updates available.
I still wouldn't buy this but it could be much worse
Reminds me of that time Microsoft created a smart watch, when that kind of thing was actually kind of new. It was a pretty nice watch, with plenty of features and a totally new tech gadget at the time. A lot of people bought them for xmas that year, the perfect gift for that tech-enthusiast loved one.
Then on December 26th a huge earthquake hit Indonesia (9.3 on the Richter scale) followed by a major tsunami. It killed a lot of people and threw the region into chaos for a while. The world rallied to get aid there, but it was still a horrible time for everyone involved.
Unfortunately one of the features of the smart watch was breaking news being pushed out as alerts. As this was huge news, it was pushed to the smart watches. This left a lot of people waking up during the holidays with terrible news pushed into their lives. People began te reconsider if having such a thing is a good idea.
This, combined with poor battery life, killed of that particular smartwatch.
Humanity as a whole decided we absolutely needed bad news injected as fast and directly as possible at all times and has pursued all technological means to do so. Even going so far as to generate so called 'fake news' or 'alternative facts', when no real bad news is available that very second.
This is why funerals are, psychologically, a bad idea.
Wakes, the whole intent of them, are much better for morale. It’s better to celebrate the life someone had, even if the death wasn’t natural or premature.
The flower got it right, that was kinda what they needed to hear at that moment but they were in the wrong headspace.
...someone actually bought that thing? Wow...Reginal Perrin was probably really on to something.
tech writers seem to have the habit of buying the most useless consumerist dystopian things that corporations throw out, and then make a full article on how the thing didn't work out well and they're stopping to use it. Maybe they just to that to have something to write about, or maybe they really live in a different reality in order to not notice the absurdity upfront.
Seems like a cultural issue to me. The flower isn't wrong. If they attended a celebration of life instead of a funeral, the message would read much differently.
