When I read this post, I thought the whole thing was a just a weird metaphor. I saw the picture at the top, but since there was no explanation in the article of why the pony was in the store, I thought the author had simply photoshopped the pony in. It was only after seeing all these comments taking the claim so seriously that I realized the guy really had seen a pony in the Apple Store.
There is a Horse in the Apple Store
41–50 of 118 posts
Re: There is a Horse in the Apple Store
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up with a ravenous appetite for science fiction too. In particular, I was fascinated by handheld computers. Tricorders, PADDs, Al's Handlink, SELMA, they all drove my imagination nuts. From my early Handspring visor to today's iPhone 4, real life handhelds have been exciting because they slake my childhood thirst for a piece of the future. I'm a little sad, though. The first iPhone pretty much put all scifi ha…
Hmm, I can see that on the technological front, but culturally to me it hasn't surpassed the imagined future. I might've read too much cyberpunk, but when I was a kid I really thought this kind of tech was going to totally change things... we were going to live in cyberspace now. Somehow, using smartphones to look up yelp reviews, traffic directions, and email doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. In some weird wa…
And it all woulda, coulda, shoulda happened already, if only everyone had taken to the net to the same degree that the futurist authors of those books did. The one thing they never could have predicted was that was that a lot of the people who spent all day online would be doing so because they were unpopular, thus driving a correlation between cyber-community and anti-social tendencies that has stigmatized that possible future to this day. The one thing that made me hopeful again was the ads Blizzard ran with famous, popular, pretty, celebrity-type people saying they play WoW—but we'd need a lot more of that before grandma is jacking in.
Re: There is a Horse in the Apple Store
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up with a ravenous appetite for science fiction too. In particular, I was fascinated by handheld computers. Tricorders, PADDs, Al's Handlink, SELMA, they all drove my imagination nuts. From my early Handspring visor to today's iPhone 4, real life handhelds have been exciting because they slake my childhood thirst for a piece of the future. I'm a little sad, though. The first iPhone pretty much put all scifi ha…
Hmm, I can see that on the technological front, but culturally to me it hasn't surpassed the imagined future. I might've read too much cyberpunk, but when I was a kid I really thought this kind of tech was going to totally change things... we were going to live in cyberspace now. Somehow, using smartphones to look up yelp reviews, traffic directions, and email doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. In some weird wa…
Having grown older, I've become more and more convinced that spending a lot of time in cyberspace is a fundamentally bad idea. Using technology to enhance my life in the real world? Fantastic. Using technology to escape into a virtual world? Doesn't sound healthy.
Re: There is a Horse in the Apple Store
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is not the topic of submission here either, but I can't help but feel that picture in the wikipedia of the guide horse is horrible abuse. All those straps and chains, UGH. /shudders
I'm not sure how being fitted with two entirely standard pieces of tack (a breastplate and a bridle) counts as horrible abuse .
Well, now we're talking in terms of relativity. You're saying that it's not 'horrible abuse' because it is standard treatment, but this says nothing of whether or not standard treatment is 'horrible abuse.' For example,
The Jews that weren't killed in the concentration camps "didn't have
it so bad" compared to the ones were. But this says nothing of whether
or not overall treatment of Jews in concentration camps was good or bad.Re: There is a Horse in the Apple Store
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Children are amazing. If you want to refocus your world, talk to one for half an hour. Wait! Not like that, you'll get arrested.
I didn't understand children when I was one, so I doubt I'd understand them now.
Things I already understand are boring to me. Things I don't understand are new and exciting to learn about, or at least consistently surprising.
Re: There is a Horse in the Apple Store
#46I know it’s not the topic of the submission but I would have very much liked to get an explanation. Is it maybe a guide horse? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_horse
Guide for? I hope not blindness since the guy seems to be looking at a computer.
Re: There is a Horse in the Apple Store
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, I can see that on the technological front, but culturally to me it hasn't surpassed the imagined future. I might've read too much cyberpunk, but when I was a kid I really thought this kind of tech was going to totally change things... we were going to live in cyberspace now. Somehow, using smartphones to look up yelp reviews, traffic directions, and email doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. In some weird wa…
Having grown older, I've become more and more convinced that spending a lot of time in cyberspace is a fundamentally bad idea. Using technology to enhance my life in the real world? Fantastic. Using technology to escape into a virtual world? Doesn't sound healthy.
I guess I don't do it much anymore (posting on forums like this notwithstanding), but I'm not sure I've changed my mind overall. There's a certain kind of community that BBSs, along with medium-sized Usenet groups / webforums / mailing lists / etc. gave, that is somewhat different from IRL kinds of communities, and also different from both very small online communities (people you already know) and very large online communities (places like reddit, Slashdot, and HN). Not to promote a replacement of rl with cyberspace, but I think it's an interesting experiment where something is lost by it not persisting.
Re: There is a Horse in the Apple Store
#48I am in love with the title. "There is a horse in the Apple Store". I want it on t-shirts and cereal boxes and in graffiti on highway overpasses.
I am not even sure what it really means. I know it's purely literal, but it's almost poetic.
Re: There is a Horse in the Apple Store
#49I really like the observations his niece makes, specifically “When I play hide and seek with my friends I have to hide, but if I don’t want to be seen by grown-ups I just have to be quiet.”
The interaction between children and adults in our culture is weird nowadays. I was at the zoo with my girlfriend in the reptile section. A little boy was staring into the same tank that we were, his mom was maybe ten feet away. You know how reptiles are, they are always hiding behind some rock or branch or just blending in nefariously. So I ask the boy, "Do you see the snake?" It felt awkward to ignore another human…
It's terrible isn't it.
Because in the past you could have been a reptile enthusiast, and he might have been interested and maybe you could have taught him something.
Now everyone just looks at you weird.
Re: There is a Horse in the Apple Store
#50Maybe I'm just drunk, having just been kicked out at bar time from the place around the corner[1], but this resonated with me: "When does the magic of a situation fade? When do we get acclimated to the exceptional?...We define a pattern, no matter how exceptional, and acclimate ourselves to it?"
I'm surrounded by exceptional situations every day and they just seem mundane. Tonight I congratulated a guy who just signed a record deal with Sub Pop Records. Earlier this week, I landed a development contract for an iOS app that I think will revolutionize its market come early next year. It goes on from there. These sorts of things seem normal to me now. At 15, I would've been, to quote the article, gobsmacked by my involvement—however tangential—in any of them.
Are human beings just so easily adaptable to their circumstances that they start missing the depth of these 'big' events after a while? What must it be like to be Bill Gates or Bono? "Had dinner with Queen Rania of Jordan and the food was middling to fair. My Gulfstream's flight to New York was delayed due to weather issues. What a joke. Don't they know I'm supposed to have coffee with Bill Clinton tomorrow morning to talk about his philanthropic efforts?"
Where's the magic? What does it take to surprise and delight us? Obviously not a pony.
[1] the haagen-dazs ice cream bar I'm chewing on right now doesn't hurt either: having a 24 hour supermarket across the street is the bomb. Get kicked out of the bar, go buy ice cream. Not a bad way to end a Friday night.