Paperdove - Partly about beer. All about me.

A friend came over this weekend for a short time. We sat around the firepit (with no fire) and had a beer. He said, "Hey, I've been over to Paperdove. You haven't updated that shit in a while. What about the trash you wrote about the 360?"

Which is true. I haven't taken the time to update Paperdove. Aliesha and I are trying to organize our lives, to tame them a bit, or at least beat them into submission. Part of that is time management. I suspect I should set aside an hour or two a week to spew more garbage out onto the Intarwebs. I have to do my part to kill the signal in the noise, no?

In any case, for the sake of Zubin, I should say, "The XBox interface still sucks." But take heart, XBox fanboyz-n-girlz: Sony released a PS3 update recently, simply to add some suckage to the XMB. Now you have a link to the Playstation Store on every menu item! Well, not every menu item. But on many of them. Instead of containing the evil to one small menu item, the store now sprawls over all the media menu items, as well, with insidious suckers attached to every little bit of the menu.

Whereas Microsoft reduced by a the ubiquity of advertising on their interface (meaning only that you can still see advertisements from every menu item, but really they're another menu item in the channel), Sony has done everything they can to add adspace. For instance, instead of the easily-disabled "information channel" they introduced a year or so ago, they have added a scrolling adspace to the clock. There's no way to disable this chupacabra, either. Like the goatsucker, this thing gets its teeth into you and won't let go 'til you're drained of blood. Or the will to live, at least.

They also added sparklies t to the animated wave background. Why? It makes it look fuckin' ugly. Fortunately, they still have a "classic" view, which is the old non-sparkly version. Also, they have added hooks for other themes to include animated backgrounds; but, they charge cash money for the animated themes. What kind of stupidity is that?

I find I'm playing games less and less. I played Uncharted: Drake's Fortune for a bit on Saturday. And maybe I can time-manage a weekly slot for gaming. But lately, we use the PS3 to watch DVDs and BluRays, and the 360 to access Netflix's on-demand shows. Otherwise, the consoles hardly come on.

Zubin said a couple of years ago that this was his last generation of consoles. I thought he was nuts; but the older I get, the less time and inclination I have for games. So maybe I don't have a lot of base from which to criticize the sucky interfaces on both the game systems. Maybe this is the modern version of, "You kids get off my lawn!"

But really. Get off my lawn.