I feel an addiction coming on. In the 90's I bought a computer game called Riven. It got over 100 hours of my life in the first month. I promised my family I'd stop playing it, but then I'd sneak out to the computer at 2am and get right back in it. They finally had to destroy my CD.
Since then I've been reasonably careful about avoiding digital addictions. I gave half a summer to Civilization (still can be seduced by it if i'm under stress and need to feel in control of something) and a total (so far) of about 10 Sunday afternoons to Ancestry.com. I give 30 mins each morning to the NY Times and I'm going to just ignore email for now because that would be too revealing. Thanks to family, friends and colleagues, I'm bombarded by new digital stuff all the time, but up until now, it's been relatively easy to say...uh, no thanks.
Don't ask to explain why yet, but the new browser Kelley sent me, Flock, is showing all signs of being highly addictive. It has an intense UI, very similar to a computer game and at first, it's intimidating. But i know from experience that those cockpit-like UI's wield alot of power and it doesn't take that long to get acclimated. I've spent two hours with it so far (and I'm sitting on the beach....)
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