Jessica Lares

Nothing’s worse than playing a game that takes forever. Monopoly comes to mind. In our house, it usually takes us three hours to complete a run. I’m not one for Words/Scramble With Friends for this reason. Games shouldn’t be played at your own pace and drawn out per days, weeks, or even months.

But you know what’s even worse? The people who sit there and draw out a picture on Draw Something for 5+ minutes. I’m being honest when I say this… I don’t want to see your art, I just want to guess the word/person/character/etc and move on. This isn’t a place to post your medium which only lasts for a minute, it’s JUST a game. When people start to get serious about making their art look “good”, it is no longer fun because the guesswork is taken out.

And I’m not talking about the people who put a little extra effort into their work, it’s about the people who exaggerate the detail, and add large amounts of unnecessary color. Sure, it’s a great exercise because it lets you improv drawing, but the goal here is to have FUN, nothing more and nothing less!

A cool project where a guy artificially makes his Smart Cover look awesomely vintage with coffee beans.

Maybe I’m biased because I only have one working eye (when I say working, I mean poorly), but I think this is something that is far from reality. The video they posted doesn’t even depict real life situations – How many of us actually walk around our city on foot? How many of us could actually focus on things popping up in front of our eyes and things that we’re walking towards? It’s a cool idea, sure, but nothing more.

I became really uncomfortable with Instagram last year. When people started talking about how companies needed to embrace it, I put my foot down and said NO. It was enough that people were posting thoughtless photos with filter after filter, but now we were going to see the same exact thing coming from brands. I honestly didn’t want to see a photo shoot that had already been photoshopped extensively plastered with another layer of junk, and as much as I love Starbucks, the endless shots of new drinks/food and advertising wasn’t appealing.

And by the time I left, it had became a nightmare with new users asking people to add them and love their photos comment after comment in the Popular section. Too many people were hitting the LOVE key just for any photo in their feed, and it has become a platform which I now find as boring as Twitter.

On a personal grounds, it really hindered my creative thinking too. Just as well a reason why I fell out of love with Camera+ and moved to Snapseed. You would take a beautiful picture, and then it wouldn’t make sense in a square. It was either that, or the filters would make them look awful. Why we have moved from square TVs and monitors to square photography will always puzzle me.

I recently went from an iPhone 4 to a Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket. It wasn’t something I really wanted to do, but the fact that I was now dealing with a device that could potentially cause damage to my hands from glass chipping off after dropping it made me think again. I was also eligible for an early upgrade, so why not? Losing out on the apps doesn’t really matter because I still have the device to toy around with.

I love my new phone. I love that it has a bigger screen and I can see things more clearly on it. I also love that I can have all my time, weather, and shortcuts on the home screen. Maybe the app selection isn’t as good, but it’s nice to have it this way. I could never organize my iPhones very well because there’d be a new app every week that would throw my folders off because I already filled them to the max or you’d have startups like Oink that would fold.

But what is really brilliant about the whole thing is how I quickly adapted to change. Yesterday I was on my iPhone, and of course there’s only the one home button… Which I have already completely forgot about. Trying to go back one page in social application? Try again.