Wolmania - Friday, August 20, 2021

Good morning, dear reader. As usual, I've got a fun collection of stuff for you to enjoy/agree with. Let's get started with some quirky consumer technology:

Item 1: a link

Playdate hands-on: a Game Boy from a different dimension

Panic is a Portland-based software company with a long history mostly developing for Mac and iOS but lots of fun side projects (like publishing this great game). They announced way back in May 2019 that they were making their first piece of hardware - Playdate. It's a retro handheld game console with a crank on the side for some reason. It looks really fun and whimsical in a way that industrial design rarely is these days, and it seems like they're loading it up with games with a similar sensibility.

They opened up pre-orders a few weeks ago and immediately sold 20k consoles to smart, discerning, good-looking customers like me. They have an interesting pre-order process - instead of limiting pre-orders to a specific number based on their manufacturing capacity, they just let as many people preorder as want to, and they'll fulfill purchases in the order they were received. I'm sure this is a little complicated from a logistics perspective, but if a little software company can do it, I don't see why major online retailers (or Sony) can't manage it. Anyway, the Playdate is already sold out through 2021, but pre-orders now should ship sometime next year.

I'm excited to get my hands on this thing, even though if past is prologue I'll play with it for a day and a half and never touch it again. Still, it should be fun to try out the crank and it'll look great in my Zoom background.

Item 2: a list

Classic 5 piece rock band roles, ranked

1. Drums
2. Bass
3. Rhythm guitar
4. Lead guitar
5. Vocals

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: a photograph

Thanks for reading. See you again next week when I'll unveil my new yellow and purple color scheme.