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With This Technological Marvel, Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again.

By Lord Castleton | Miscellaneous | February 8, 2016 |

By Lord Castleton | Miscellaneous | February 8, 2016 |


The Wheel. Electricity. Sliced Bread. And Now This.

It is the dawn of a brave new world. It is the end of an era of misery and brutality and living in a constant penumbra of hunger and aggravation and having to actually move sometimes.

Now, as of like two days ago, all that has changed. Feel the eternal souls of Archimedes and Michelangelo and Nikola Tesla dancing the lambada as the greatest advancement in history has happened in front of our very eyes.

YOU CAN NOW ORDER PIZZA JUST BY SAYING IT ALOUD FROM YOUR COUCH.

You don’t need a phone. You don’t need to trifle with boring, useless old traditions like standing, or calling or paying or moving.

You just say it. Using your Amazon Echo.

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That’s it. You just shout for pizza and pizza will be there. It’s the closest thing to magic, outside of the corner of Franklin and North Orange in Los Angeles. Someday, your overweight grandchildren will laugh and regale each other with tales of ambulatory inconvenience and suffering, when the world was a far darker place and when ingesting a manhole-sized pancake of curds and dough was something that required human contact and some form of travel.

My god. It’s exhausting just to say it out loud. What a barbaric time we used to live in, like, last Thursday.

You may have read about the Amazon Echo before. I know I talked Dustin into coming over to the dark side, and if he had the time he would thank me every day for his kids hammering the everliving shit out of games like these:

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Is it recording everything in your home at all times? No! Probably. I mean, who knows? It’s not like we’re splitting the atom in my house, anyway. The Amazon Echo is just a tool, and one I know that advanced humans like Dustin and I won’t be able to live without, especially when people realize that you can now also do this with it:

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Oh, hell yes!

Who needs a low paid assistant to book your rides when you can just talk a ride directly to your house?

ME: Alexa! (You program it to awake to either “Amazon” or “Alexa” and not the obvious choice for every single person who owns one, which would be “Computer”. Who doesn’t want to be Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest?)

ALEXA: YES, MASTER (She doesn’t say that, but she should, goddamnit).

ME: Have an Uber bring me a pizza!

ALEXA: As you wish, my master.

Aaaaaaaaand scene. Bam! Is there anything else you need? Does it matter that as of, like, last week you can also use Alexa to stream your Spotify playlists?

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Or that as of Christmas, instead of forcing your kids to watch their clumsy dad with his mealy mouth try to spittle his way through a rendition of A Christmas Carol, you could just ask Alexa to have Tim Curry read it?

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Sorry, friend! I’m going with Wadsworth on this one. While your kids had an amateur Christmas, my kids had a professional Christmas.

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Hold up. Hold up. Are you being paid by Amazon, Lord Castleton? This feels way, way too much of a love letter to not be an ad. Uh, no, but I totally should be. I have no idea how that kind of thing works, but yeah, Amazon should be hooking my shit up for all the pitching I do for their Echo.

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But no. I’m not getting paid. I just love new toys and I love that you can use your Echo to turn off your lights and interface with ITTT and read Kindle books.

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And play Jeopardy.

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And help you mix drinks.

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And construct bite-sized personalized briefings and campaign updates.

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And talk you through workouts.

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Much like Kristy’s fantastic online shopping review the other day (also not compensated, we are doing something so so wrong), every once in a while we use a product or service that is so good or so awful that we want to share. And if, at some point, Amazon wants to take notice of all the positive press they get from us and make it rain gift cards for the whole staff, who am I to complain?

Those of us with Echos are now the elite members of society. We are the people with E-Z Pass transponders breezing through the toll booths of life, while the rest of you fumble for nickels. Lift a phone to your ear for pizza. Lift a screen to your fingers for an Uber. I mean, honestly! Why not also grind your clothes against a washboard while you’re at it? You people are adorable.

But my people - advanced People 2.0 like me and Dustin? You will know us by our superiority and our NPR flash briefings and our kids who know what Carson City is the capital of. You will know us by our horoscopes and our fortune cookies and our custom playlists and smart home integration.

But mostly you will know us for the ring of tomato sauce around our smiling mouths that we wear like a toga praetexta and the custom workout we do every time we walk from the couch to the door to accept the bounty of the technology gods and a cardboard-encased slice of the future.