Nice Job, Hasbro.

Every once in a while I have to stop snarking on commercials and actually endorse one, because the message is just too good.  It doesn't even bother me that the games being featured indocrinate kids to be Good Little Capitalists and Breeders.

If I was married with kids, this is what my house would look like, except that the kids would be a lot better looking of course.  We'd be playing board games on the nights we weren't reading or just talking.  Nobody would be blathering away on cell phones and nobody would be texting or staring at a glowing screen.  Because as the ad implies, none of that involves living, just existing.

I see adults with kids in parks, at ball games, at the beach etc. all the time redefining "family time" to mean "people related to each other being in the same general location fiddling with and staring at electronic devices."  It's freaking heartbreaking, and it's also so repulsive to see such asshattery being normalized.  Is the "connectivity" addiction so damned powerful that people need to be forever putting their alleged loved ones on the back burner?  Aren't we all getting a little sick of playing second fiddle to a glowing box?  Why is someone who isn't there always a higher priority than someone who is?

Maybe I'm just in a mood because every day I have to be extra careful crossing streets, watching for people who think that self-driving cars are already a reality and its perfectly ok to text while they are in motion.  But I think its more than that- more and more I wonder why people even bother to pretend to be social animals when all they really want is to crawl into an electric cocoon and be left alone.   Or why such people went through the motions of getting married and having children if they weren't going to give spouses and kids any quality time beyond "lets go to the AT&T store and get you hooked up so you can leave me alone until you move out."  What the hell is going on here?