Last year, Capcom announced that Mega Man 11 would be released sometime this year in celebration of the franchise’s 30th anniversary. Today, the company announced the date for that release: October 2nd. It will be available on PlayStation 4, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Windows PC.
The plot follows the series villain, Dr. Wily, who decides to invest in a new idea he studied at university at the same time that Dr. Light, Mega Man’s creator, adds these upgrades to Mega Man. This installment will retain the gameplay of the series, while also adding in new challenges and powers to keep things interesting. Speed Gear will allow players to slow time down, while Power Gear will give Mega Man the ability to charge the Mega Buster to be even more powerful. Double Gear will allow players to use both these abilities at once when health is critically low.
This isn’t all that Mega Man fans have to look forward to this year. Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 + 2released this month on the Nintendo Switch; that means that all 10 of the original games are available on that platform. Additionally the Mega Man X Legacy Collection will arrive on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC on July 24th.
Israel’s Self-Flying ‘Cormorant’ Whisks Soldiers to Safety
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Five men in white overalls lifted the stretcher off the ground, one of them taking care to lay a clear plastic IV bag that’s connected to the patient onto his stomach. They marched him toward what looks like a black inflatable dinghy on small wheels, crossed with a fly. The stretcher was loaded in through a hatch on the side, and then the men stood back.
The patient was actually a medical training mannequin, but that didn’t stop him (it, rather) from taking part in the first “mission representative” demonstration of a new aircraft. That bean-shaped thing is called the Cormorant, and it was built by Israel-based Tactical Robotics to make battlefield evacuations—which today rely on helicopters—quicker and safer, thanks to a new design and the fact that there’s no human pilot involved.
The rescue of the mannequin was actually the second half of the demonstration the Cormorant put on at a remote airfield in northern Israel earlier this month. First, it took off with a full cargo of military supplies, slightly wobbly at first. It leveled out as it flew a large loop over a green field, then descended vertically, alighting on the grass. The overall-clad squad offloaded the cargo and put the patient in its place, then watched it take off again.
Also watching were representatives from the Israel Defense Forces, the sort of customer Tactical Robotics hopes to sell on the Cormorant’s autonomous capabilities. For the company, this demo was a major step up from January 2016, when the aircraft—then called the AirMule— first took off.
The Cormorant looks ungainly (especially compared with the water bird for which it’s now named), lunging straight up into the air via a pair of six-foot fan rotors hidden underneath its body, one in front, one in back. The only clues it can fly horizontally are two smaller fans, mounted vertically at its rear. Power comes from a single turboshaft engine, the kind commonly used in conventional helicopters. Using two smaller and encased rotors, instead of one large one on top, reduces the physical footprint of the Cormorant, making it better suited for flying in mountainous, wooded, or urban environments. It can also operate in higher winds than a human helicopter pilot would be OK with, according to the company.
Ducted fan designs are notorious for stability problems, particularly in gusts and crosswinds. To counteract that imbalance, Tactical Robotics developed what it calls a vane control system, at the inlet and outlet to each fan. A control system moves these vanes independently to generate sideways forces and counteract gusts.
At a demo earlier this month, the Cormorant carried cargo and a medical training mannequin, proving its potential usefulness on the battlefield.
Tactical Robots
The engine’s capabilities let the Cormorant lift more than 1,000 pounds of cargo, or two injured people, with a mission range of about 30 miles, flying at more than 100 mph. For the military, that could be enough to reach the front lines to drop supplies, then bring back injured soldiers. If things do go wrong, an optional rocket-deployed parachute should provide a softer landing.
In lieu of human company aboard the aircraft, patients would be connected to base through a remote monitoring system. On-the-ground staff would be able to check their vitals, as well as chat with them over a two-way video link.
The Cormorant’s less than elegant profile is no accident: Tactical Robotics says the lumpy carbon-fiber shape should help it avoid radar detection (stealth is a strange science), and that the exhaust system can be air-cooled, reducing its infrared signature.
Beyond the battlefield, this sort of unmanned “flying car” could appeal to first responders. Fire crews could dispatch one to rescue a person trapped behind a wildfire, or to the roof of a burning high-rise. Fire departments already use smaller drones with remote cameras to map fires or spot missing persons. This would be the next logical step, albeit a large one.
Going even further, Tactical Robotics says it might be interested in the sort of flying car scheme Uber is trying to get off the ground with its Elevate program. Beyond major modifications to the Cormorant (it’s lying-down room only), that kind of plan requires navigating all sorts of regulatory and tactical obstacles. But each successful demo brings that vision closer to reality. In the meantime, it can bring wounded soldiers a lot closer to making it home.
People seeking a set of wheels traditionally had two options: buy or lease. But the advent of ride hailing turned the next generation of drivers into backseat riders. Now app-based subscriptions—think car sharing that’s paid by the month, not the hour—are vying for consumers who fall between Uber addicts and car owners.
Car sharing is projected to grow globally from 5.8 million users in 2015 to 35 million by 2021, according to Boston Consulting Group. “If we’re right, nobody’s going to borrow money to buy a car again,” says Scott Painter, CEO of car-subscription startup Fair. He has reason to be bullish: His company has secured more than $1 billion in funding since 2016. The service connects drivers to used cars at dealerships nationwide, bundling warranty, maintenance, roadside assistance, and optional insurance into one month-to-month, pay-by-app fee (from $150). Pick up your car of choice at a participating dealer and return it at any time with five days’ notice.
A slew of other startups are also wooing commitment-phobic drivers. In 2015, Flexdrive launched subscriptions in Atlanta, Austin, and Philadelphia, with plans to expand to 24 other cities this year. Carma Car, which started in the Midwest, is now eyeing the East Coast. Even traditional automakers, from Ford to Porsche, are testing subscription models. “This takes a painful process—buying, financing, and maintaining a car—and turns it into a frictionless experience,” says T. J. Rylander, a VC at Next47. It’s the on-demand way: all the utility of ownership, none of the hassle.
More Great WIRED Stories
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Back in 2013, when you could still mine bitcoins at home, WIRED was sent a small, sleek mining device manufactured by the now-defunct Butterfly Labs. We turned on the Roku-looking machine in our San Francisco offices and allowed it to do its job. A small fortune was soon amassed, now worth around $100,000. Then, we lost the money. Forever.
Here’s what happened to WIRED’s 13 Bitcoins—and to the millions of others that have faced the same fate.
Stefan Antonowicz, WIRED’s then-head of engineering, set up the miner. Robert McMillan, a former senior writer for WIRED (who now works at The Wall Street Journal), then wrote about it. “When we received that Butterfly miner, we had a new ethical question: What do you do with the proceeds of a review device that essentially prints money?” says McMillan.
First, it’s probably worth explaining how WIRED accrued its six-figure Bitcoin fortune. While fiat currencies, like the dollar, rely on banks and government regulators, Bitcoin runs on a peer-to-peer network monitored by an army of volunteer miners that run specialized software. Every 10 minutes, all the miners in the network race to solve a series of complex cryptographic math problems. The computers that win are awarded a slice of 12.5 new bitcoins. (That number halves every four years; it was 25 when we got our miner.) Usually, the fastest computers in the network solve the problems first.
Over time, the puzzles have gotten harder, leading to a kind of computing-power arms race. Back when Bitcoin first launched, it was possible to mine coins using an everyday computer. These days, you’ll need specialized hardware significantly more powerful than the Butterfly Labs miner WIRED had. Currently, there are about 17 million bitcoins in existence; by 2020, all 21 million planned Bitcoins will have been mined. You can learn more about the process in our Guide to Bitcoin.)
WIRED’s miner essentially won the Bitcoin math lottery a couple of times, allowing it to generate a little over 13 coins into the network. Then, the staff had to figure out what to do with them. “We had a very long conversation, over several weeks, about what to do with the money,” says Michael Calore, a senior editor at WIRED who has been at the magazine since 2006. Some staff members argued the Bitcoin should be donated, or set aside for a charitable purpose in the future. Others said it had to be destroyed permanently. What was agreed upon was that the money shouldn’t just sit there, because it could influence how the magazine reported on cryptocurrencies.
“I said we had to dump it and donate the money to charity soonest or we wouldn’t be able to cover Bitcoin,” says Adam Rogers, a deputy editor at WIRED. “We had to disclose it in every story.” Eventually, it was decided that the private key, which unlocks the Bitcoin wallet and allows the funds to be spent, should be destroyed.
“We talked about donating it to a journalism institution, or setting it aside as a scholarship. But we decided that if we gained any benefit from it at all, it would color our future coverage of bitcoin,” says Calore. “So we just destroyed the key, knowing full well that it could eventually be worth six or seven figures.” McMillan then posted a story announcing the key had been ripped to pieces.
Throwing Away the Key
To deal in bitcoin, you need at least two different keys, one public and one private (newer security protocols allow you to add more private keys). Together, the combination of codes lets you trade Bitcoin without an intermediary like a bank. You can look up WIRED’s public key to send us money, and then in theory, we could use our private key to access those funds—had we not destroyed it. It’s extremely unlikely we could successfully guess the code: it’s 64 digits long and no one remembers what it was.
No additional copies of the private key exist, at least according to the people who were there. “I didn’t make a copy of the paper, or commit the 64 characters on it to memory,” says Antonowicz, the technologist who set up the miner. The good news is that if someone did move the coins, the transaction would be public, allowing WIRED to see where they traveled to. In fact, you too can check out WIRED’s lost Bitcoins right here.
In theory, we might be able to recover the Bitcoin wallet from the hard drive where it was stored, but even that wouldn’t be much help. “There might have been a way to forensically recover the wallet—with the encrypted key—from my hard drive, but I shredded that particular drive years ago,” says Antonowicz.
Plus, even if the wallet was resurrected, it’s encrypted. Breaking that protection via brute force would take an unimaginable amount of time. There are three times more possible combinations than there are atoms in the observable universe, by Antonowicz’s count.
“Originally I was going to say that the closest metaphor I have is that we dropped a car key somewhere in the Atlantic, but I think it’s closer for me to say we dropped the key somewhere between here and the Alpha Centauri,” says Antonowicz.
Recovering our bitcoins is essentially like trying to recover a photo album on a lost computer. Except not only did you get rid of the hard drive, you also protected the album in an encrypted folder with a 64-digit passcode that you threw away.
Still, we wanted to make sure there was absolutely no way to get the bitcoins back. WIRED’s editor-in-chief, Nicholas Thompson, suggested that if we were able to recover the funds, they might go toward hiring a full-time cryptocurrency reporter. I reached out to the founder of Butterfly Labs, who didn’t respond. I also contacted Mark Frauenfelder, a writer and the author of a WIRED article about how he recovered $30,000 worth of Bitcoin. He agrees we’re screwed.
“If you lost your private keys I think it’s game over,” he says. I also looked into a service that tries to crack cryptocurrency wallets via sheer brute force. But their services would be no help, since we don’t have access to the hard drive itself. It looks like WIRED really did lose the money forever. The good news is we’re far from alone.
Lost and Never Found
Chainalysis, a research firm that analyzes activity across different cryptocurrency markets, estimates that between 2.78 and 3.79 million, or between 17 and 23 percent of all bitcoins have been lost. That includes wallets believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious founder of Bitcoin who hasn’t touched his estimated 1 million coins since 2011.
“The number of lost coins over time will drop,” says Michael Gronager, the CEO and co-founder of Chainalysis. He argues that it’s because there’s more awareness of Bitcoin’s enduring value, even if the price wildly fluctuates. He also says that even if Satoshi were to reemerge, his activity wouldn’t significantly impact the market because he wouldn’t likely spend a large sum of Bitcoin at once.
There are several ways you can lose Bitcoin. Like WIRED, you can simply lose track of your private key or your hard drive. One of the most famous cases of this is what happened to James Howells, an IT worker in London who lost 7,500 bitcoins, or around $56 million, when his laptop was thrown away in 2013. He reportedly wants to dig through five years of trash to unearth the computer. This is the most common way to lose Bitcoin; even Elon Must tweeted that he forgot how to access a portion of a coin.
You can also lose bitcoins by running buggy code or making software mistakes, though these instances are more rare. Last year, for example, someone forgot to collect their mining reward and burned 12.5 coins. In another similar incident, someone may have accidentally swapped a processing fee with the value of the transaction, resulting in nearly 300 coins lost. One time, someone even sent 2,600 coins to an incorrectly configured address, burning them into nonexistence. All of these examples come from BlockSci, a tool developed at Princeton University for analyzing the Bitcoin blockchain.
It can be difficult to assess whether any given bitcoin is really lost for good. “It’s actually pretty difficult to say for certain. A lot of what we do is look at the big picture,” says Harry Kalodner a PhD at Princeton who helped develop BlockSci. He says part of the problem is that you can rarely determine whether someone is just holding onto their Bitcoin, or whether they’ve definitively lost access to it. Since Bitcoin isn’t controlled by any single authority, there’s no one who can simply close your account.
So what could WIRED have done, were we to do the whole thing again? Since 2013, Bitcoin has added a number of new, more sophisticated features. For one, we could have locked our coins away until a certain date. “One Bitcoin feature that’s been added is that it now supports time-locked coins, that makes them completely un-spendable until a set point in the future,” says Kalodner. Like, say, May 2018, when the editor-in-chief could really use some money to hire another reporter.
This Creepy Chrome Extension Pauses YouTube for You When You Look Away
https://ift.tt/2IWGeAG
Want to trade the tattered remains of your privacy for a very minor convenience? Ever wish your computer would stare back at you while you hunt for that one good SNL skit on YouTube? If “yes” is your answer, do I have the tool for you.
FacePause is a Chrome extension that tracks your face as you watch YouTube. When the add-on notices you’re not staring directly at the screen, it automatically pauses the video, saving you from… what, we’re not entirely sure—multitasking? The extension mostly works as advertised, though when I tried it, FacePause occasionally struggled to detect if I was, in fact, paying attention, causing the stream to stutter a bit.
The project was created by German developer Mattias Hemmingsson to explore what developers can do with Chrome’s built-in FaceDetector API. “I don’t trust my webcam,” Hemmingsson writes, “so I have it covered and I don’t trust Youtube/Google so see this more as an experiment of Chromes new technology, than a product you’d use every day.”
To try it out, if you’d even want to do such a thing, add this extension, enable Chrome’s Experimental Web Platform features (via this url: chrome://flags/#enable-experimental-web-platform-features), relaunch the browser, pull up a YouTube video, click the slider that should appear at the bottom of your screen, and wearily grant access to your camera. Or, just watch a demo of it in action.
This is probably not something you’ll want to keep installed on your computer, but it’s an intriguing project nonetheless and amusing to try for just a few moments.
Jeff Bezos Details Plan to Make Blue Origin the Amazon of the Moon
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ plans to splurge some of his jaw-dropping wealth pushing his private spaceflight company Blue Origin towards the business of moon colonization—think Elon Musk’s dreams of a SpaceX-backed colony on Mars, but much less likely to get everyone involved killed—dropped last year.
But this weekend, Bezos dropped some more hints about those plans, including that he thinks it’s possible to really get started within the next century. At the Space Development Conference in Los Angeles, Geekwire reported, Bezos believes humans will ultimately use the functionally unlimited expanse of space as as a giant solar powered manufacturing sector slash garbage dump:
“We will have to leave this planet,” Bezos told me. “We’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better. We’ll come and go, and the people who want to stay, will stay.”
Earth will be zoned for residential and light industrial use, while heavy industry will be moved off the planet and powered by 24/7 solar power, he said.
“The Earth is not a very good place to do heavy industry. It’s convenient for us right now,” Bezos said. “But in the not-too-distant future—I’m talking decades, maybe 100 years—it’ll start to be easier to do a lot of the things that we currently do on Earth in space, because we’ll have so much energy.”
According to Geekwire, Bezos said that the lunar surface is “almost like somebody set this up for us,” with polar deposits of water ice that could be mined for everything from oxygen to rocket fuel and possible rare resource deposits. He also added that Blue Origin’s offer of a public-private partnership with NASA to build a lunar lander capable of carrying five tons of cargo in preparation for the arrival of humans remains open, but “We’ll do that, even if NASA doesn’t do it … We could do it a lot faster if there were a partnership.”
Also, Bezos apparently likes the European Space Agency’s concept of a Moon Village where all lunar outposts are concentrated in a single region for potential resource-sharing the most. As Geekwire noted, Bezos views Blue Origin as primarily about lowering the cost of cargo delivery to space rather than actually getting too deeply involved in the construction of things like habitats, so this would all set up the company nicely to be a sort of Space Amazon for said Moon Village.
Competitors like SpaceX and Boeing seem to have an early advantage: As TechCrunch noted, Blue Origin is still only testing sub-orbital rockets. But Bezos told Geekwire he’s liquidating $1 billion of his Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin, and doesn’t expect to run out of money anytime soon. In any case, these all seem like reasonable insights in how humans can achieve our deepest ambition as a species: An entire solar system filled with trillions of hastily discarded Amazon boxes.
How to review your life’s Amazon buying history—and what we learned from our own
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Amazon
Ahead of the United States’ Memorial Day weekend, Ars staffers were milling about the virtual water cooler when someone happened upon some intriguing data: their personal Amazon shopping history. This spreadsheet, which consisted of years of purchases and thousands of dollars of receipts, was easy to compile within the Amazon account interface, and it fit nicely into that day’s chatter about other companies’ issues with data privacy and GDPR compliance.
So, for funsies, a bunch of us reviewed our past decade-plus Amazon existence by grabbing a giant spreadsheet from our individual “order history” pages. As Americans who’ve spent many years ordering things off the Internet, we at Ars all have Amazon shopping histories in common, but that doesn’t mean we all use the site the same—or feel the same about Amazon’s reach, quite frankly. See below for charts, examples of our first non-media (book or film) purchases at the site, and personal recollections about how Amazon has figured into our shopping lives over the years.
If you want to play along at home, by all means. This link should force you to enter your own Amazon credentials and then redirect you to an “order history” page. The first drop-down menu on the resulting page should already say “items.” Confirm that’s the case, then set the date range from January 1 of the earliest year on record to today. Then pick “request report” and you’ll receive a CSV spreadsheet file that can be parsed by Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. You may need to split this into multiple reports (like, 2005-2009, 2010-today), should your shopping history be as big as some Ars staffers’.
Let the data (and knickknacks) begin
Each gallery includes supplementary info provided by Ars staffers, in the order of their blurbs. Here are Samuel Axon’s first media and non-media orders from Amazon.
Beth Mole’s first non-media purchase on Amazon was a gift for her mother. (Way to shame the rest of our mom gifts, Beth.)
Beth Mole’s shopping-history review reminded her that she purchased this incredible baby-sized shark robe.
Beth provided a shopping-habits chart by year.
Valentina Palladino’s first non-media purchase was a Nintendo DS game. You can no longer buy this cartridge version for less than $50 on Amazon, by the way.
Samuel Axon, senior reviews editor: $8,285.42 since 2009
Most of my Amazon buying history is Christmas presents, as my family uses it for wish lists. Total dollars spent is also a misleading number, as my fiancée and I split some of the spending. That’s not reflected here, as she has transferred money from her account to mine to cover half the cost of many of those gifts.
What aren’t gifts are mostly purchases via killer deals I saw online through affiliate links on various tech and gaming sites. I generally try to avoid using Amazon as much as possible. Same-day delivery in LA is awesome, but I have concerns about one company basically owning all the retail infrastructure in the United States, which seems like where we’re headed. Also, Amazon needs to pay its fair share of taxes in the United States.
I’m always impressed with what Amazon has accomplished—its success is not unearned. But the more a company looks like a monopoly either actually or potentially, the more disinclined I am to give them my money.
Beth Mole, health reporter: $4,262.51 since December 2006
My first set of orders were presents for family members—a DVD set and books—which was a theme until around 2014 when my then-boyfriend (now-husband) added me to his Prime subscription. My first non-book/DVD/CD purchase wasn’t until October of 2007, when my brother and I went halfsies on a fancy kitchen mixer for my mom’s birthday.
My (sparse) order history between 2006 and 2013 continued to be mostly an odd assortment of presents for family and friends—which is actually kind of fun to look back on. For instance, it includes the first things I bought my nephew when he was born: a tuxedo bib, Goodnight Moon, and a shark robe (you know, baby essentials.)
Since getting Prime (and becoming lazier about going to actual stores), I’ve strayed more into domestic ordering, such as paper products, allergy medicine, soaps, and toothpastes. Boring stuff. But the past year, I started going back and forth between Amazon and Target, which now has free, generally fast shipping and sometimes better deals.
Valentina Palladino, associate reviewer: $9,726.12 since 2009, “72 orders a year for the past three years”
Unsurprisingly, most of my first Amazon purchases were books. I have a couple of fond memories of a delivery truck rolling up to my family’s home and its driver dropping off a single package for me containing the newest Harry Potter book that had just come out that day. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you view it), my Harry Potter reading experience wouldn’t have been the same without release-day delivery from Amazon.
But my book purchases slowly took a backseat as years went by and as items like ink cartridges, HDMI cables, and two-pound bags of chia seeds became more important than the newest novel release. Today, I mostly turn to Amazon for necessities that cannot wait for my next IRL shopping trip, routinizing my online shopping and making most of my order history incredibly boring. It would be really easy for me to lean on Amazon for all of my purchases since I work from home, but I regularly try to take trips to retailers big and small for essentials, gifts, and home decor or other things that I want to have more personality.
Now it’s rare that I even buy a physical book from Amazon, but that’s because I’m an avid Kindle reader, so Amazon provides the reading material still with a some supplementation from my local library’s digital shelves. But on the rare occasion that I do order a physical book, I still get as excited to receive that package as I did years ago—and those will forever remain my favorite Amazon packages to receive.
Sean Gallagher showed us all up in the 3D-effects department.
Sean’s first non-media purchase was a digital camera in 2002.
Most of my early Amazon purchases were books, and I only made a few purchases per year until around 2016, when we opted into Prime. Almost everything I’ve personally bought aside from books is a tech-related (Arduino, OrangePi, Raspberry Pi, replacement laptop batteries, phone cases, cables) or a gift (Shark Bite novelty socks for my daughter, for example). But I’ve also bought stuff for my other silicon-based activity: pottery. There are a couple of orders for “Speedball 001066 Underglaze, Black,” as well as potter’s tools and chamois cloths for use in throwing pots on the wheel.
John Timmer, senior science editor: $3,500 since creating an Amazon account (no date given)
A disturbingly large amount of my purchases came via rewards points generated by my primary credit card—over half the entries include the term “gift card”—so the actual total of my own money is substantially lower than that.
The entries are an extremely random set of electronics, bike stuff, and one of my odder hobbies: growing wildly inappropriate trees from seeds in small apartments. The very first item is a device from a dead platform, a Palm Tungsten TX. From there, my record shifts into more sensible purchases, like SSDs (both of which I’m still using), keyboards, mice, and hard drives for my NAS. It looks like, for many years, whenever space was getting tight for my backups, I’d simply grab whatever gift certificates I had around, buy the biggest drive they would get me, and throw that into the NAS.
Biking stuff was a slow trickle for many years, mostly replacing worn-out things, until there was a sudden binge when I bought my first new bike in 25 years a little while back.
Then there are the seeds. I currently have a very small giant sequoia on my balcony. It’s a replacement for a coast redwood that I managed to get to my own height before it outgrew its pot and suddenly died. That’s a pattern I’ve been dealing with for a while: the trees look great right up until when they commit to dying, at which point no amount of care or larger pots can dissuade them. So there’s a steady stream of seed purchases, as I try to keep some new trees starting in case the older, larger one decides to give up; some buys happen just to deal with the fact that not every batch of seeds is good. The hope is, at some point, to get one of my trees that’s still healthy to someone’s house for planting. But it’s been a while, and it hasn’t happened yet.
Even more embarrassing is the knowledge that Amazon’s not my only supplier for this.
Jeff Dunn’s first Amazon purchase was this laptop.
Megan Geuss’s first non-media Amazon purchase was this mixing bowl. “Ideal depth for easy mixing,” and “currently unavailable,” hahahah suckers!
I was just wrapping up college at the time I opened my account, but my first major purchase came a few months later when I bought a Sony Vaio S as my first “professional” notebook. It was a bit of a splurge at the time, but my adolescent desire to not carry a MacBook like everyone else, combined with the fact that I had just spent three years using a junky Gateway, was enough justification for me. I think I witnessed about four other Vaio owners over the period I used mine.
That purchase alone continues to make up a third of my total Amazon spending. Since then, I’ve pretty much exclusively used the site to buy (Hank Hill voice) video games and video game accessories, with a few books and board games thrown in. This reinforces a few things for me:
1. I am a young guy who has never been married, had kids, or lived in an exceptionally large apartment. (This will all change soon enough, but I’ve been frugal while I could.)
2. I have never lived close to a GameStop and/or rarely find its prices appealing.
3. I spent the first couple years of my career writing about the video game industry.
4. I generally don’t like buying things online. Some deep-seated part of my monkey brain doesn’t trust online stores with things like food or basic household items; if I need those things, I usually want them now, and I don’t mind taking the walk or car ride to go get them. Getting away from the screen is healthy, right? I’ve made it a point to live within walking distance to a grocery store when hunting for my last few apartments, so that’s helped.
I’ve also covered Amazon enough to know that, for the wrong person, Prime becomes an excuse to buy things more than a helpful tool for buying things you planned to get anyway. I’m probably the wrong person in that case, so I’ve stayed away.
I opened an Amazon account in 2005, when I apparently purchased a number of books for my sister’s high school language class. I have no recollection of this and no idea why I would have done this: I was already in college and living 350 miles away from home. But Amazon indicates that they were shipped to my sister, and they’re titles you read in high school: The Importance of Being Earnest, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (uggggh, a blight on English Literature), Lord of the Flies.
Amazon won’t give me prices for any of the books before 2008 for some reason, but I can tell you I bought exactly 10 books in my three first years as an Amazon customer. In 2009 I made my first non-book purchase: a heavy, red, 7.5-quart ceramic bowl. I had just moved into a proper apartment (I had been living in the basement of a house with six other people for a while), and I saved up to get something nice. I still have it, and I love it.
In total, I’ve bought 107 items from the retailer, and in many cases a group of items represents an order of several books before a school semester. I don’t have data on the 10 first items, and my above tally includes every purchase after those. My spendiest year was 2017, which was the year a number of weddings and new babies happened in the family, so there were a lot of gifts to buy.
Mostly, looking over my Amazon history, I’m struck by how much Amazon potentially knows about me. My purchases are pretty mundane, but you could deduce a lot about me from this order history. With that realization, I’ll probably try to buy less from the store in the future.
