Hey, look! More cool stuff I can't afford!

In my general perusals of the internet, I've stumbled across a little gadget that I'm finding myself somewhat taken with.

And, if the pledges it's racking up on Kickstarter are anything to go by, I'm not the only one.

The video on it's Kickstarter site is really comprehensive. Obviously, that bit is designed to convince me it's a good thing, that it's worth backing, and so it will have some element of bias in it. But until the thing has been finished and reviewed, it's all I've got by which to judge it.

Regardless of how the actual gadget turns out, I have fallen in love with the concept at it's core.

The Light Phone, invented by a company called Light, is a credit-card sized gadget that only receives phone calls.

Which sounds a bit useless. But there is a lot more behind it.

It's not a replacement for your smartphone. It's for when you want a break from it.

It works with the phone you already have. You download the app, you leave your phone at home. You don't have to put up with notifications from Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat or whatever else you have installed on your smartphone that will inevitably buzz at just the right time to interrupt an important conversation or ruin the mood.

More importantly, your friends don't. Or colleagues or boss or interviewer or lover. Or whoever else gets irritated when your face is in a screen all the time you spend with them.

Your phone calls get redirected from your phone to your Light Phone, so that if there is something really important happening, you can still be contacted. People can still get through to you in emergencies.

But that's it.

You don't have to deal with the rest of that crap. You don't have to worry about Twitter notifying you that someone else said something that doesn't pertain to you at all, and perhaps not even interest you in the slightest. Which my Twitter has been doing recently. I don't like it.

I do like the Light Phone.

I know I'm broke right now, but I'm contemplating getting one. Even though there are a load of other Kickstarters I want to back that I could get more stuff from for less money. Even though I'm skint enough to buy basically only Morrisons own brand food.

And pretty much everyone I know except my nan (who doesn't have a smartphone, so is still good company) will be getting one for Christmas.

I'm twenty two years old. My generation is the one that suffers most severely from smartphone addication. I think I'm reasonably distanced from my gadgets. I recently went a week without a laptop and craved Blogger more than anything else. I'm happy leaving my phone at home when I go out. But I am close to a lot of people who can't handle doing those things. Who will be sitting in a room full of close friends and stare at their phones.

I want one, even if it just to ward off potentially ending up like that.

And I want other people to have one. I want to not feel like a third wheel when I'm hanging out with one friend. Ever.

I love that this thing is so close to existing. It's cute and it's cool and, if it all goes right, could be saviour of many, many relationships.

People Are Flinging Shit At Me.

I've recently been introduced to a new smartphone app called Fling. If you don't know what it is, it's your generic photo-sending app but, instead of sending it to a specific person or group of people that you select, it flings it to a random 50 people who also have the Fling app.

A friend of mine told me she was enjoying it and advised me to have a look at it if I got bored.

Then I got bored.

I thought it sounded like a laugh. Honestly, my gut reaction to that description of it was somewhat naive. My first thought was how much we could learn about the rest of the world. I thought about all the things I didn't know about culture in other countries that I'd pick up from the things that strangers found interesting enough to share. I thought how cool it would be to take it round a museum and share the things that fascinated me with people who weren't there.

And after using it five seconds I realised that that's actually quite a childish thought.

Because obviously people aren't going to send interesting things. They're not going to send the kind of exciting things you'd get excited about. They're going to send photos of their duck faces and their genitals and, for some reason, their knees.

I've been using it for not even two days and I've lost count of the times I've seen "mycock4urtits". As if there aren't boobs aplenty to be found on the internet. Without the hassle of asking for them. Or risking having a stranger mock a photo of your dick. (Because that's what girls do. We judge them. I promise.)

And yet, I am going to keep Fling. I am going to try to resist the urge to send photos of "no one cares" scrawled on a Post-It note every time I get a selfie or a testicle. And I am going to take it to museums and galleries and parks and places that are exciting and interesting and I am going to try to use it to educate some strangers.

I'll probably fail. But, I'll also enjoy knowing that I tried.