Now all I have to do is convince the rest of humanity that my pieces of metal and paper are worth all of their cool stuff

Because I have nothing better to do, I am typing this from my job. Ok, there's not a single truth in that sentence (I'm actually dictating this), but I had to start somewhere, and I wanted to mention the fact that I have a real job. It also happens to pay real money and require real time, two concepts as foreign to me as the five spices in Cantonese Five Spice Beef. Seriously, once you break the $10/hour barrier, it's amazing how much money you start earning. I now spend less than a quarter of my income on rent. Amazing! I used to have to work 40 hours to make rent. Ah, college.

A side effect of not much money is that PC gaming was basically impossible until I bummed a real computer off a friend for 400 dollars--as you can see, I have my limits for how much I'm going to spend on a console. Once I had that setup going, I immediately went to my local game store, so I could pick up the latest badass free or cheap games. As a child of the 80's, I grew up with shareware; Doom, Commander Keen, etc. Video games were free, and there was enough to play that you didn't have to spend 10 dollars or whatever upgrading their "free" versions, unless you really, really wanted the extra Doom levels (I think everyone did). Paying for something just felt . . . silly, really. You know, a free milk trial/expensive cow scenario.

Which leads us to the modern age, an age where game software costs 50 dollars, work software at least twice that, and shareware is a thing of the past. I had never paid for computer software unless I really, really wanted it or had the money in my pocket (I'm terrible with money, it's just so much less useful to me than the things I can get if I spend it) , so it seemed like I was doomed to purchase games whose desirability was questionable or simply not play games--Blasphemy! They make us pay money and we agree. They raise prices, and we agree. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, and no further!

You know, you'd think that Picard impersonations would go over well with the inhabitants of the local video game store. They still make you pay them. Go figure.

Anyways, I didn't feel like paying for crap (see previous statements about college) and Dad told me not to use the Horde for petty larceny since the last time, where half of them got wiped out by a few scrappy survivors in a mall with a gun store--not my best plan. Thus, I decided to get a job at the selfsame game store that was bleeding me dry, partly because I figured I could get them to give me some of my money back and partly because I had heard about their "borrowing" policy. Basically, they let you borrow anything, as long as said thing can be resold in its pre-borrowed state, i.e. smudge or scratch a new game and it's yours. Long story short, I checked out this "Titan Quest" game a while back.

Longer story short, it took me two months to find a job after college because Titan Quest doesn't seem to have job listings for the real world. Oh, sure, there's like two dozen requests for professional monster slaughterer in the virtual facsimile of Greece, but no one seems to need a computer programmer for some reason. Finally, I stopped playing long enough to get one of these "job" things, mostly because Jane was about this close to get me an compulsory position as official Poopsmith of Redding and I needed some kind of prior commitment to get out of it. Now, I have all these numbers in a bank and the keys to this one place I have to show up at every day, and almost no time left. Granted, bank numbers seem to be the most desired commodity in these parts, and I am most willing to part with them for fancy plastic discs, but it seems like I've lost a much more valuable thing, for some reason. I'm sure it's not as important as the burgeoning collection of detritus-enveloped games that appear to be conquistando my bookshelves.

So where does it leave me? Us? The children? I give 50% of my waking hours to a company, and in return, they give me something to which all of humanity appears to have ascribed a value, in all probability while hallucinating on some good shit. Then, I use my mass hallucination credits to purchase a place to live, food to eat, and electronic signals that my brain finds entertaining. Only I there's a limited amount of time in which to consume my delicious signals, especially since currency takes a long time to generate. It looks so bleak on liquid crystal.

And yet, I'm enjoying myself immensely, so much so that writing here wasn't worth skipping work, eating, games, living. These words, I bring to you altruistically, so that you may regard them and ponder just how much fun you're having and how little the description of that fun matters.

Rock on, everyone. Rock on and fire at will.

:SñrC

PS: I think I'll come to publish here again, if only as an outlet for words that are so often replaced by a "fuck" derivative when I'm speaking.

Picard-voice makes ultimatums fun and easy! Try it!