A Run on Stupid Pills

Trying to get through the morning news this AM is an exercise in "duh"-factor avoidance. Maybe it's the Ahmadinejad halo effect. First, post-launch for the Halo 3 video game. Lines in LA and New York looked as bad as iPhone cult queues, and the front of the line was dominated by people in their 20s and 30s. I've resigned myself to this being the new, "mature" gaming market -- after all, the only sector of my own company doing well is the sector serving the gaming community. But standing in line all night for the privilege of buying a VIDEO GAME??!! And I thought Apple had turned people into mindless consumer robots. All hail X Box, PS3, Wii, the sole determinants of the new American economy! Feh.

Now it's on to those pesky illegal aliens. The New York Times gave us a front-page story about how the town of Riverside, N.J. set ordinance after ordinance to limit employers hiring those of questionable status, only to see two-thirds of the businesses downtown get shuttered. Gee whiz. Do you think it's actually possible illegals might have an overall positive effect on the economy? Is it possible Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh were actually feeding people a load of crap? Nah, it's like Riverside's former mayor Charles Hilton said, the ones that closed were just the bad businesses. Too bad they were sustaining the town.

Listen to me, I'm starting to sound like that grumpy crone Joni Mitchell on her new album Shine. Pay no attention, I'll grab some Prozac to counteract the stupid pills.

PS3 and the Problem of First-Person Shooters

Disclaimer: My folks never banned toy guns from the house, and I've never been adamant about gun control, though I always thought an obsession with guns was creepy in the extreme. Since the post-Thanksgiving advertising season began, the onslaught of ads for PS3, Xbox, and Wii has been narrowly focused on the first-person shooter game. Silly me, I thought that advanced graphics might be useful for three-dimensional virtual worlds (unrelated to blasting everything to kingdom come) and to the next level of John Madden sports spectacular. Instead, we get killing people/robots/animals with weapons of every stripe. Friends tell me Sony et al are simply responding to the college-age male demographic. I say the problem is that too many gamers are morons. Don't give me that "eye-hand dexterity" shit. Shooter experts are being groomed as cannon fodder by the Defense Department. Other than that, the shooter game carries no redeeming social value except proving the idiocy of the player, and showing how many gaming dummies are lackeys for a military-fascist state.