the halo disease
A few nights ago I was on a “date” with a nice, good-looking boy who worked in computers. He was 26, which I could *maybe* look past, but he didn’t know that much about music, which I could just barely look past, and he had stopped engaging in hobbies outside of Halo - that was an absolute dealbreaker. It turned out that his questionable shirt (”Yes, I am a gay robot.”) could have clued me in right from the start, but I didn’t know until I got home and looked it up.
Halo is ruining mankind. I came home that night, and as usual, I could see about 9 different simultaneous Halo games going on through the windows of other people’s apartments. When I went to bed I had to knock on the walls to let people in my own apartment know that I was having difficulty sleeping through the noise of incessant Halo gunfire.
I was talking to jdl about it. Like this:
Him: You should have called the cops.
Me: And tell them what? That people are playing video games too loud?
Him: Tell them you hear gunshots.
It was a good conversation. We talked a lot about the disappointment that is other people - i.e., he’s still railing on about the need for “silent packaging” in movie theater candy, I’m still (obviously) ranting against Halo. Eventually he summed it up like this, “Friends are one thing. Finding other people who are annoyed by the same things you are, that’s where it’s at.”
Indeed.
(Remember the term “playstation widows”? The very fact that this term has fallen out of fashion while the problem it refers to has gotten worse says everything we need to know.)