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the scrounging game It seems I have some 'pologizin and correctin' to do. Turns out I was a bit too hasty with my last missive lauding The Sims Online and all it stood for, proclaiming it to be a direct descendant of text-based social MU*s and all that came with it. Well, I was perhaps 25% correct in that regard. While The Sims Online did feature a rudimentary building system, social chat opportunities and the ability to take on a persona strange and wacky, it was still too deeply rooted in skill-based MUDs. In fact, it was a horrific amalgamation of that and (your favorite levelling treadmill masquerading as a MMORPG here), requiring you to spend insane amounts of time to keep even two skills of yours up high enough to make enough money with other people to maybe build part of the house you want -- and, in the meantime, spend enormous amounts of time sleeping and peeing to get your green levels up ... and by the time you've finished building, your skills have deteriorated again, so off you go to begin the circle anew...I do admit to being completely blown away by the game early on, however, and only wish its appeal wasn't so short-lived. At any rate I have since found another virtual world in beta -- a world in which I am now participating, and once the NDA is relaxed I'm gonna have a whole boatload of stories to tell. This world is much more along the lines of what I had been so shortsightedly calling The Sims Online earlier, and I'd done a good job of embracing this one whole hog while poor Professor Teh Cat slunk, miserable and dejected, into a playerwipe of my own devising. So it goes. But even the ability to fly around a new virtual world and create beautiful works of architecture hasn't been as fun as it should have been but I ascribe that solely to the fact as I was playing around with the game this winter I suffered from a prolonged bout with the Feels-Like-Crap cold. It's not exactly the Norwalk virus to be sure, but I certainly did feel at least like New Haven or Manchester. It started at the end of January with an irritating tickle in the back of the throat, then progressed to that all-post nasal drip, all the time feeling and when I woke up one fine February morning I felt like I'd been hit full-on by a freight train comprised solely of clammy wet blankets. By the time I got to the office I'd been wholly wrapped up in those blankets of nausea, and blearily stared at my computer screen trying to swallow enough to make the little numbers stop doing the hoola-hoola dance around the spreadsheets and error reports. And then around 1 or so I started smell-hallucinating. I certainly couldn't really smell any actual smells thanks to this nose, but I could've sworn I smelled oatmeal. Oatmeal! That's what I needed right about now, I thought. Some good old-fashioned comfort food oatmeal. Mushy food for mushy people. I slowly rose from my comfortable chair (45 whole seconds to get up; I felt like an old man) and tottlered over to the office cafeteria. There, just waiting for me, was an individual-sized single serving cup of oatmeal (just add water and a spoon!) for the amazingly low low low price of $1.85. Too bad the change in my pocket amounted to 63 cents. Give or take a penny. It was then I started to play The Scrounging Game. Everybody's done it before in their life; some of us more often than others. It starts with the Pocket Pat-Down Round, where you jostle every pocket you've got to hear change jingle. I unfortunately was wearing my heavy red jacket at the time, chilled enough thanks to the Feels-Like-Crap to not want to remove it inside, and this red jacket has enough pockets to really up the Scrounging Game difficulty to at least 4.5 or 4.6 Arbitrary Marks of Difficulty. The Pat-Down Round finished, I then had to dive into each pocket to grab at anything small, round, and metal. My total after the Pat-Down and Diving Down rounds: $1.15. I was getting there, slowly but surely. Now at this point you're probably wondering why I didn't just ask a coworker for some money, as 70 cents surely is a pittance to us computer-like workers, some of whom make enough money each month to actually eat chicken dinners. But the truth of the matter is once you've gotten this far in the Scrounging Game, you're committed to playing it out fully. The feeling of accomplishment one gets upon the successful completion of the game is unparalled. Besides, in this post-superduper-snazzola-dotcom-boom industry, folks are loath to "temporarily" hand out sums of money for anything, no matter how small:
So that's when I knew I'd reached halftime of the Scrounging Game, and had to take the pathetic money-searching to the next level: I headed out to the car and searched the glove compartment for tollbooth change. Now you can do the Pocket Pat-Down with no shame from time to time, but to leave the warm, cozy confines of the Inside to go out to a freezing car and grub around in a glove compartment for under 75 cents in change, now, that's ... well, I don't know what it is but it certainly isn't as high on the noble list as patting down one's pockets for spare change. Regardless of the nobility of such an act, I lucked out something fierce, as it turns out my car contains enough spare change to fund the invasion of a middle eastern country, provided the military isn't picky and accepts it all in nickels, dimes and pennies. In fact, the most difficult part of the Tollbooth Change round was trying to work my frozen fingers enough to pick up a dime. This clearly illustrates the horrible hardships I had to endure, stoic and resolute, in order to get an overpriced single serving bowl of insta-oatmeal. (How much suffering does it take to qualify for schadenfreude, anyhow?) Pockets now positively full and bulging with the bling, I proudly strode back in to the cafeteria with my dollar eighty-five and pounded the bowl of oatmeal down on the cashier counter. It was time for the Big Spender to arrive and take the biggest bowl of oatmeal in the house, yo, and then I was gonna take it back and I was gonna eat it, and-- "Dollar ninety-four." "Pardon?" Uh oh. The cashier was giving me guff. "Dollar ninety-four. That's with tax." Now you don't honestly think I could've gone this far in the Scrounging Game only to be foiled by the same 5% state sales tax that I pay every single day when making normal transactions for food, goods and services, do you? Of course not. Now it was time for the brief, but quite important, endgame. The NEED A PENNY? TAKE A PENNY endgame. I dipped my thawing fingers into the conveniently-placed styrofoam cup and eventually fished out one final dime. The cashier gave me a penny back, which I promptly dropped back into the cup. The cup giveth and the cup taketh away, and you cannot expect to take such a generous helping without being expected to tithe, and that's precisely what I did. Oh, and the oatmeal was tasty too. Now we're nearly halfway through March and I'm not sure exactly why I decided to tell a story that happened a month and a half ago, but I'd written half of it already and didn't want it to go to waste. I guess I also wanted to illustrate that with the proper motivation and lack of shame, a fellow can do just about anything -- like cough up half his body weight in phlegm when he thinks nobody was looking. One of the joys of being a new convert into the wonderful world of DVD is the unabashed glee with which you can dive into such things as DVD bargain bins (sure, you can dive into VHS bargain bins but somehow it's just not the same) as well as play around with Netflix, everybody's favorite online DVD rental, uh, thing. You select a whole bunch of movies to rent, Netflix mails you a few at a time (usually 3 but you can spend more per month to rent more) and you mail them back when you're done and want more. And then you get more. And then mail them back. And get more. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera until you've gone through their entire online rental catalogue. There's a zillion films in there but at the rate I'm going, I'll have cleaned 'em out by mid-August. I did one strange thing with what I'd done with Netflix, however -- I'd gone down the list, genre by genre, adding films I was interested in. But therein lies another delight! Picking films you'd always wanted to see but were too neurotic/embarassed/whatever to buy the ticket and be seen in the theatre or justify to the apathetic video rental clerk. "Uh, yeah, um. It's research. For serious. It's, um, for my dissertation on ... vaguely smutty pop culture references in bad T&A films. Honest. ... Um, I'm gonna ... just put this back on the shelf, then. Say, how many piercings do you have?" But since I'd gone genre by genre, my regular offerings were, well, predictable. And man cannot live on a steady diet of historical drama alone before getting to the cheesy 1980s college comedies. So in a fit of inspiration I wrote an application that will randomize your Netflix queue for you. It works nicely because you have the ability to rank the titles in your queue in the order of which you'd like to view them. So if you take a list of numbers from 1 to X (where X is the total in your queue) and shake it up a little and then assign each number in the shook-up list, in order, to your queue, you'll nicely randomize it and never know just what you're gonna get. F'rinstance, recently I received The Great Escape, Man on the Moon, and the Pink Lady & Jeff DVD, which consisted of two episodes of the second-worst variety show ever to disgrace the airwaves. (In case you wondering, the worst variety show ever was the Brady Bunch Variety Hour, which I have received previously from Netflix. Both shows came from Sid & Marty Krofft and you'd think they'd have learned from the first to stick to kids' shows. But what can you do? Now the collective cultural shame of a generation is enshrined forever in DVD format, providing handy evidence to shock the kids not yet born until the 80s who believe that bell bottoms, smiley faces, and disco dancing were super-cool all together back then, and super-cool all together now. Hello cultural context. Goodbye, illusions of taste. But, as my pal Lynn pointed out to an Outback Steakhouse waiter recently as we pondered appetizer selections, the death of illusion is the birth of wisdom. Or something. I think someone else said it first.) At any rate, Netflix is giving me fun things to watch and that's good, especially since I don't cotton much to cable television anymore. I enjoy the films and extended features like "Interactive Menus" (well, what would they be if they weren't interactive?) and the ability to watch a French dubbed movie with Cantonese subtitles. Thanks, Interactive Menu! PS: The Dark City easter egg game is fun until the end, at which point you can't figure out why you were "rewarded" with what you were "rewarded." Aw, nertz.. Take care, and don't eat anything you
shouldn't.
R. Noyes | |||
