Smart Ass Kids

            I play video games.  I’m not ashamed of it.  I own a PlayStation 3, and I enjoy playing Call of Duty and a few other games.  I’m a modern kind of guy, so I even get on the internet and mix it up with the other gamers out there.  Don’t get the wrong idea.  I am not one of those pimply-faced couch potatoes who live online and would rather “frag a noob” than have sex with a woman (as if that’s a choice they have to make very often).  But I do like to run around shooting make-believe people with make-believe guns on the TV screen while I eat chips in my underwear.  I’m just not very good at it.

            Occasionally the game console requires an update, and for some reason the people over at Sony think you want to actually watch the thing download and install for 10 minutes.  They must think that, since it never seems to do any of this crap automatically.  First there will be a screen that pops up that says, “A system update is required.  Would you like to download it now?”  As if you would say, “No, thank you, PlayStation.  I don’t want to download the update.  I want all my games to stop working.”  So you push the “x” button on your little controller, and now you sit and watch the update download for several minutes instead of playing video games.  Seriously, Sony.  Cut that crap out.

            It was during one of these little intermissions this weekend that I discovered a new, heretofore unnoticed feature of the system.  You can send emails over the PlayStation Network to other people who also waste their lives on video games.  To my surprise, I had about 150 messages in there.  They were not kind messages.  Here’s a sample:

Subj: FUCK YOU
You are really not good at this.  Why don’t you just quit trying?

Subj: PLEASE KILL YOURSELF
You are terrible.

Subj: OOOPS
I almost played with you again.  You suck.

      Now, first of all that’s very negative feedback. You guys should try to be more constructive with your advice. Secondly, that’s some pretty harsh language from a bunch of juvenile punks sitting on beanbag chairs while their mom yells up for the laundry. I know this is who they are because I can actually hear their little high-pitched voices over the Bluetooth headsets they got for Christmas. Sometimes they get mouthy with their mothers and it makes me upset. But the really upsetting thing about this is that I suck so badly at a first-person shooter game that these lazy, unmotivated, barely literate, virgin, zit-faced slugs felt that they had to write me an email about it. I’ve been a Marine for more than 22 years now. You’d think I could do a little better than that at a combat game. 


 I console myself by remembering that they probably got so good by dividing their time equally between playing the game and pulling their puds. Cyberbullying buttholes.