I love to read, and I also enjoy collecting my favorite series and authors’ novels. However, unlike most collectors, I don’t like hardcover editions of books. I vastly prefer paperbacks; they’re cheaper, fit better on my shelf, and are easier to just grab and throw in a pocket in case I’m going somewhere.

However, like their hardcover predecessors, there’s one thing about paperbacks that pisses me off: the price. On average, a paperback book today goes for about $7.99. Worse yet, this price is set regardless of the book’s length; it’s the same eight bucks for a 600-page novel and a 200-page one. Topping it off is the larger trade paperback format that many publishers have been adopting; these books are a few inches larger per side than standard paperbacks, but often include less pages…and the price starts at $13.95! What the hell’s up with that shit? More money, for less pages…just because the book’s slightly larger?

Fortunately, I’m a big proponent of buying used books; The Book Barn has helped me fill out my Frank Herbert collection for a dollar a pop. When I have to buy books new, I almost always use coupons to knock a few bucks off the price. I love to read, but when new books cost more than a lunch, something’s very wrong.

Oh, I’m sure I’ll piss a few people off with this one. And I even warned you that it was coming!

As great as the Internet has been in expanding communication and creativity around the world, in few places is the grand network’s place more hotly debated than in the video game hobby. While it’s done some good, I think the bad just might outweigh it.

Why? Because of the ridiculous Internet fanbase that the gaming community has morphed into. Instead of becoming a new way for game fans to meet up and enjoy discussing games, a majority of game talk on the Internet nowadays is nothing but flame wars and system bashing. It’s not enough to enjoy games; you’ve got to slam the competition, too.

This gets even worse when it comes to the rapidly-disappearing notion of exclusive titles. First-party stuff nonwithstanding, game series exclusive to a single platform are quickly becoming a thing of the past, due to the exorbitant costs of game development these days. As such, most big titles appear on all platforms simultaneously, or at least within a few months of each other. Instead of celebrating the fact that now more people can play a great game, fans are more apt to trash the platform the series original came from. It’s not good enough that Tekken is now multiplatform; it’s apparently more important that it’s no longer a PlayStation exclusive.

It’s not just fans that are to blame, either; hardware manufacturers and game developers are equally at fault. For example, Metacritic and other aggregate scoring systems have become a standard talking point in company press releases. No longer do highly reviewed games stand on their own merits; now, they absolutely must score higher than the competiton, or worse yet, they must score higher than an eight out of ten, lest their publisher scream bloody murder at the reviewer! (Like it’s their fault that your game didn’t come out as well as you’d hyped it.)

And just look at the ridiculous amount of nitpicking that goes on between multiplatform releases! Ninety-nine percent of the time, a game is going to be the same on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. There might be slight graphical glitches, or sound issues, or perhaps a set of items exclusive to one platform or another; but at the end of the day, the games are the same. However, you constantly see Internet trolls nitpicking every last difference to death in order to extol the virtues of their chosen platform while pissing all over its competition.

I suppose it’s not all bad. One upshot to the massive Internet fan culture is the lightning-fast fact-checking. When companies and their public relations firms lie, as they are wont to do, the gaming masses have been able to call them out on it very quickly. A famous example of this was back in May 2008, when Microsoft claimed in a press release that the Xbox 360′s global sales of 19 million were “more than any other current-generation console.” This was completely false, as the Wii had sold nearly 25 million units worldwide many months prior. Gamers called Microsoft out on this, and the company’s statement was quickly amended.

Overall, however, the Internet has made the gaming hobby a very nasty and corrupt place. I’ve left the video game forums I used to post on because of this; I was even moderator of one such forum, but the trolling and flaming got so bad that it was like trying to hold back a tidal wave with an umbrella. It just wasn’t worth trying to carry on a rational conversation anymore. It’s things like this that honestly push me away from the hobby from time to time. I pity anyone who’s just getting into video games, and quickly finds themselves over their head in a sea of mean and vicious fanboys with nothing better to do than attack, attack, attack.

Every now and then, I get the urge to watch a shitty movie. Seriously, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. They’re movies I know are crappy, because I’ve seen them before, but I still feel the need to watch them again. It’s like I’m a glutton for punishment.

When I was recovering from surgery earlier this year, it was the Star Wars prequels (don’t worry, I followed them up with the original trilogy). After seeing the much-hyped but eventually disappointing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I still wanted to see it again. Towards the end of the summer, I watched the Matrix saga in its entirety. (Part of that was because my girlfriend had never seen any of the sequels.)

Lately, though, the object of my brain’s desire has been the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. The first film was excellent; the sequels, not so much. Director Gore Verbinski didn’t even see the full script before he started work on those! (Fortunately, he’s vowed never to make that mistake again, so the powers-that-be will really have to kiss his ass if they want to make the inevitable fourth installment.) Anyway, I dunno where this sudden resurgence of interest in the PotC trilogy came from. Maybe it’s because LEGO® resurrected their Pirates theme. Or maybe I’m just stupid.

Digging down to the core of the matter, I wonder why I enjoy watching these junkballs. Perhaps it’s my overly sarcastic nature; when watching them, I do tend to make wiseass comments à la Mystery Science Theater 3000. Or perhaps I’m so sick of this twisted mockery of existence that I feel the need to torture myself (the economic slump will do that to people).

An interesting article appeared on CNN.com the other day. To sum up, a group of atheists in Olympia, Washington, put up a plaque next to a nativity scene with the following text:

At this season of THE WINTER SOLSTICE may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

As you’d expect, the Christian community is going absolutely bugshit over this, and someone even stole the sign! (It was later found in a ditch, and returned.) While I firmly support the atheists’ right to free speech, and agree that the Christian aspects of Christmas have been overblown over the past decade or so, it’s the way in which the atheists went about stating their piece that I’m not keen on.

If you want to change people’s minds, that’s fine. But the group worded their plaque in a rather rotten manner, and that’s only going to piss people off, not encourage intelligent discourse. A humanist group in Washington, D.C. ran a bus ad campaign that simply said “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.” That one’s far more agreeable. It doesn’t single out any particular religious belief or deity, nor does it shit on anyone if they do believe. It just calls on all of us to be decent human beings for a change, and that’s something humanity desperately needs, no matter what season it is.

People in the United States have a very unfavorable view of atheists and agnostics, and that view is largely driven by the evangelical Christian community. Atheists and agnostics are routinely painted by religious groups as evil, horrible people. While this clearly isn’t true a vast majority of the time, plaques like the one placed in Olympia do nothing but reinforce the negative stereotype. Cut the shit; there’s much more polite ways to get your point across, without sinking the same level of negativity as your adversaries.

The current generation of gaming makes me sick sometimes. No, it’s not because of the shovelware, or the high prices of the hobby, or the onslaught of generic shooters flooding the market. It’s because the gaming world has corrupted itself into a diseased culture where if a product isn’t in “first place” or has extremely high sales, then somehow, it’s crap. (This is primarily due to the Internet, and how that grand network has actually ruined gaming…but I’ll sum up my beliefs on that subject in another post. You’ll just have to wait.)

For example, the constant potshots that Microsoft takes at Sony in their press releases every month are also indicative of this first place culture. The only measure of the Xbox 360′s success, apparently, is that it outsells the PlayStation 3. Whatever happened to succeeding on your own merits? The same applies with games; if a game doesn’t sell a million copies, it’s often derided by the gaming public. This is ridiculous; as with any other media, popularity does not equal quality. (In fact, it’s often the opposite.)

You really see this behavior rearing its ugly head whenever criticisms (even constructive ones) are leveled at a particular game or platform. Let’s take, for example, the recently released Gears of War 2, for the Xbox 360. While it’s been getting the expected high reviews, the game’s not without its faults. Mention them to your stereotypical 360/FPS fan, though, and you’ll likely get the following response: “Well, it’s better than any game on teh PS3!!1!!!!11″ What, exactly, does the PS3 have to do with Gears of Wars 2? Absolutely nothing. It’s just like how when people pick on the PS3′s high price, a common Sony fanboy response is that “the 360 doesn’t even have BLU-RAY!” The 360′s lack of a high-definition optical drive has no effect on the PS3′s price, so why even bring it up? It’s apples and oranges, people.

Ironically, you see a reversal of the first place culture with the Nintendo Wii. As we’ve all seen, the Wii’s truly an anomaly in the gaming sphere; it’s not the most powerful system, it doesn’t support high-definition graphics, nor does it have a persistent online gaming service, but it’s absolutely trouncing the competition in sales. By the logic of the first place culture, it should be the king of the hill, because it actually is in first place, right? Oh, how horribly wrong. PS3 and Xbox 360 fanboys may not get along with each other, but they have no problem joining forces to trash the Wii. They’ll use any excuse in the book to slam Nintendo’s juggernaut, ranging from the absurd to the laughable. (My personal favorite is “[Insert game here] is the same thing as [insert older game here] with waggle controls!”) While the first place culture applies to them, it’s thrown out the window when it comes to the Wii, for no apparent reason.

This kind of logic disgusts me. Even during the heated Sega Genesis vs. Super NES war back in the 1990s, it never got this bad. There’s tons of great games available, no matter which platform you choose. Using your platform merely as a means to attack the competition is stupid, and only makes you look like a tool.