Dining In

ChunkyChili posted:

Normally this house is chill. Four college students, a landlord, and his girlfriend.

Shredder is the fictitious name of one of my housemates (arch-enemy of splinter the great mutant ninja rat). Now I just have received a call from Shredder, waking me from a pleasant slumber. Some back story:

I have a pet snake. A small ball python. She is quiet, doesn't smell and has never escaped. My snake eats rats. Buying rats in bulk is the best option, and as such I have a large bag of frozen rats. It used to be that the dead rats 'chilled' in my mini fridge. As per my landlords request I recently shut off the fridge, no sense in wasting energy when the rats and my food can find space in one of the other freezers in the house. No problem there.

Shredder insists that I replace all of his food in the house freezer. Over $300 CAD, because it is "gross and unsanitary". I can't afford to do that. I need a second opinion. Did I cross a line with the rats, or is this guy a wingnut?

Last Friday Night I'm at the Wing Stop with six co-workers. First, let me just say that the Wing Stop has some damn fine wings. I'm not sure if they are a chain or anything, but if you can find one, you should give it a shot.

Back to the story... one of the guys is talking about how he is pissed off because he is having to pack all his things to move. It is such a pain in the ass to have to pack all the boxes, blah blah blah. I, being the optimist that I am, say something along these lines:

"It isn't so bad. When you move you get to rebuild your life; throw out the old and bring in the new. It's like the Phoenix who is reborn in his own ashes."

Everyone just turns and looks at me with a "WTF" look on their face. Not a single person at the table knew what the hell I was talking about. I mean jesus, even kids that watch Harry Potter are familiar with the Phoenix. The other people at the table were 6 college graduates aged from 25-35, and not a single one had even a scintilla of recognition in their eyes.

So here is the question and I realize that I might get a skewed answer because of the audience I am addressing - Am I complete geek for referring to the Phoenix in an everyday conversation or are the people I work with just a bunch of uncultured heathens?

See, I don't quite see it like that. It's more like this:

You go into a fancy french restaurant. Food costs a fortune, but it's (by all accounts) worth it. You order your food, so does your companion. You get it, and it's this hideously complex arrangement of sauces and textures and such. It's also got a fork. The waiter spends a minute explaining the subtlety of the flavours and such- pretentious, but he wants you to fully get what you paid for.

And then you ask for ketchup.

Is the chef justified in throwing you out on your ass afterwards, as he almost certainly would? Probably. You paid for it, but he made it, and he intended you to taste something specific that you were trying to completely ruin with salty red goop. You may not care, you may only care about the fact that it was technically a chicken dish and you were still gonna eat that chicken (as if that's what mattered), but he still had a perfectly good reason for saying "er, no, fuck off and die."

Now, I don't think that this is why there aren't any cheat devices now. The reason is because it's far more lucrative to sell them, as EA knows and as everybody else will soon know as well. The most lucrative part of gaming in the future is very likely to be these ancillary costs, why would they give that up? I have little sympathy for IP extremism either.

(EULAs are horseshit, everybody KNOWS they're horseshit, the only reason anybody abides by their provisions is that they're too poor/dumb/scared to fight a legally unenforceable contract in court, even though EULAs get regularly mauled there.)

But c'mon. You do have to recognize that sometimes you shouldn't be slathering ketchup on your meal.