One of the downsides of living in an apartment building just across the road from a large, public park is — unfortunately — the tendency for incomprehensible gatherings of crew-cut youths clad in bright colours and their beer-gut-and-Budweiser parents in tow, two screaming babies in a pram and another in the oven. Yes, I’m referring to the unfortunate but inevitable occurrences of football games — soccer, as the Americans call it — which in itself would not be a big problem, if not for the fact that it both attracts and largely consists of club-headed neanderthals who appear to display a worrying lack of self-control, leading to what I can only describe as some of the most hoarse, vehement shouting forcing its way out of their Lambert & Butler tar-coated throats.

It’s not just this, though, but any occurrence of this inexplicably dull sport which seems to evoke the most primive and violent natures from these already low-brow plebians. Going anywhere near a public place before, during, or after any kind of match which seems to hold some ridiculous significance to these simians is practically a death sentence, due to their unfortunate nature to riot furiously and violently if “their” team loses the game, a haze of bloodlust hanging over them like a cloud. Similarly, if the team they “support” — and I use that word in the loosest manner possible — wins a game, they seem equally overcome with primal fury, destroying and fighting everything in their path as their uncontrollable wrath leaves broken windows and empty beer cans in its wake. This, perhaps, is the most bizarre aspect of the whole experience, as if every fan is simply a ticking time-bomb, waiting for the moment to explode in bestial anger regardless of the game’s outcome!

I can’t even begin to understand why sports of most kinds tend to bring out the worst, most primal and aggressive natures of ordinarily air-brained yet harmless peons — though it mostly seems to focus around the more physical of sports, ones that involve a lot of running, since I’ve rarely heard of a chess riot, or police being called in to deal with enraged snooker fans.

Truth be told, though, that’d be quite hilarious to observe.

(Image courtesy of my blogging compadre, Gorse.)

And there it is, after countless hours of boredom and frustration, after trawling mindlessly through mountains of outdated content I cared little about, at last the reward — and with it a new title, Loremaster Squick, a way to show the world that I truly have nothing better to do with my life than sink hours into tedium and repetition for the hopes of a hollow reward of coloured pixels. Despite that, I don’t regret a moment of it.

That’s what got me thinking about gaming as a whole, and the bizarre system of effort and reward that we as gamers seem to impose upon ourselves. Of course achievements in games like World of Warcraft or on systems such as the Xbox 360 and Steam — or a rose by any other name, such as “trophies” on the PlayStation 3 — are the perfect example of this mentality in action, I feel it’s only a relatively new coat of paint on the surface of something much older. Remember when you were a kid hanging out in the video-game arcades of the 80′s and 90′s, marvelling at the high-score tables populated and dominated by those elite few with the seemingly unattainable skills needed to occupy such a throne? Or as a more domestic example, something every gamer should be familiar with: The urge to beat the level, defeat the boss, to press onward and explore new territory, or simply to beat a score and achieve some measure of satisfaction from the knowledge that your skill and dedication could be quantified by digits glowing on a phosphor screen.

This, I feel, is something endemic and intrinsic to the gamer mindset, and yet the intangible appeal fails to make any logical sense in my mind. We push ourselves to incredible lengths for the sake of achievement and improvement in an artificial system which exists solely for the sake of providing challenge where there would otherwise be none. An extreme case of this would be the Korean gamer who quite literally killed himself by playing too much StarCraft; more common examples can be seen all around us. Who out there wearing the moniker of “gamer” can honestly say they haven’t spent a weekend or more shut away in a darkened room, hunched over a screen, thoroughly absorbed in one of these faux-simulacra?

Is it simply human nature to constantly push ourselves further, so desperate for self-improvement and so eager for accolade that we are inherently drawn to such a medium? The overwhelming popularity of gaming as a whole on a worldwide scale would seem to imply a certain truth in this logic, though I can’t help but feel as though something is missing. Can it really be that simple? In the end, are we still just a bunch of apes who’ll push a button all day long if it means we’ll get a bunch of bananas and a pat on the head?

And there it is. Perfect. Pure. This is what I wanted in my stomach today. Oh yes.

To say I don’t cook very often would be an understatement; in fact, I’d go as far as to suggest that the vast majority of my diet is based upon microwaved ready-meals and various pre-made concoctions that come in tins. Occasionally I’ll branch out and experiment — such as the time I successfully re-heated cooked sausages by using a toaster — but for the most part, it’s best for everyone’s sake that I refrain. Today, I decided to attempt an ill-fated experiment with making enchiladas, courtesy of an Old El Paso meal kit. Having had excellent results from the nachos kit in the past, what could go wrong?

As it turns out, a great deal.

Given that the kit provides enough food for 3-4 people, I decided to go halves on the ingredients. Easy — I’d bought two packs of cooked chicken and a bag of grated cheese, but it was easy enough to separate the cheese and only open a single pack of chicken. The pre-heating the oven and slicing the chicken parts went pretty well, too, though of course I got a couple of oil splashes from stir-frying said chicken. The fail begins when I was instructed to mix the “spice mix” powder with hot water, and combine that with both sachets of tomato sauce. I did so, splashing tomato substance all over the kitchen and myself numerous times in the process, and it was only after I looked upon my creation with pride before I remembered the whole halves thing.

Shit.

I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve who just discovered Santa isn't real.

Time to fry up more chicken and acquire more minor oil-burns (including, of course, fumbling and pouring far too much oil into the pan), realizing the bowl wasn’t even big enough to combine the new quantities of chicken and cheese required and thus having to combine them clumsily into a larger bowl (more spillage), chicken going everywhere as I tried to combine the un-mixed and mixed parts together. But surely, even if I end up with too much food, it can’t go wrong now?

Wrong again. Now it comes to spooning the filling into the tortillas, during which point I somehow managed to get spicy tomato sauce all over my leg without even fully understanding how. I also realized that the baking tray it required was currently used to house the sauce/cheese/chicken mixture, requiring yet another messy transfer before my truly appalling attempts to wrap the filling in the circles of corn and wheat. And then I realize the baking tray is far, far too small, requiring the kind of desperation that only a starving chef could appreciate, literally forcing the things down into a barely-coherent mass in the tray, my miscalculations on filling size providing less and less in each tortilla, which helped only slightly. Pouring on the rest of the sauce and the remainder of the cheese, more tomato goodness went everywhere.

Finally — not sure if the tray is oven-safe or not but hardly caring at this point — I thrust it into the kiln-like depths and awaited the result.

The results: Not quite as advertised, though I blame myself entirely for this failure. A mass of gooey, red-and-yellow sludge topped with what almost resembles elbow macaroni, concealing beneath a sad, crushed amalgm of god only knows what, forced into far too small a space with all the wrong quantities, begging to be eaten just so it can be put out of its miserable existence.

And this is why I’m not a chef.

No philosophical discussion is complete without stick-figure diagrams.

Yesterday, I had a discussion on theology/philosophy with a couple of Mormon missionaries, largely concerning the issue of omnipotence vs. the fallacy of free will. I don’t think they were really expecting me to whip out the whiteboard and dry-erase markers, but it seemed to go over pretty well. I was actually surprised by the outcome — they stumbled a little at first, clearly not expecting the question, but managed to formulate a fairly adequate response. The gist of the conversation ended with the conclusion that even though God knows what choice I’m going to make (the little stick-man in the box with the branching paths represents me), that doesn’t influence or affect the fact that I still had the choice in the first place.

Now, I could have gone more philsophical and argued that knowledge of the future does in fact invalidate any possible notion of free will, and even without the presence of some heavenly overlord, this concept troubles me from time to time purely from the perspective of science (we are, after all, composed of matter which acts in predictable and logical ways). But I’ll give them credit for trying, especially as I’m sure neither of them expected to have such a thing thrust upon them without warning.

Maybe next time.

The rest of the conversation pretty much went as could be expected, and I had time a-plenty to clarify a few things I’ve been hazy on. I’m not about to be “converted” or choose a religion any time soon, but I like to think I keep an open mind, and this is one angle I simply haven’t given much attention to in the past. I know plenty enough about Catholicism, I’ve read into Taoism and Buddhism, but those Mormons always just seem so damn happy, and I want to know what their secret is. And then I’ll ask one of those monks in orange robes who always hang out on streets and seem to constantly act like they just won the lottery last week and things could not be better.

Somewhere along the line, I just decided that I was tired of life being predictable, dull, and largely falling into the trap of same shit, different day. There’s something fundamentally satisfying about just breaking out of that routine and walking down a path you’d never normally take, just to see where it leads you.

Sometimes I wish it was possible to insert images into compiled C code, in a way that’d make them pop up on the screen — 90s hacker movie style — when anyone tried to tamper with my precious creation.

Mostly, I wish this was possible because then I’d have this pop up inside a large, angry, hazard-line box.

Oh, c’mon. You know that’d be awesome.