Life and alternatives

Anybody notice the new link? Quiet Bubble looks like the kind of thoughtful commentary on life-avoiding stuff like books, comics and movies that I love a little too much. I've scanned the blog enough to know I don't always agree with him, but he's got a lucid point of view which I appreciate.

Hey, I would go out and get some fresh air, but there isn't any. Those wildfires in Florida and Georgia have smogged us up something fierce. I remember when my friend Scott was playing some computer game where you wander around a fantasy world. Midway through the game he installed a new graphics card, and I was intrigued by all the eye-candy background details that suddenly popped up. Right now Birmingham looks like we've switched to an older, cheaper graphics card. All the background details have vanished.

Say, speaking of computer fantasy games, here's how I broke that nasty habit: I started playing a game called Longest Journey or something. It's one of those games where you have a character onscreen, and when you point and click on some feature of the landscape your character describes it. So at the start of the game she was in her fantasy dreamworld where most of the story takes place, the premise being that she has vivid dreams which turn out to be true. I clicked on a mountain range, and she said "Real life never looked so beautiful." I peered at this three-inch Thomas Kincaide-looking mountain range, peeked out the window onto a beautiful sunny day, decided that real life looked way more beautiful, and went outside. Goodbye, computer games.