Mirror of our life found in the Seattle area.

PillBoy directed my attention over to Penny-arcade today to take in Tycho's post. I read it to the wife this evening and she requested that I re-post it on our blog, so here goes...

(Yes, it is true even down to the cat shit)

A large part of why my marriage functions is that I rarely see the person I'm married to, and if we do see each other we're too exhausted to fight about anything. You might think this has nothing to do with gaming or geekery, when it is in actuality the core of what makes my life possible. I'm often asked how I find the time to play the games I talk about, and it's really very simple. I'm emotionally inaccessible to my life partner.

(sidenote: I do not feel the emotionally inaccessible part applys to us.)

In the Monster Manual, she and I have different Activity Cycles that overlap slightly in the evening, during which time we consume a DVD in strained silence. This scenario is maintained by two cardinal rules which must be upheld at all costs, lest genuine dialogue occur.

1. She must never be exposed to any household tasks involving Cat Shit.

2. All gaming must be accomplished with the use of headphones.

The first one is easy enough. The second one had a single exception, the Xbox in the living room, until Crimson Skies was released. You and I are quite used to repetitive cues being broadcast to us constantly, we can derive the information - which side has the flag, let's say - without consciously processing each statement. Not so for her, and the fortieth time she heard that the "Blue Team" had "Dropped The Booty," it created a conflict that I was sure would result in the dissolution of our union. I was able to resolve this particular issue via the X2VGA converter, and we were able to resume our prior arrangement, but for a time we were dangerously proximate to true self-analysis.

Since I am free to play games so long as they do not project in the the audible realm, I had always assumed that this precluded any access to more advanced Sound Configurations, such as the elusive 5.1 that has become more and more prevalent. I can recall the day in 2000 when I discovered that a common pair of headphones could be made to emulate positional audio, quite the revelation at the time, like discovering that your penis is also a magic wand. Hearing word that there were actually wearable 5.1 audio setups was just as startling.