Over the weekend, the remote control for my beloved TiVo decided to roll over, shit the bed and expire. If you don’t have TiVo, know that the remote is the only way to control it. No working remote means an uncommunicative TiVo box that does what it wants, recording and deleting at it’s whim. Meanwhile, you can’t watch anything it may have recorded for you.

After calling support, going through the rigmarole to determine the problem, they’re sending me a new remote since I’m still under warranty and I can’t seem to find a store in New York City that sells them separate from the whole system. They all want to sell you those $200 universal remote deals. All I want is my trusty $30 TiVo remote back.

In the meantime, to stop TiVo from changing channels on me and deleting shows on it’s drive that I may still want to watch, I’ve unplugged it. I actually felt a pang of loss watching it’s little power light fade as I stood there, cord in hand. Almost like I’d just pulled a Schiavo on it. It was suffering, unable to communicate and just going through the motions, still trying to be a good little worker ant even with it’s legs pulled off. Poor little bugger. I had to put it out of it’s misery.

I’d never realized how dependent I was on TiVo. I used to hold the fact that I didn’t own a television as a point of pride, but yet there I was, reflexively thumbing the old cable box remote I’d pulled out of limbo only to find that no, Dave—you can’t pause live TV anymore. You can’t rewind. You can’t skip commercials and you can’t do whatever you want and trust that your favorite television shows will be dutifully recorded for you. No, you have to sit there like a tool and watch every mind-numbing commercial at the proper time-slot and God help you if someone talks to you or a car alarm goes off on the street, you deaf fuck. There’s no pausing in the land of no TiVo.

It’s snotty, but it’s almost an offense to have to watch TV the old fashioned way. It’s like if the Amish watched television, they’d be going through what I have to deal with—only by choice. Without TiVo, watching TV sucks monkey balls. Instead of a hard drive filled with all your favorite programming, you’re back to Sunday nights with 200-plus channels and jack-shit worth watching. Lame! Hopefully my replacement remote will arrive soon because while I hate missing the Daily Show and Colbert Report, etc.—dealing with this for much longer is going to have me back to being an anti-television believer.

I bought a brand-spanking-fresh-copy of the FPS game, Prey, after waiting for it for almost a year. All the videos, screengrabs and rants I’d seen had me thinking it was going to be the coolest shit since duct tape.

After installing to my desktop’s XP partition (and subsequently spending 40 minutes running updates and patches since I never boot Windows anymore), I gave it a whirl and was greeted with a jerky, shitty looking game with the lowest frame-rate I’ve ever seen. A little deeper digging and I found that my NVidia GeForce 5200 wasn’t supported and closest I could get to smooth gameplay was by running at the lowest graphical settings, which were horrible. I wasn’t happy.

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I don’t really watch much television. Law & Order, Grey’s Anatomy, The Daily Show and the random historical documentary or something similar pretty much sums up my time spent in front of the TV when not watching a DVD. I have nothing against it. I could watch those Roman and WWII warfare documentaries all day and I’m a sucker for the “History of the Bible” and “Life of Jesus” bullshit shown almost non-stop on the History Channel and others. I just get distracted or forget to watch them.

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For the past month and a half, I’ve been spending a good chunk of my free time in Second Life. Stripped from the official website, Second Life is described as “a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.” Since it’s user-run, it’s hard to peg, since everyone generally moves to groups and cliques they identify with and do or create whatever the hell they want. In short, from pervert to programmer and from gamer to shut-in—there’s something for everyone. Second Life is definitely some pretty whacked out shit, worth at least a quick look.

Touring about the territories of Second Life, you see seemingly endless 3D creations. Houses, vehicles, stores, giant purple dildos, whatever you could possibly imagine seems to be represented there in one form or another. Users are given the use of a 3D modeling program while having the benefit of still being in-game, allowing you to create objects while playing or possibly as a form of play. Some objects are incredibly beautiful and painstakingly crafted to be as aesthetic or realistic as possible, while others are mediocre or downright lame. Being a self-created reality, there’s quite a varying amount of quality out there.

Everything made in Second Life can be sold to other players, using game dollars known as Lindens. In turn, this virtual money can actually be exchanged for real hard currency. The last time I checked the exchange rate, twenty US dollars made the equivalent of around four hundred Linden dollars. Some people—prolific and talented ones, actually make a tidy chunk of cash of this virtual business. I’ve met one individual who nets about twenty thousand dollars annually from in-game sales of items, scripts and real estate, nicely supplementing his teacher’s salary.

While I’m impressed with Second Life, I don’t really know what to make of it. There’s some really smart people, very talented artists and professionals and a huge mass of idiots, perverts and all-around trashy people. There seems to be bondage shit everywhere you look and everyone seems to be trying to make up for their shortcomings through their avatars. Everyone’s got big muscles, huge boobs and all the trappings. It’s pretty seedy and more than a little bit gross. Where are all the fat, bald people? Personally speaking, blindingly beautiful person that I am, I spent a good chunk of time getting my avatar to look about as close to the real-life me as I could. I just don’t understand why so many people need to look like rejects from a Florida nightclub. Who wants to see that shit?

A good defense of this good, bad and ugly is the fact that it is truly user-run. All this crap is from the great masses. While a kind of exhilarating example of digital democracy, it doesn’t do much in changing my belief that the majority of the human race would be better served as food to the smarter individuals. Brains, it’s what’s for dinner, but I digress.

I don’t know how long I’ll stick with Second Life. My PlayStation is much more inviting and requires much less actual work, but if you find yourself in-game, stop by. My game-name is David Sleestak. I’ll show you my house and we’ll kill a few beers and bong-hits. In-game, of course.