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The Hollywood Writers' Strike and My Gaming Habit

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Mel "Kezzy" Sodersten
FAN EDITORIALIST

Well it's official. The writers in Hollywood have decided to go on strike. At first I found this news kind of distressing. For a long time I found little on the television worth watching except for the Fox Sunday animation line up and sports. The standard sitcom formula had become very stale to me and I found myself playing a lot of videogames. However in the last few years I found a lot more programming that appealed to me. Heroes and Lost were definitely not sitcoms and I enjoyed following the stories. Boondocks gave me a cartoon that appealed to my hip-hop sensibilities and South Park's writing started to feel inspired to me once again after hitting a wall for a few seasons. I also discovered The Trailer Park Boys through my roommate which gave me several seasons of material to watch. And then there was The Office, 30 Rock, and Weeds, all sitcoms, but so different from the ones I'd become so bored watching. After having found television become such a part of my life again, the idea of losing it all was cause for angst.

However, given some time to reflect, I decided this might be a good thing. With so much good TV to watch, the last few years have seen me develop something that hadn't been an issue for me before. Yes I caught the dreaded backlog disease. While I have been pretty good about limiting the number of games I'm playing at any one time, the number of games still sitting in plastic on my shelf has been growing. And while my backlog isn't huge compared to some of the numbers I've seen (I just counted and there's 16 games, 17 if you want to count Mario Galaxy which my mom is gonna swoop up from Costco for me today, but it's not in my possession yet so I say 16) it will still be nice to have a lot of extra time to clear some of that up. On top of that my roommate has an excellent sci-fi collection I've been meaning to dip into, and it would be nice to actually get out in the fresh air more often and play some golf before winter really hits.

So to the writers in Hollywood getting ready to reenter talks this week I say stand strong brothers and sisters. Stick it to the man, you're the ones who make these programs I love so great, so get what you deserve. And when you do come back I will have cleared out some of my backlog and won't feel so guilty watching.