This weekend's showers - the first in several months - mark our annual return to the rainy season. Each summer San Diego is warm and sunny, oftentimes without a cloud in the sky. But then Fall and Winter roll around, and the rain comes back. Last year was particularly wet, setting records up and down the coast, from San Diego county up through Los Angeles county. I can't imagine that this year's winter will be as wet (or wetter) than last year's, but if the last few days are any indication, it's not going to be a particularly dry winter either.
Personally this is my least favorite time of the year. Give me sun and warmth over drizzle and gray. The only redeeming thing about San Diego winters is the occassional Santa Ana winds, which are hot winds blowing down from the high desert. Each time the Santa Anas kick up, which is usually a few times a winter, we get cloudless days in the 70s in the middle of winter. Being able to walk down the street in shorts and a t-shirt in mid-February, the sun warming my skin, while back home in the Midwest the family's digging out of the latest snowstorm, helps me put up with the gray, cloudy, rainy days that dominate the winter months.
I went to school to a small, male-dominated engineering school in Missouri and we had our fair share of gamer geeks. Guys (and the occassional gal) who were either obsessed with card-based games (Magic and the like) or computer-based games (MUDs or other cheesy network games that could be played on dated Solaris boxes). These were the publicly accessible gamer geeks, ones who you could see and smell in public, be it in the dorm lounges or the computer labs. There were also, however, a relatively large contingency of MMORPG fans, mainly Everquest at the time. These gamers, though, were typically confined to their rooms, so their presence was far less obvious.
However bad Rolla had it, it appears as if South Korea has it several orders of magnitude worse. From Video Game Addicts Concern S.Korean Gov't:
Many of South Korea's 17 million gamers _ some 35 percent of the population, principally males in their teens and twenties _ are obsessive. At the 1,000 won-per-hour ($1) Internet cafes popular among young South Koreans, they'll sit eyes glued to monitors for hours on end. Sometimes play will extend for days. ...
Gamers camped out at Internet cafes typically live on instant cup noodles and cigarettes, barely sleeping and seldom washing.
Ick. Imagine the odor. It's not just olfactory matters, though - for some it's a matter of life and death. “In August, a 28-year-old man died after nearly 50 straight hours of playing online computer games. The man, whom police refused to identify by name, was moved to a hospital after he collapsed while gaming and died three hours later. ... This year's gaming death wasn't the first such case of someone dying at a computer terminal in this game-crazed nation: In 2002, a man died in Kwangju after 86 hours of marathon gaming.” Insane.
I wonder what societal factors allow for such a socially backward addiction to take hold in a nation. Are there a disproportionate number of women to men? I could understand how this phenomenon might take hold if there were high unemployment and few women. But if jobs and females are plentiful what possesses a young man to choose this over starting his career and finding a life mate/bedding a woman?
Attending a college where there were five men to every woman (and most of the women at UMR were nothing to write home about!), I guess I could see how one could slide into gaming addictions. Fortunately my social circle took an alternate path. Rather than giving up and descending into obsessive game playing, we simply spent our nights discussing how to get ourselves some tail. Sadly we were virtually all talk, but what do you expect from a bunch of computer nerds in a setting where there are an overabundance of Y chromosomes?
So what's up with South Korea? There has to be a better male to female ratio - they have no excuse! :-)