In South Korea, video games pay money to YOU

Excerpt from the article:


(12-18) 04:00 PDT Seoul -- Choi Yeon-sung avoids going out most days, and when he's on the street, he puts his head down -- to dodge the whispers, the stares and the pleas for autographs.

Such are the hardships of a celebrity video game player in South Korea.


I guess it figures. All the people that we idolize-- actors, singers, sports players-- are gaining enormous fame and fortune for doing something that we all did for fun when we were kids.

I mean, as kids, most of us enjoyed singing songs. Most of us played pretend, and most of us threw a ball around from time to time. And now, as adults, we have a certain fascination for people who can take these seemingly simple activities almost to the level of an art form, doing them with such skill that they make gigantic amounts of money just from the expenditures of people who are willing to pay to see them do it.

This happens even when (as in the case of some actors) there is very little actual skill present, and the individual in question got this ridiculously high-paying job because of other traits, like inherited wealth or good looks. In some ways, this may fascinate people even more, because not only is the person making millions doing an activity that kids do for fun, but he or she is making millions without even doing this activity much better than kids do it. It's the American dream of attaining fame and fortune without any significant effort.

So it's no surprise that some country, someday, would convey this kind of celebrity status to video game players. I say it's great-- at least video game players have to have actual skill in order to achieve celebrity status.

I just wish that there were some kind of respect for people who don't do anything fun and useless for a living, and instead work long hours doing hard manual labor that benefits others in a tangible way. Why is it people like that who earn minimum wage?

The things that a backroom job does to your mind...

Days like this just leave me in awe of how many people there are in the world. Specifically, how many people there are in a big city like Minneapolis (which isn't even one of the most populous cities in the world, which boggles my mind even more).

People are buying patio furniture. A lot. At the Target store where I have my backroom job, if you just counted the number of people who came in for patio furniture and needed to have it pulled from the backroom for them-- heck, if you just counted the ones who did that during the hours I was on duty... I'm sure you'd get over a hundred so far this spring.

I can only imagine what number you'd get if you included people who bought patio furniture when I wasn't there, and people who bought patio furniture that didn't need to be pulled from the backroom, and people who bought patio furniture at other Target stores in the area, and people who bought it at other patio furniture retailers besides Target.

And yet this huge number of people is not even the majority of people in this city. I know this, because there are three situations when you buy patio furniture:

1. When you get a patio for the first time in your life, and have to buy your very first set of patio furniture. (Hasn't happened to me yet.)

2. When your old patio furniture breaks. (Also hasn't happened to me, of course.)

3. When you decide that your old patio furniture is so godawful ugly that getting new, better-looking patio furniture is worth a few hundred dollars to you. (Won't ever happen to me, but probably happens to many of the yuppies around here.)

I am willing to bet that, for the average person, quite a few years pass between these events. I doubt there are many people who buy a set of patio furniture every year, or even every two or three years. So, at any given time, the number of people currently buying patio furniture has got to be a pretty small fraction of the population.

And yet this small fraction of the population is huge. Patio sets just keep marching out the door, day after day, nonstop. I see them being bought, and I know I'm only seeing a small percentage of the ones that are being bought, and yet it seems like a staggering number to me. And not only is this staggering number only a small percentage of the patio sets being bought, but the mind-blowing number of people buying patio sets is only a small percentage of all the people in the city.

And this city is only a tiny, tiny percentage of the people in the world.

Some people look up at the stars to think about how gigantic the universe is and how small they are as individuals. I look at South Bali Gazebos and Parisienne Wrought Iron Chair and Table Sets.

Late-night thoughts

In my city, from time to time, there are billboards and signs advertising religion. Nothing flamingly fundamentalist; just things like "Teenagers, rebel! Take your parents to church!" In 1999 there was an ad campaign pointing out that "the Bible is Y2K compatible." "If the lights go out, turn to the Light of the World." Cute stuff like that.

It occurs to me that, while there seems to be a law against having religious material in a government-owned area like a courtroom, there is no law against having religious material in a government-owned area like a city street.

So I think we can quit arguing over the whole issue. If a judge wants to display the Ten Commandments, all he needs to do is rent some billboard space in front of his courthouse.