PS: Relieved

Sony, intimidated by my threat to mobilise the world, have fixed the problem. Or, to be strictly accurate, the PS3 has fixed the problem itself. Just what we need: intelligent computers. A few tiny steps from sentience and then we’ll have Arnold Schwarzenneggers all over the place.

Let me terminate this topic by telling you that Spud is at this very moment catching up on last night’s playing; I can hear him muttering parent-approved swear words under his breath (blast/fart/crap). He reminds me of his father, who would come home from work in the early days of our marriage and play games on his monochrome screened, 20 megabyte hard driven computer, and scream the foulest language at it. When I asked him why he played them when they had such a deleterious effect on his mood, he replied, ‘Because it relaxes me,’ proving that even back in the Eighties computers were already smarter than some people.

PS3d Off

Spud Bud is rather annoyed.  He got in from school last night, overjoyed because he had no homework for the first time in three years and could dedicate the whole of his evening to the Playstation. 

Not. 

There’s a glitch in the system, apparently, rather like the Millennium Bug i.e. something to do with the date, and if you turn it on to use it, it explodes and gives you measles and you die of gangrene.  That was how it sounded when Spud was raging about it, anyway.  How can I live without my PS3?  No aliens to massacre; no World Cup to win without one united player in the squad; no car chases knocking down innocent pensioners who happen to get in the way?  When I suggested he do something radical like read a book, I suddenly knew how scared those aliens must feel when he notices them.

I’m sure the bug is not as life-threatening as he thinks it is; people survived without electricity and modern medicine long enough for somebody to invent them, so I imagine they can get by without their PS3s for a while.  (I had to whisper that last sentence so he didn’t burn me for heresy).   Sony can’t afford to upset millions of players around the world.  If they all react like Spud, and I bet they do because, like my son, they’re all geeks with no life, then there’s going to be a lot of angry gamers gathering and fomenting outside Sony headquarters.  Which is in Japan, by the way.  Here’s the address according to their website, in case you want to protest in person: 1-7-1 Konan, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0075, Japan.  I quite like the idea of starting a global riot; I’ve always been interested in Chaos Theory: a housewife flaps her wings in England and a giant corporation Novocaines a generation in Japan.  Or did it happen the other way around?

I wasn’t going to use the phrase ‘PS3 Bug’ because I didn’t want hordes of mega-nerds finding their way to my blog in their quest for Sony answers and becoming enraged that I don’t have it and wiping me off the face of the blogosphere with their uncanny technical super powers.  But if I’m going to start a mass movement, I think I’ll have to.  PS3 Bug.

An interesting aside: a thesaurus.com definition:  a geek is any smart person with an obsessive interest, a nerd is the same but also lacks social grace, and a dweeb is a mega-nerd

An uninteresting aside: it still bugs me that the Millennium was celebrated at the end of 1999.  A millennium is a thousand years and two millenniums are two thousand years, not one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine years.   Buy a calendar, people!

When I told Spud about the Millennium Bug and how everyone was Y2Krazy and that terrified world citizens stockpiled tinned goods and moved to the wilds of Scotland in case aeroplanes fell out of the sky and fridges crashed, he was at first amused but then began to see the attraction.  Once Sony sorts the problem, he’s taking his PS3 and the contents of my larder, and moving to Glasgow.