I'm reading the escapist from start to present. Frankly, I'm losing the battle, because they seem to publish issues quicker than I can read them. Fortunately, I seem to have detected a pattern. See, each of the writers seems to write one type of article, and by type I really mean the same article over and over again but with different words and pictures. This is really speeding up the process.
I'm slightly irked everytime I read the "we're becoming normal people now" article in it's different manifestations. The premise of the article is simple: Look at gaming, everyone is playing video games now. Sony and Microsoft have taken consoles and made them entertainment items. Everyone buys them, not just gamers. We should accept these normal people into our gaming culture, so they realise that we're not insane axe wielding maniacs. Nerds are about to become cool. All hail the new flesh.
Except that it's all bullshit. Firstly, if everyone plays games, and you're better than they are, it still won't make you cooler than them. Secondly, if normal people play games now, and they didn't play games before, and you did play games before, you must not have been normal. Them playing games simply makes them normal, and you still not normal, except now the both of you play games. The difference is that games will now be big budget extravaganzas of everything you hate about TV, sports, and popular music. No longer are they catering to you, the gamer, they're catering to Average Joe, and you won't want to play the games he wants to play.
So now you're still a freak, only surrounded by normal people in an increasingly unfamiliar setting. And it gets worse.
You see, absolute freaks sometimes hang out with lesser freaks. The lesser freaks accept them because, well, they're all freaks, and the absolute freaks aren't really all that bad, in context. When the lesser freaks are absorbed into the realms of normality, the normal friends of the lesser freaks are less tolerant of the absolute freaks, and the absolute freaks end up being left alone. This makes them turn into axe wielding maniacs. These axe wielding maniacs are going to go after the lesser freaks for abandoning them.
They will kill you, and you can't do anything about it because they're 1337er than you are!
The real solution is to realise why we want to become normal: women. See, if there were more freaky women, more men would want to become freaks than the other way around. All we have to do is to emotionally scar little girls so they become freaks. Once this ratio grows above 50%, we win fellas... we win.