This week's rant brought to you by White-Out: putting white paint into tiny containers and pretending it's magic since the days of typewriters.
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Like oh so many people during this pandemic, i am playing video games a lot more than i usually do. Like, a lot more. No concerts to go to. No movies theater screenings. No anything, really, that we'd usually do with friends during our free or social time. Free time amounts have gone up, social time is non-existent. There are only so many movies and tv shows you can watch and only so many books you can read before you crave something more interactive to do while still "chilling" inside. There are only so many hours that my cardio or my neighbors can withstand noise making in my drum room. So the fun of videogames comes calling to help out and embrace us in these solitary times.
Even high level introverts like myself need social interaction and while we've been watching extrovert friends completely lose their shit over the last several months, all humans needs some level of interaction with new people. Online gaming allows for such interactions and allows for a low entry point into the social world for bite-sized serving lasting typically only one game. Russian roulette style interactions where you spin the cylinder and await what kind of teammates you will end up with for this round.
For all the good, the bad, and the utterly disturbing you come across while playing with randoms from a game's lobby, i have become almost inconsolably overwhelmed by a nearly constant occurrence: the astronomical number of people who have a "chirping" smoke detector going off in the background!
If i'm playing a game with teams of 4, at least every 3rd game there is someone in the random crew who has a detector clearly in need of a replacement battery. That is a lot of fucking people who's first line of safety against dying in a fire is not functioning at full capacity! i am sincerely concerned for a large number of people out there. Some of the people i get paired with are from other countries but a majority are playing here in the US. I imagine some of those chirps are coming from homes while others are coming from apartments.
i learned about the "chirp" in my 20's. It is the noise your smoke alarm makes when the backup 9 volt battery needs to me changed because it no longer has enough charge left. Growing up, my family replaced all the home's smoke detector batteries when we changed the clocks forward or backward for daylight saving - so twice a year, as recommended by fire departments everywhere. Because of this our alarms never got to the depleted battery point where they had to start making the warning "chirp".
A dangerous amount of videogamers out there either live in homes where they are not replacing these necessary batteries or reside in apartment buildings where the landlords don't care enough to have their maintenance staff replacing the batteries in these legally required devices every 6 month or so. In addition, that "chirp" is annoying as fuck. It's meant to be, so that you take action when you hear it. As annoying and distracting as it is to hear that sporadic electronic sound throughout the duration of a game, how do these people live with that constantly going off in the background? i'm not sure which bothers me more while playing, the piecing tone or my concern for those who's mics it is passing through?
For fuck's sake people: change that 9 volt battery! How are we going to survive a pandemic or worse - the climate crisis - if as a society we can't even keep our smoke detectors in basic operating condition. Honestly, it is a staggering amount... whatever frequency of occurrence you are envisioning right now based on my description... double it! i think it's beginning to effect my sleep.
