I recently acquired an X-Box Kinect the other day. It was a birthday gift from someone, and it was a neat little toy I was looking into. My main reasons were initially for the game Yoostar 2, which is considered a "movie karaoke" game where players act out scenes from popular and famous movies. It looked fun and interesting, but the driving factor behind this idea was my conceptualization of Yoostar as the ultimate in drunken get-togethers with friends. Imagine drinking with good buddies, and in your inebriated stupor, stumbling up to have fun with some of the most iconic lines from The Godfather? Or maybe The Terminator?
This could have possibilities, and it could be done so without complete humiliation in front of the local bar scene, which most folks grudgingly must accept when performing music karaoke at the wee hours of a weekend morning. Under the care-free wings of alcohol, they want to do it, but their brains knows they'll look like idiots. Still, sacrifices must be made, and with Kinect, that sacrifice is no longer an option.
While toying around with my machine, I was soon to find out that the Kinect hosts an awesome power that unleashes the worst in human villainy, and it wasn't that Yoostar 2 didn't live up to my expectations. I honestly haven't even tried it yet.
This villainy stems from the deep, dark recesses of mankind's soul. It lurks in the pit of our bowels each waking moment, and it simmers to a boil, slipping out every so often when we feel stressed or backed into a corner. Whenever we feel that need to thrash on someone lower down on the food chain than us, we let this smoldering beast free to have its reign of terror for a few hours, plaguing hapless and helpless victims like Alex DeLarge on invalids.
Human anger. Outbursts of frustration.
When the rage has burned down and been contained again, we put our normal, polite, civil, human faces on again to cooperate with the rest of society and the community around us. Our vicious words are ignored, for the most part, as if they never happened, and the wheels of society continue spiraling. That is, they did before Kinect came to us.
One of the functions on this little toy is its ability to obey voice commands and carry out the most menial and simple of tasks, like opening or closing a disc tray. For it to hear correctly, I've often had to yell at it like some senile old man you may find screaming at bushes growing next to his front door. Just standing there. Screaming raptly at an inanimate object.
In response, the X-Box simply obeys. It listens, and if one were to scream loud enough, it gives in without a peep of protest. Just calm silence. Pent-up spite from stress long ago finds a way to creep into the human mind at this premise, as I can simply order the X-Box to open the disc tray, set in a disc manually, and then walk away a few feet without closing the tray only to order my machine to do it for me. Sure, I could have closed that disc tray. I was right there. A mere few inches away. Just a push of a button.
But NOOOOOOOO.
I wanted to make the X-Box do it. It had to learn some discipline. It had to learn who the master was. Us. The little people who work menial jobs in a world structured against them.
As I sit here and write this up, I can hear my younger brother downstairs testing out my Kinect. He's screaming at the machine to pull up Netflix, and I sense frustration in that the episode he ordered to watch didn't play exactly as he deemed fit.
He could have simply used a controller, but no, the temptation was there. Let's yell at the machine to do it. That bitch. That peon.
This is how the wealthy must feel about their servers.
