Pearl Harbor or: How I Learned to Stop Needlessly Wanting and Watch the Box Office Bomb

First, let me start off by saying this is not a post about the movie Pearl Harbor, that movie gem that came out the same year I graduated high school. I have never seen the movie, and don’t really have the intention to watch it. And that’s kind of the point of this post.

You see, although I have never seen nor desired to see the movie, and my wife has never seen nor desired to see it, it sits on our DVD shelf right now. Pearl Harbor is a movie that randomly found its way into our collection, most likely through a garage sale. See, I could easily blame my wife, and her hoarding tendencies for Pearl Harbor, but I know that I am equally guilty of this. I have dozens of video games in my collection that I have never really played. Some of them I have only played for fifteen minutes, and still more of them I have played even less than that. To be sure, there are some games in my collection that I have played all the way through, multiple times even, but well over half of them sit there unfinished. The reason I point to Pearl Harbor is that it is the perfect symbol of the consumerism that I, and many others in our society, are guilty of. At a personal level, it represents something that I don’t want, and possibly might even actively hate, yet because it can be easily obtained and will add to my collection of other things I don’t care about, I do want it. On a larger level, Pearl Harbor symbolizes everything wrong with consumerism because it is the ultimate formulaic movie. Seemingly trying to take advantage of the popularity of Titanic, one of the most successful movies of all time, this movie tried to combine the right amount of action and love story to a tragic historic event. It was the ultimate cash-in movie. Although I don’t think it did too well in the box office, it’s still a symbol of how we’ll take things with little substance, consume it, and then go on to the next thing of little substance with little thought about it.

Thus, we get to the point of this blog. A while back, before I started writing about running, or started running for that matter, I wanted to start a blog called “Ketchup Gamer”. The idea of the blog is that I will play through games I already have in my collection and will stop buying new ones until I have made a sincere effort to play all of the ones I already have. This doesn’t just apply to games, it also applies to movies and books, but games are the most obviously offenders in my collection. The idea is to appreciate what I already have and realize that I don’t need the newest things to be happy. And if it saves a little money, so be it, but that’s not really the point.

The other big thing is that I am limiting myself to things that I have physical copies of or express license to use digitally. My “gray area” collection of media on my computer has been completely deleted, and I can only play games or watch movies through devices they were made to be used in.

Also, I can consume “new media” through subscription services I already have, which means Netflix and PlayStation Plus, and can use whatever legitimate free internet sites, such as Hulu, that are available to me. I’m also allowed to go to the library, and check out anything from there. In fact, everyone should go to the library. It’s a wonderful place.

We’ll see how this goes. Next time, I’m going to talk about Pac Man Championship Edition for the PS3. I’ll just say for now that anyone with a PS3 or Xbox 360 needs to buy this game. Also, let me just say, in case any of you are worried I might do something stupid, I still have no intention of watching Pearl Harbor.