/pizza

I thought it was ridiculous that Pizza Hut has its own channel via Time Warner digital cable in this area, from which you can actually key in the type of pizza you wish to order from your armchair, and have it delivered straight to your door.

But, it actually gets worse than that. If what I am about to show here was a joke, I would be laughing my tail off, almost literally. It would make an excellent parody of a certain group of people I have come to regard with an intensifying degree of contempt.

That sad truth is that it's real. It actually exists, and it has already been implemented. My initial reaction was to laugh, more in nervous disbelief than pure amusement. As soon as I began to ponder it, I nearly wept.

http://everquest2.station.sony.com/pizza

Yes, my dear hopelessly sociopathic gaming geeks, ordering pizza now no longer requires scraping up the entirety of your blobby mass from the computer chair whose contours are perfectly molded to the shape of your body, or even leaving your precious game of Everquest you've been working on continuously since the last genuine Elvis sighting! You know the world is becoming a better place to live when pizza can be ordered by a simple keyboard command even your average Everquest player could understand! Of course, if no one else is around (and there likely wouldn't be--chances are you never even answer your phone, providing you didn't lose it amongst all the Mountain Dew cans and empty pizza boxes strewn about your room) you'll still have to get up to answer the door and pay the deliveryman. But hey, who said the world was perfect?

And remember, you'll get fresh pizza! It's certainly worth emphasising that the pizza will be fresh, and not a week-old moldy specimen they pulled out from underneath the cleaning supply cabinet (sound familiar?). So you can play content in the knowledge that while you're slaying evil monsters, gaining awesome new spells with which to pwn your rivals, and developing invaluable relationships with 11 year-old nerds who deliberately misspell common words to fit in with a clique and hit on anything that shows promise of having a vagina, your pepperoni trio pizza is in the oven, just rising to be devoured in an Orc-like fashion!

Enough mockery, though. I simply cannot get over how strikingly pathetic this is. My loath of multiplayer gaming is not the primary cause of my vexation. It's the fact that these online RPG players who spend the majority of their lives in a virtual world are only encouraged to keep on playing even in spite of hunger. Honestly, it would be so good for them to get up, stretch, and go for a nice little stroll to a local eatery--get some fresh air, a little exercise, and maybe remind themselves what it's like to interact with real environments and real people. But no, pizza can now be ordered from a video game and brought to your front door, necessitating only a short, intense, breath-stealing waddle upstairs and through the hallway. I can just picture a pasty-skinned, obese kid devouring his fresh pizza, typing in nifty little commands with his fat greasy fingers, thinking "life doesn't get any better than this." I cannot help but be contemptuous of such a lifestyle, because there is much, much more to life than having junk food brought to your door as you stare bleary-eyed into a computer screen, playing epic virtual quests with equally bland souls all day. At least, I hope most people have the capacity to realise that and embrace the finer aspects of life.

Now, if only you could install a sink into your computer desk, and make your computer chair double as a toilet. Then, we'd be in business, wouldn't we? At least, until your toilet backs up. Then, you might just have to turn on your Nintendo and order up professional plumbing service from the Mario Brothers.