A recent Wired article and subsequent Slashdot discussion was a lot more fact than fiction for me and reminded me of a story I'm fond of telling ...

In the summer of 1997, my family and I moved to Regina two days after I graduated from high school. My friends, Tyler and Brian, and I worked for a couple weeks at a local computer camp (where we had originally met years before) and then spent the rest of the summer working for the Saskatchewan Science Centre developing curriculum for a computer camp and re-doing their website (see the fruits of our labours here). We were working there through a grant provided by Labatt People in Action. We were either really good at what we did or there wasn't enough work to do, because we spent most of that summer downloading new things called "MP3s" and playing Quake against each other. If you are not familiar with the game, our computers were networked together and we (virtually) ran through mazes all day killing each other with some huge weapons, and our days were filled with explosions and graphic (1997 graphics, of course) murder. We played Quake at least 6 hours a day, sometimes even more.

It got so bad that it started to affect my real life. Once, I was in the bathroom not far from a mining exhibit in the Centre. Every few minutes this exhibit sounded a giant explosion in its demonstration of mining. I was sitting on the toilet and suddenly heard this huge explosion (from the exhibit, of course) and my first thought was "Oh shit, they're coming to get me!" and I started to get up. I literally thought that what I had heard was an explosion from gunfire and mortars and I needed to leave before I got killed. The next time the line between reality and fantasy was blurred was when we were at the university that summer registering for classes. We were walking out of the UC when I saw a bus driving by with pictures of C.C. and Lorie on it, the DJs at what I considered to be the worst radio station ever, Z99. I swear to God that I reached behind my back for my rocket launcher! I actually believed that I was carrying a rocket launcher and could use it to blow them away.

Verily, I speak the truth!