5 Things I Accomplished While PSN Was Down

We were all hit across the side of the face with a salmon when the Playstation Network went down. Nobody expected it or planned it, it just happened. Quickly gamers out there had to scramble to find a few things to hold their attention during the outage. Here I go over just a few things I accomplished during the PSN outage of 2011. There are more items, but these seem to be the most meaningless, because I did miss gaming a whole whole lot. I mean, who calls and reconnects with their family?

1. I organized my iTunes library.

I have what you would call a medium sized iTunes library (at least to me anyway). I’ve seen people with more, and I’ve seen people with less, but my music is up into the 7,000 range of song tracks. It boils down to over 62GB’s of content or 48 solid days of not listening to the same song if I were stuck on a deserted island. Having the PSN down allowed me to devote my time a few hours a day for a solid two weeks in order to assign album artwork, organize the tracks on each CD, and make sure everything was in order with it. If the PSN were online, I would have found games to play or other things to do in order to slack off. But thank goodness I didn’t have more tracks to organize because now that the PSN is actually online I probably won’t touch my music library again unless I have new CD’s to import. Yeah, I’m kinda anal about my music.

2. Actually did all of my yard work.

Yes, I am a gamer, and yes, every Saturday I wake up to weedeat, edge, and mow my yard. I used to pay a company to come on over and do it for me so I could stay inside and not have to worry about it, but figured I could save some money this way, buy a lawnmower and weedeater, and have it pay for itself over the course of one summer. I normally slack off on the yardwork (it’s a rent house for goodness sakes) so I’m not out there picking weeds and making sure my lawn would look good in a magazine, but with the PSN down I was able to weed and feed my yard with one of those grass seed spreaders. It was nice to trim all of the bushes, mow the yard, and get the yard into somewhat of tip-top shape. Now that the PSN is back? The weeds will be 3 feet high again, the weeds will overrun the yard, and I’ll be harvesting a small group of badgers who decide my yard is perfect to setup shop.

3. Spent quality time with my family and friends.

This one was pretty tough. Normally I’m a pretty introverted guy most of the time. I don’t go out much and I can’t handle people I don’t know for very long. Hell, sometimes I can’t handle people I DO know for very long. I don’t eat out, bar hop, or hang out with friends all the time. My one little jaunt out to see the world is on Saturday nights to go play ice hockey with some friends, but other than that, I’m at home watching TV or playing video games. These past couple of weeks have made me really, really bored. So much so that I’m calling my friends on the telephone to see what they’re doing, calling my family to check in (who does that besides on birthdays and holidays?), and basically overall being a nice guy to everyone. Now that the PSN is back, I can go back to being an asshole, picking on kids half my age online and calling them racial slurs or faggots. Ahhhhh. Good times.

4. Read a book.

Right now I’m currently reading the Lonesome Dove tetralogy by Larry McMurtry (that’s 5 books for those of you who don’t know). It’s a western series of novels, so it constantly conjures up visions of Red Dead Redemption and the landscape of that game. There is even a town in the book called Presidio, so it hits even closer to home and makes that connection. With the PSN being down, I’ve been able to power read through the final book Streets of Laredo, heading towards the dramatic conclusion of the old Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call and his sidekick Corporal Pea Eye Parker. You might have seen the TV mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones a few years back. Go check it out if you need a western fix, because it’s almost like playing a video game I guess? You don’t get to control the characters at all, but you do get to envision the world in which they live, which is cool. Now that you mention it, RDR kind of sparked my love affair with westerns again.

5. Caught up on my Netflix queue.

Watching movies from your Netflix queue can sometimes be tricky. Often you’ll get a hard hitting drama in the mail that you have to sit through, but you put it off and put it off, letting the disc collect dust because you’re not in the right mood to watch it at the time. Here recently though, I’ve been like, “Fuck it! What else am I going to do?” I’ve watched everything from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me to Slumdog Millionaire and Appaloosa. There is no stopping me! Oh wait, what’s that? The PSN is back online and I can get to my Instant Queue now? Shit, well there goes all of those good movies and my disc-based portion of Netflix. I guess I can get back to watching Zombie Strippers with Jenna Jameson now.

This is a personal list. A list of things that I’ve done in my spare time over the course of those long 27 days when the PSN went offline. I could have done a lot of things with my time like plant a tree, pick up trash in a a chain gang or help out at my local homeless shelter. And if you were to ask why I didn’t do those things? Well, I’d look at you straight in the eye like you were crazy and say, “Hey, it’s not that big of a deal. My gaming network just went down for a few weeks. No need to get hasty.”

What kind of things did you guys accomplish with the PSN down and out? Take up knitting? Sewing? Or are you helping out at the old folks home? Let me know in the comments.