What are these "hobbies" you speak of?

For fuck's sake, how much more offensively trite can you get, New York Observer? Today they have a "cute" article about how men like to partake of the video games and women, as usual, enjoying nagging and bitching. Aw, look at the cute miserable people who don't have anything in common but stay together because they think that's just how it is with men and women!

On Nov. 9, to the delight of men across New York, the sequel to Halo, the popular Xbox video game, wherein players battle in lush violence to save the universe from an evil alien race called the Covenant arrived in stores. And for those men’s wives and girlfriends, it was a day of infamy, indeed... It’s not that Ms. Deppe hasn’t given Halo a fighting chance. "I played the first one," she said. "There are weird aliens and they wave their arms above their head when you shoot them and then they run around. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no story, there’s no plot, there’s no background—it’s just ‘save your troop from alien invaders.’ I don’t understand how someone could sit there for eight straight hours and play a video game."

Women! How could they possibly understand something like "science fiction" when they don't sell it at Macy's? Men! What did these feeble-minded child-brained creatures in adult bodies do before video games? Tinker Toys?

Mr. Koehl’s obsession has necessitated the purchase of a second TV for the household. "It’s sick. There shouldn’t be that much TV in such a small space," Ms. Griffin said. But "it’s annoying when he’s hogging the television. For Brandon, it’s winding-down action before bed—like a bedtime story. And then it’s usually me screaming at him, ‘Turn it off and come to bed!’"

But once he comes, she turns back into nice mommy and tucks him in with his teddy bear.

Of course, grown women are not immune to the idea of "fun", since they remember having it when they were children so long ago.

It’s not that all women reflexively hate video games, of course; many fondly remember Super Mario Brothers and Ms. Pac-Man, or the thrill of clobbering their brother at Tecmo Bowl. But it’s inescapable that men just like to play with gadgets more; it’s something about the thumbs.

Since we know that men have thumbs and women don't, of course. Or is it that we can't manipulate a video game controller because we all have expensive manicures? I can't remember.

Part of what keeps these guys playing the game to the point of nausea is simply that it’s hard; it actually requires skill, a weird kind of unlearnable skill. (Many a male noted sympathetically that girls simply don’t have the studied hand-eye coordination that they do.)

When it comes to this alien concept "fun", suddenly women are all thumbs. But don't forget, when it comes to cooking dinner, women indeed have better hand-eye coordination, since it developed in the caveman days when men were out killing big animals and women were at home doing the cavewoman version of needlework.

Mr. Clute’s girlfriend lives in California, and he said he would never ditch her for Halo. On the other hand, "maybe she’d just play the video games with me," he said. "But then she’d want to have sex or something, and that would get in the way." He laughed at himself.

That's the laugh of the cuckold, my friends. An empty, sexless laugh.

Kidding, kidding. My god, do they think that women just don't have hobbies? I am just really jealous of all these women, because my boyfriend is addicted to PC games, which means that we are pretty much in an endless, if quiet and polite, battle for computer time.