Video Games are as much a drug as heroin or crystal meth, in that when you play them, you feel GREAT. I defy any to drug user to say the sensation of sitting back in your couch as that first game of Grand Theft Auto IV loads up doesn't compare to a veinful of the finest black tar street horse.

Who knows if these games are really bad for you, but this much is true: playing too much feels like shifting your brain into neutral and gunning the accelerator until you smell burning metal. Hours of this super-revving cannot be good for your engine.

So, in a moment of clarity, I quit my Xbox 360 cold turkey. I unplugged my beloved console and all its components – controller, headset, games, and heavy power cord attachment thingy – and dumped them in the console graveyard, with my dusty, unused PlayStation 2 and a super-dusty, more-unused old GameCube. And I miss Liberty City already.

I would love to be what is known in the real drug world as, “a chipper.” That is, someone who can occasionally shoot smack without becoming a junkie. But that is not the case. With a great game like GTA IV, it's all or nothing. I even found myself using the GTA equivalent of methadone – watching Grand Theft Auto gameplay clips on YouTube. But that path is not the road to salvation.

So, here are the steps I have taken in my attempts at recovery from this powerful addiction.

• I admitted I was powerless over gaming – that I was staying up way too late, then, later, unable to sleep because when I closed my eyes all I saw was exploding cars.

• I came to believe that a Power greater than myself – my wife – would kill me if I didn't cut it out.

• By use of the good book – the Grand Theft Auto Cheat Guide -- I have surrendered my self to God-mode.

• I made a list of all my loved ones I had ignored – the movies in my NexFlix queue – and made amends to them. (Thank you for accepting me, DVD of Cloverfield.)

• I have renounced the lower companions of my former life: MrKillSplat, SilentButDeadly, BadEwok, Dooooooog23, and CylonSUKKKA.

• Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, I will preach this message to others who game excessively in the most powerful form available to me – a blog.

Since I live in a sub-dimension that's time-shifted a month after your Earth world, I didn't go see Wall-E this weekend. Instead I finally saw Prince Caspian. When I went to buy tickets from practically the only theater in New York that was still playing it, I was like "Prince Caspian, please!" and the woman was all, "I'm sorry, that film isn't playing here." Then her supervisor leaned over and was like, "Yo, he mean Narnia, girl!"

Yo. To my surprise, it was pretty great.

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One reason I haven't been blogging with much regularity lately is that I've been working on a book, a fantasy novel. (Also: I am a lazy puke.) One of the great things about writing a fantasy novel is you get to roll your own magic system. Because every fantasy fan I know has always harbored the secret belief that nobody has ever gotten magic quite right. But they know how it would really work. I'm no different.

I'm not going to lay out the magic system I came up with, because that would be boring, but here are the ones I took as my models. They're not the most famous, and the books they appear in aren't the Greatest Fantasy of All Time. But as magic systems go, they're my favorites. Why, I don't really know. There's just something very satisfying and self-consistent about them. (But mine is better.)

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Which I don't really. But I will post this, since it is Internet law that every blog in Christendom must post it. It being the teaser for Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Howser, I mean Harris.

What the hell is this? Whedon explains.

When I was little I assumed that all video games were eventually going to look like Star Wars. Massive spaceships with chunky irregular outlines, white with the occasional colored industrial markings, would hang in the inky void with tiny fighter ships flaring and dying around them by the dozens. Pink and orange planets and multiple suns and huge smeary nebulae and such would hover in the background. The only reason they didn't look like that was the technology hadn't gotten there yet.

I was further confirmed in this belief by Ender's Game. (Which also confirmed my belief that video games are secretly real.)

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As I get older, it only becomes more and more clear I will never read all the books I want to read before I die. There's just no getting around it. There's too many books! Even my Amazon Wish List, aka my Amazon "Don't Want To Read That Much So I Will Put You On This Pointless List" List is swelling at over 300.

This is tough for me, because I'm a reader. Maybe, even, for someone with two small kids and ridiculous career, a “big reader.” But it's even harder for me, because… I am a completist. Once I start reading an author's work, I need to read everything that writer has written. I can't veer away. I need to check all that author's books off my mental list. My knowledge of their work must be complete.

Now, I would never argue that I am a “smart reader,” or that my library contains the most artistic and challenging works civilization has to offer. But, I defy any of you to have read more Larry McMurtry books than I have. And that includes a lot of bad Larry McMurtry books. Why, oh why, would I read one more vexing Larry McMurtry semi-historical horny Western lady book, when I could be expanding my brain library in new intellectual directions?

What is my problem? I am running out of time. I'm 36. I've read about 2000 books. That leaves 2000 more to go, if I'm lucky. So why am I going back, again and again, to Walter Mosley? His books have all blended into one giant Easy Rawlins L.A. smoothie, and, for some reason, I'm still thirsty. Or C.S. Forester? Almost every single year of Horatio Hornblower's seasick life has been accounted for in print – and I want to hoist the mainsail and chart a path for more. John Le Carré, Evelyn Waugh, Robertson Davies – I get it. I know what you guys do. (Spy, Wry, and Sly, respectively.) You're great at it. Why can't I move on? Oh Peter Carey, you Australian literary chameleon you, please release me from your page-turning walkabout!

Becoming fixated on a small group of authors limits one's mental diversity. Shouldn't I have read 39 different authors from one of those annoying 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die You Illiterate Moron-type books instead of 39 P.G. Wodehouse comedies of British Upper Class manners? Wouldn't three shelf-inches of Moby Dick make for a more well-rounded cranial scorecard than foot-and-a-half of Douglas Coupland?

There's probably nothing to be done. Breadth has been defeated by depth, if you can call Ian Fleming depth. Obsessively needing to “complete” these writers is embedded into my DNA. (A possible clue: my mother's bookshelf has, at last count, 10,000 Ngaio Marsh mysteries.) I give up. Anyway, I gotta go read my ten millionth Richard Stark novel. I sure hope stone-cold career criminal Parker kills those guys who double-crossed him. Again.

I don't know how many of you out there in the land of the living read PvP. I do. There was a time when I did not 'get' why PvP was popular, but now that I'm down with the full continuity I find it consistently funny. I don't even really mind that it has basically nothing to do with gaming anymore. Kurtz's deep fluency in the code of pop culture allusion is enough to keep me going. Plus it updates every day like frickin' clockwork, even on weekends. A rare -- nay, unique -- quality in a webcomic.

I've also gotten addicted to Kurtz's side-project Ding!, which is pretty much a medical mystery since it's set entirely in World of Warcraft, a game I do not play.

I only post about this because I've just discovered a kind of PvP-enhancing prosthetic: PvP Makes Me Sad, a blog that breaks down every PvP strip frame-by-frame, thus making me feel less sad and alone in my PvP obsession. It's not always respectful -- I think of it as a kind of loyal opposition -- but it's always insightful.

Also I have no e-mail, Wanted isn't out yet, and it turns out you need Leopard to use the Spore Creature Creator, and my Mac is running Bobcat or Civet or some other lesser feline.

I haven't kept careful records or anything, but I am willing to stake my journalistic integrity on the claim that at no point in the past 10 years have I had an empty in-box. A few weeks ago, when I came back from a leave of absence, I had a four or five hundred e-mails in there. I've been winnowing ever since.

Last week the scroll bar on the side of my inbox window disappeared, indicating that I was in the endgame. It was like the leopard near the top of Kilimanjaro. That was when I realized I could take this thing all the way. I redoubled my efforts: if I could in any possible sense be said to have read and answered or otherwise dealt with an e-mail, or if I could possibly get away with ignoring it, it was outta there. This was some serious straight-up 43 Folders kung fu. (I don't actually know what 43 Folders is, but isn't this the kind of thing you're supposed to do?)

Today I moved the final email to my 'old' folder. There was nothing left. My inbox was pristine, pure white, without blot or stain.

It's fricking amazing. It's like somebody lifted a giant rock off my chest that I didn't even know was there. I am never going to let my in-box fill up again. Never. Iron discipline. Read it, deal with it, archive it or delete it. I will never get distracted, never relax my vigilance -- hey look, the Spore Creature Creator is out!

That's the title of Frank Darabont's unproduced Indy IV script. You know what, it is good. Too bad it pretty much amounts to fan fiction at this point.

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This week in Time I wrote a column (which started out as a blog post) about stealing Wi-Fi. It's here.

The main thing that I don't think I properly conveyed in the piece is the incredible, psychotic obsessiveness that you develop when chasing a distant Wi-Fi signal. It always begins so well -- whenever you join a network on a Mac, it always flashes you all the bars at once, as if you've stumbled on some massively robust quasar-level Wi-Fi emitter. Of course it's just a tease, and then it immediately shrinks down to one measly bar, which vanishes just as you're about to send a mission-critical e-mail. Then you're left clicking and clicking the Wi-Fi icon in the hope that the signal will resurface, and then even when it does you try to rejoin and it won't let you on...

Obviously I've been hurt too many times to write about this objectively.

At the end of the piece I triumphantly announced that I've given up Wi-Fi mooching and gone straight. Of course the minute I turned in the piece Earthlink went down, and they can't get anybody out to my apartment till next Thursday. So I'm back to stealing Wi-Fi for a week. This post is brought to you by my unsuspecting neighbor, 'mkmeeh'. Thanks, whoever you are.