Entertainment is a contentious issue in my household. This is in part due to differences between my husband and me.

He: finishes games and books consistently. I’m easily distracted (ooh shiny!) and I can count on one hand the number of games I’ve actually finished.

He: doesn’t have a lot of creative pursuits, long-term goals, etc. I suppose some people may see this as a failing, but he is actually a damn good example, I think, of the Zen idea of “goallessness.” He really does just live for the moment.

So it’s taking us a while to work out the monthly entertainment expenses issue.

He agreed with me that we should cancel Netflix until we get through our backlog. Netflix: cancelled. To celebrate, I’m going to put that $17.84 per month into savings.

The MMOs are the most contentious issue, because, again, his entertainment backlog is shorter than mine. Plus we both like games, but few games give us the opportunity for teamwork and togetherness that we both value - most multiplayer games are competitive, not cooperative. MMOs are good in this respect. Of course, there are other alternatives - but Matt makes a good point that a lot of these options, in the long term, would lead to us buying more and more $40-50 games. I guess we could rent them, too, but I just discovered that a membership to GameFly - the game equivalent of Netflix - starts at $15.99 a month for one game out. So… this is better than an MMO how?

For now, since our WoW subscription just auto-renewed, we will see how much we play it in the next month, and cancel if we don’t put any more time into it. It is less expensive than City of Heroes, it’s true, but if neither of us wants to play it, it’s not a bargain.

The cable subscription stays, for now. Neither of us really like the options we have if we cancel it. Most of our shows are available streaming on their respective websites, but huddling around my computer monitor is not my idea of quality “together” time.

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