December 8, 2007
Real Guitar Heroes Don't Smoke Weed
In what simultaneously has to be one of the most hilariously inspired and gut-wrenching punishments in the history of parental discipline, a local GTA father has set a new standard for puffing penalization.
The man—an elementary school teacher known by the screen name "k_lid"—decided to sell his son’s Christmas present on eBay (a notoriously hard-to-find copy of the best-selling Guitar Hero 3 game) when he returned home from work early to find 15-year-old Isaac sparking the ganja with his crew.
Apparently young Isaac had no idea how close he came to getting his dream gift until after his dad showed him the listing. It seems that Pop had gone through a period of deliberation:
Maybe [giving him the game] would make him stay home more and "rock out" on this fake guitar thing. He pretty much spends all his free time at his friend’s house playing it anyways (while high on marijuana, I would imagine).He intended to give the game to Junior even after his suspension from school for fighting, but the herbal transgression was simply the last
As of the time of me writing this, he does not know I got him Guitar Hero 3. I will show him the auction once it is posted and we can watch it finish together. Sort of a "father-son bonding experience."It is Christmas, though, and dad is still considering getting Isaac a different game, just to show that he cares: "Maybe something like Barbie as the Island Princess or Dancing With the Stars. "
Oh, yes, he DID just go there! When dad did ultimately show the young horticulturalist the eBay listing, Isaac was "not amused."
Photo by Scorchez from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
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What the fuck? getting really baked and playing guitar hero is one of the most enjoyable video-game experiences ever. This man has issues.
I once found a Craigslist posting from a mother who was trading her kid's Wii (or something) for a bike. She asked him to focus on his studies or else she would trade in the Wii...and she did.
He should get his son Lee Carvello's Putting Challenge.
oh no! a teenager smoked some of the marijuana! how excessively terrible!
geez.
granted video games are pretty lame, but still. c'mon pops.
I dunno...I wouldn't let my 15-year-old kid and his pals smoke pot in my home, and I would certainly punish him if that happened...because as long as he's a minor, it's your responsibility as a parent. Plus, in this particular case, it capped a sequence of other bad behaviour.
Dad's house, Dad's rules. That aside, the kid is a moron for risking smoking up at home.
And 15 is a bit young to be smoking pot regularly.
This story makes me groan, roll my eyes and blush, all at the same time! If you look on the comments from yesterday-ish, mine is one of the many in favor of the son getting the game with impunity.
It's a tough call I guess. When you have a child, I suspect you believe you are going to be able to somehow influence the outcome of their life, and then you have a shocking realization that their friends are actually much more influential than you are, leading to the kind of rash overreactions that this father has exhibited.
However, as a strong proponent of youth empowerment and cognitive liberty, I think young people should be able to make a conscious choice to determine their mental state without having to suffer some kind of arbitrary consequences, even from their parents. This dad is just being plain mean, now, for a personal decision his son has made that is not only his right but harmless. I think it's this disconnect between his expectation of being able to completely determine the outcome of his son's life and what is actually happening that's making him react irrationally.
What a dick.
Ha ha ha Kevin!
Have no remotely remote idea what it's like to raise children, eh?
Didn't think so.
No offense intended, but I'll gladly bet you your tuition that if you ever enter parenthood your answer will be a wee bit different than the one you typed in here.
This man is being a responsible parent, good for him.
But he had to embarass his kid in the process eh, good show pops.
I think the dad should give the kid the game. Right now. Don't wait for Christmas.
The only catch is, the dad and the kid have to play the game together. The kid can only play with his dad and the dad has to agree to set aside at least 2 or 3 hours a week to play.
This bonding time between the two of them would be invaluable. I suspect that these two aren't spending much time together these days.
This is a far better solution than selling the game on Ebay for a profit. That money will be soon gone, as will the memory of the event. If they wind up bonding over the game though, they'll have those memories forever.
this post is just asking for people to tell this guy how to parent his kid. He can do whatever he wants, regardless if it's irrational or harsh. Embarrassing your kid and withholding his christmas present is certainly NOT going to prevent him from smoking pot.
"Hey Issac, wanna smoke a doobie?"
"NEVER, POT LEADS TO MY DAD TAKING AWAY GUITAR HERO"
This is not realistic. Although i do encourage smoking up for a round of GH, this kid showed some REALLY poor judgement when it comes to smoking pot at home. Go to the park, get some eye drops, some airfreshener, whatever you have to do, just don't get caught.
It's interesting (read: horrifying) that for this father being violent at school and getting suspended is acceptable, but getting high is inexcusable.
Nothing said he thought fighting was acceptable, the smoking up was the "last straw".
This dad is a gangster!
I wouldn't give this kid anything for Christmas. He should make his son do the drop off of the game when he sells it. Yuk yuk.
PS Letting your 15 kid get away with smoking weed is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
if smoking pot is the stupidest thing you've ever heard, then there is seriously something wrong with you. You might find that almost all 15 year olds smoke pot often, weather their parent's allow it or not.
Actually #16, "raches" didn't mean that pot-smoking was stupid. Letting your 15 year-old child smoke weed and turning a blind-eye to as a parent, is stupid. You probably had trouble reading due to the excessive pot-haze.
DaveH: 'He intended to give the game to Junior even after his suspension from school for fighting' tells me the father thought fighting and suspension weren't enough to warrant serious punishment of the Guitar Hero III variety.
Kevin - one day you'll realize that your parents were much more of an influence on you than you thought (unless you're an orphan, in which case, disregard).
The father acknowledges that selling the game isn't likely going to stop the kid from smoking up again, but what he's doing is better than idly sitting by doing nothing. If I were that father and I spent all that time looking for the game (which obviously shows he cares a great deal about the kid), I'd have done the same thing, if not worse.
Kids are going to drink/smoke pot/whatever...but they should at least try to retain at least a few brain cells to realize that it's totally disrespectful to do it on your parents' property!
We don`t know enough about the circumstances of the fighting. What if the kid is usually mild mannered and was being bullied? I don`t know enough about it to completely condemn either the father or the kid. I`m not even sure I like the whole e-bay aspect of it either, but that`s his choice.
I only speak for myself when I say that I`m thankful now for the limits my parents set back then, and the ones I hated the most are the ones that make the most sense now.
The people here who think that smoking up at home is somehow worse than smoking up somewhere else are complete idiots.
If the 15 year old was smoking inside and it's a non-smoking house? Sure, he deserves to be punished. But if the kid is smoking in his backyard then that's infinitely better than a park, an alley way or pretty much anywhere else (except maybe Amsterdam).
The reality is, if someone's going to smoke up, they should do it in a safe place. Home is safe. In a park or alley there's just too many things that could go wrong. The kid could have got bad drugs and not have anyone around to help him, someone might try to jack him for his drugs or the police may want to bust him for possession.
No study worth the paper its printed on has come out suggesting that prohibition works. This dad -- and all parents -- should be more concerned with harm reduction.
If my minor child smokes weed in my house, he's gonna get punished more than getting his video game taken away..."safer" or not (and I don't really find pot that big of a deal, in general).
It's parenting; not prohibition handed down by an absolute dictator. As long as my kid is under 18, I'm in charge, 100%.
Public humiliation––however it takes place, and whatever the reason for it––is still a dick parenting move.
When I have a kid, I fully intend to keep my horrible, horrible punishments for any and all bad behaviour private. If I take away little Timmy's Guitar Hero for bad behaviour, I will cook it into a pie and trick him into eating it. Then we will read Titus Andronicus. Sort of a “Father-Son bonding experience.”
What are you going to do, Marc, install a CCTV camera on the kid's shoulder? It's about teaching safe and responsible use. If you punish the kid every day until he turns 18, what do you think is going to happen when he turns 18? He'll go on the biggest bender of his life and who knows how long it'll last.
"You might find that almost all 15 year olds smoke pot often, weather their parent's allow it or not."
Did smoking weed lead to this poor sentence?
The father's E-Bay posting contains the following paragraph:
I know smoking a joint isn’t the end of the world, but if you can convince me that he deserves the gift, then I will end the auction. You will have to be very convincing. I am an elementary school teacher and I know that rewarding bad behavior is just asking for more of the same…
Maybe if the son reads this comments thread he can convince his father to change his mind: "But Dad! Pot-smoking video game guys from the Internet who don't have teenaged kids think you're being a dick!"
Haha, this is all hilarious. I mean I suppose some people are reacting as though this is the worst thing in the whole world because the thought of selling Guitar Hero is a sin to them...but come on, you gotta give this dad some points...this is funny stuff!
"...we can watch it finish together, sort of a "father-son bonding experience..."
"You might find that almost all 15 year olds smoke pot often, weather their parent's allow it or not."
Broken; You beat me to it, LOL. "Yo, Dude, how's the whether, up there?" :- )
I never could stand stoners.
This story makes me glad I never had kids too.
All of the people here who think it's so cool that a 15 yr. old smokes pot at home (or anywhere), obviously don't have children of their own.
I'm with you, Marc.
This is HARDLY public humiliation. No names are known, and unless the kid tells his friends about it, there's no way for any of his peers to know he lost his game for smoking pot.
It's certainly more clever than the "punishments" I saw other, dare I say liberal, parents give their kids for smoking pot in teenage years.
This included such gems as, "you can smoke pot in the basement but when I have guests over please shower before coming upstairs!.. no, you won't? okay i'll get you that new Playstation game you wanted if you just LOOK presentable tonight."
UH HUH, like that "I'm your friend! do what you want." shit is ever effective.
Kids, don't be stupid. As long as you pass high school, get into the post-secondary stream your parents want, and never blatantly do drugs around them, parents generally don't care if you smoke a joint and you're a "minor"...
it's neither the thought of selling his copy of guitar hero that annoys me (i personally couldn't care less about guitar hero, which i find to be a kind of sad comment on the fact that people would rather mimic playing guitar than actually learn the real thing), nor the humour of the situation (which was, i admit, darkly amusing) but the fact that some people are predictably and single-mindedly supporting the "oh no, horror of horrors, someone young smoked pot! he made that decision all by himself! how evil! father = %100 control over every action of son's life even if that action isn't at all harmful to him!"
honestly, i'm a little biased in this case, because i find it pretty frustrating when people are so quick to gleefully punish a teenager for smoking some pot, but are perfectly willing to accept when someone their age does it, or worse, when someone their age goes out and gets totally smashed (a much more dangerous thing to do, in my opnion).
trust me. i know plenty of kids who smoked pot in highschool and became perfectly fine, upstanding citizens. you have nothing to worry about. the kid will not ruin his life. everything will be ok.
1] 15 is still a little early to blithely let your child smoke anything on a regular basis. They're still developing.
2] School teachers probably cover their bases in similar fashion; should the issue ever come up, at least it's demonstrable to school boards, unions, principals, arbitrators, lawyers, judges, parents, police, and juries that this teacher made an effort to quash illegal substance abuse in his own home.
Regardless of what you think of the morality of banning marijuana, it still is illegal. Teachers have to exercise an incredible amount of care just hugging their students, so I imagine that they take pains to protect their career and their families by at least making an attempt to look like they are observing the rules. Given the Federal Gov't's announcements for their legislative agenda, being careful about marijuana usage in your home is probably a good idea for teachers. [i'm just sayin', if word got out that this guy was lax, he could be arrested, his kid taken away, who knows what other crap could be flung in his direction]
All these other issues - video games, parent-offspring bonding, eBay, public humilliation, etc. - nothing I feel able to comment upon.
@30: It's also really sad that people will mimic playing pro basketball or fighting ninja duels to the death instead of, you know, going out and doing the real thing.
Video games are about fantasy. I don't play Guitar Hero to be a musician; I play to be a ROCK STAR.
Funny thing is, rhythm games have existed for a long time. Suddenly, the controller's shaped like a guitar, and some people start complaining how sad gamers are (well, they always have done so, but you know what I mean).
I don't see why GH players and actual guitarists should be mutually exclusive; I know a fair number of musicians who enjoy both. And if anything, playing GH has increased my respect for people who have invested time and effort to build their skill as guitar players.
Anyway, we were talking about weed?
i have a feeling that my thoughts on videogames won't go over well with a lot of people...
anyways, my comment was simply an aside unrelated to the discussion. hence the reason it was, you know, set off by parentheses. i was just pointing out that, to me, playing music is much more satisfying than pretending to, and you acquire an actual skill while doing it. whereas (i hope, to most people) fighting ninja duels to the death or shooting someone in the face is more enjoyable if it is left as fantasy, since most people don't enjoy those activities in real life. nonetheless, i am going to disagree with you again and say that i still think going out and playing basketball is better than sitting home and playing a basketball videogame. heck, if you want some sort of rhythm game, as you mentioned, play drums! they're awesome too, and the same argument as i gave for gutiar hero would apply here as well. gosh i'm rambling. basically, video games creep me out in general. why be sedentry and pretend to do something fun when you can actually go out and do it, which is much more rewarding? remember a life that didn't involve simply pressing buttons and looking at someone on screen do something to someone else on screen while your eyes glaze over?
but now that's a serious aside. and it makes me sound like an old man. 'you kids and your darn video games.'
I guess that's the difference between your viewpoint and mine ... I'm not "pretending" to have fun when I play video games. I *am* having fun. I'm pretending to do something else, but the fun I'm having is completely real.
As I've said before, the way I see video games is that they are a form of fantasy, like building a "fort" out of pillows and sheets or playing kitchen when you were a kid. The physical materials might not be the real thing, but it's what's in my mind that matters.
I'm actually not a huge fan of most regular button mashing games, but GH has that right mix that really does tap into the kid in me. The disconnect that creeps you out in video games is less apparent in GH; it's definitely not a real guitar, but mashing buttons on GH is a lot closer to playing a note than mashing a button to drive a drag-racing car. The skills the game calls for (because it does call for some skill) like a sense of rhythm, finger strength, and hand-eye coordination make it just real enough.
Still, why does anything fun need to teach a skill? I wouldn't say skill-building is the opposite of fun, but it's certainly not the definition of it.
I'm not playing a real guitar because I don't want to be a musician; if I play an instrument, I'd want to play my own songs, not somebody else's, but frankly, I'm not cut out to be a song-writer. The way I see it, by *not* playing a real guitar and openly confessing I just want the fantasy, I'm respecting real musicians who put real work into their art and talent.
I did see your comment was an aside, but hey, if we can't go off on a tangent on the internet, where else can we?