All Things Geek

• Today I finished posting all of my dad's old board games on eBay. The geek money's piling up! Nobody wants Assassin, though, which shocks me. Going by the box lid alone, it's easily the coolest game.
  
  
  From what I can tell, the game is like Taxi Driver except instead of a mohawk Travis Bickle has a mullet and his target is John McCain.
  
  Assassin's only competition on the cool-o-meter is the dashing fellow on the cover of Rail Baron, the "game of building railroad empires" (which I'm keeping for myself). He's There Will Be Blood but drunk.
  
  



• In other media news, my literature burnout has moved me to comic books. I read Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life, Debbie Dreschler's heartbreaking Daddy's Girl, a bunch of R. Crumb and now I'm halfway into Watchmen. I sure like them words when the come with lots of purdy pickshures. Reading the much hyped Watchmen, I totally understand why it's considered a classic. I didn't know how into it I was until I saw a preview for the movie the other day and had a nerdgasm. I hope it doesn't suck.
  



• As for music, I can't stop listening to Love's Forever Changes. Sometimes it sounds like someone going crazy, sometimes it teeters into hippie-dippy bullshit, but most of the time it's just an amazing beautiful album. I bought it for my dad but I don't think he ever really liked it. I'm not sure why. I can't embed anything from it, but check it out anyway.
  
• Today on TV there was a British movie from 1999 called Virtual Sexuality on. I remember passing it at Hollywood Video and always thinking that it was raunchy Cinemax-style porn. Little did I know that it was basically Just One Of The Guys but with shitty CGI. The amazing thing is how late-'90s everything about it is. There's bleached tips and Macy Gray everywhere. When my kids want to know what 1999 was like I'll hand them VHS copies of this, Can't Hardly Wait and Spice World.


• I'm afraid that all of my favorite TV shows are dying. I thought the last two episodes of The Office were pretty weak in comparison to what had been going on. What, so the Angela/Andy/Dwight triangle reaches a head and then the issue's dropped and everything's normal? No! I have a stake in these imaginary people's lives and I want resolution!
  
  Degrassi's long been put out to pasture, but that doesn't make its decline from pre-teen, Canadian guilty pleasure to pre-teen, Canadian guilty pain any more acceptable. Who are these new people that I'm supposed to care about? You can't just send characters to Africa and expect me to forget about them, Degrassi writers; not when you've left me with this:
  
  
  
  But what's really broken my heart is Skins. Oh Skins, I loved you so much! For those of you who aren't British and/or retrograding back to middle school, Skins' first two seasons were hella good. What started as a guilty pleasure (Matt warned me it was "Degrassi meets Rules of Attraction") turned into one of my favorite shows ever. But now? Let me list some of the offenses: extensive plots involving gangsters; penis-tattoos; drawn-out fart jokes; live goldfish-eating; characters nobody could give a shit about.
  
  These characters who seem to be drawn from imaginary TV-types rather than actual people - sensitive sk8r boi, walking pharmaceutical receptacle (Chris without the likability), Screech-like nerd who the former two are friends with for no discernible reason, xtreme maybe-lesbian (probably not) named Naomi Campbell (wtf??), twins (one's wild the other's not and probably is a lesbian). Oh, and Tony Stonem's little sister who the show keeps reminding us is totally attitude and anything-goes, yet somehow became way less interesting now that she talks. Skins - don't make me hate you. Please come back down to earth.
  

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Back to that irritating nerd and Darcy's froggy, Jesus-loving sister in Degrassi, let me put a question to you, world: is the nerd stereotype even relevant in 2009? Revenge of the Nerds? Fine. Saved By The Bell? Cool. The straight-laced programming geek in Virtual Sexuality? Ok. But now that the internet has taken over our lives and people camp out all night for Apple products is there still a cultural otherness to nerds? Look at tv - shows like The Office and motherfucking Chuck; movies like Rushmore and its imitators; the rise of Michael Cera and all indie quirkiness.

The outdatedness of the nerd stereotype really hit me when I was on the airplane from Belfast and they showed an episode of The Big Bang Theory. I guess it's a popular show, but it felt to me like something from another era. Haven't the nerds finally taken over? When the biggest movie franchises of the last decade have been The Lord of the Rings, comic book movies and Star Wars, I think we need to reevaluate things. Does this really represent a reality anyone thinks of as true anymore?



Of course, this is coming from someone who reads comic books, watches childrens' programming and then goes and writes about it in his blog, so what do I know?