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?

These Are The Sounds of Days That Are Past

Here I am blogging again. It feels a bit strange getting back into writing here, now that I'm home and have people with similar interests around me I don't really need a blog as an outlet anymore, but I thought if I didn't keep it up now I'd probably lose the knack completely and then where would I be? My mom gave me a book for Christmas about finding one's strengths and apparently my #1 is the desire to collect knowledge, information and objects. If you don't have an outlet for these things, though, it can be stifling and lead to stagnation, which is really the subject of tonight's show:

Q: What have you been doing since you've been home, Dave?
A: I've been clearing out all of my dad's old stuff and figuring out what to do with it. Like myself, my dad was a collector of things that he didn't really need. As my mom says, he kept things because he loved them.
This extends to vast collections of nerdy items that I'm really getting off on, like a mammoth collection of '70s superhero comics that I don't know what to do with. I thought initially that I would read them all. You see, I have clear memories of picking them out of their cataloged cardboard boxes as an elementary-schooler, lying on the flea-infested rug in our guest room with some Hostess snack cakes, my nose in an old comic. I loved the smell of them and the quaint old ads for fruit pies (there are about 3 fruit pie ads per comic).

My favorite series at the time was The Micronauts: a little-loved comic about a group of royal aliens who are forced to flee their home planet and traverse the galaxy, but get this - when they come to earth they're really small! Micro, you could say...
The idea of having little people running around in my kitchen was already in my imagination, so this fed into that nicely; especially in the second comic where they run into a kid mowing the lawn (like I did!) and he helps them defeat tiny enemy spaceships (like I wished I could do!).

The problem with the Micronauts was there was not much reason for them to be on Earth, which meant their story quickly shifted to other planets where, for the most part, they were proportionate to everything (making them just Nauts, I guess). This fed into no fantasies of mine, given that I found space pretty boring on a whole.

(the guy with the sword was my favorite)

The problem with these Marvel comics I inherited is, in general, now that I'm not 8-years-old, they're really lame; boring and poorly written. This bums me out. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or energy to weed out whatever gems there might be. My dad sold all the really valuable ones, too (and made a pretty penny by all accounts), which accounts for big chunks of plotlines missing. I think I'm going to take them en masse to a comic store and see what I can get for them, which is pretty sad, but my mom told me I need to save my energy and I can't see myself putting them all on eBay one by one.

Other collections involve role-playing war-strategy board games, tin soldiers and tiny racecar sets, among other, more badass things. My dad was such a cool guy! The things that got him excited were often the same ones that excited 12-year-olds. I loved him so much, man. I can't really look at it objectively, but I'm sure that explains something about me.

It's hard for me to part with most of this stuff, but my mom and I are both moving in the near future and neither one of us needs tin soldiers. Hell, my dad didn't need tin soldiers; he just liked them. As for the games, those have gone on eBay and are selling quite nicely. There are a lot of retired nerds out there who are willing to cough up money for PanzerBlitz and Imperium - Empires in Conflict: Worlds in the Balance.

Most of the books went to Powell's, except for a big chunk of classics that are in my sights (and some sci-fi/fantasy gems like Conan and Tarzan, which my dad loved and I hope, in the future, to read and appreciate). Some of these books are way cool and have led me to the creation of...............

A NEW BLOG

which you can view at your leisure.

As for books, my scheme of a middle school book club has been put on hold (though it's still incubating). In my recovery from learning Old English and Victorian tea-lady etiquette I've reverted to comic books. Aside from the comics I waxed nostalgic about and disowned above my dad also left me his collection of Zap Comix and other sweet goodies that I was not allowed to see at a young and impressionable age. They're great! Most of Zap is just things having sex with other things, which is pretty easy to read. But more on all that later. I'm worn out from trying to update this thing already. See you soon and welcome back!