June 2005 Archives

I get that warmy squishy feeling of intense geek love all over when I find sites like Apropos of Something. It’s got something to do with how it’s okay for us to make fun of the stuff we love for the enjoyment of other people who love it, too... but we’ll defend that same stuff To The Death should someone not-geeky dare to suggest that the things we love (and disparage at the same time) are less than worthy of that love.

It comes down to that self-awareness I’ve talked about: We geeks know how silly some of the things we love are, and yet we can’t help but love them anyway.

I mean: Check out That’s So Vader! at Apropos of Something. It makes me want to hug this site something fierce.

I was a bit hard on poor old Tom "Aliens Are in My Head!" Cruise a while back, but the fact is that he has portrayed some of the most iconic Xer characters ever to appear on film. In 1983, his high-school pimp in Risky Business codified our generation’s ideas about down-to-earth entreprenurialism. His hotshot fighter pilot, in 1986’s Top Gun, was thoroughly emblematic our of love of adrenaline-pumping experiences -- the "X" in X Games might as well stand for Generation X instead of "extreme." And no fictional character is a better example of Xer burnout than 1996’s Jerry Maguire.

It remains to be seen whether Cruise’s hellbent-on-survival Ray Ferrier in the new War of the Worlds will come to be seen as iconically Xer. I suspect the pragmatism and determination he projects in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds will indeed come to be considered definitive of our generation. After the other shoe drops, and we’re called upon to defeat the aliens -- whatever form they come in -- we’ll know for sure. I think we’ll step up to the bat and hit a home run... because what other option do we have?

With the invasion fully under way, it's time to welcome our new alien overlords...

Paramount was right to keep images of the alien creatures and the alien ships tightly under wraps (though perhaps requiring Steven Spielberg to check his cell phone at the door of the New York premiere last week may have been a tad unnecessary), because when you finally see them, you're sharing the experience with the characters in the film, and that is: Holy fuck. And you almost want to look away, it's too much to deal with, and yet you can't, it's so horrifyingly fascinating.

Click on over to FlickFilosopher.com for my review of the new Spielberg flick.

Oh, I so wanted to like this flick.

The story behind it has all the elements of, well, a great film itself: hope, tragedy, resilience, imagination, cunning, pluck, even a David-and-Goliath aspect. I wish I could call it a triumph for the little guy, but it's such an utter failure on all levels that it almost serves as a warning against giving in to great ambition.

That’s from my review of the Victorian-era, direct-to-DVD "competing" War of the Worlds flick. There’s much more, of course...

Yesterday the temperature dropped to -52.6C (that's -62.7F). Even for Halley that's officially 'cold' as it only drops below -50C a couple of times a year, if at all. The lowest recorded temperature here was -55C way back in 1974.

There are plenty of fun and games to be had in extreme temperatures like this. First we repeated an old trick that we tried last year. When you throw boiling water into the air at this temperature it evaporates before it hits the ground.

[from 75 Degrees South]

Blogging from Antarctica... it’s like blogging from Mars, only colder.

Once, in a little used-book store, I swear to God I found of copy of The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern... not the "good parts" version by William Goldman. I wish I’d bought it, because I know no one will believe me...

There is an online catalog of all these books-within-books (and damn! I thought of doing this ages ago), and it’s The Invisible Library. This is where you’ll find The Red Book of Westmarch by Bilbo Baggins, and Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations, and Suggestions for the Amelioration of Sick-Bays by Dr. Stephen Maturin...

*sigh* As if there weren’t enough real books that I’d never get to reading if I lived to be 1000 years old...

Speaking of geeky innovations in literature... Going fictional was probably an inevitable evolution in the blogging phenomenon, and now we have another first (I think): What Is Happening to Me?, the the saga of Brooklynite Kirk Thomson, video-store employee and werewolf, has been optioned by Hollywood, according to its author, Ritch Duncan.

The geeky techno circle will be complete when the finished film gets downloaded two days before it’s released to theaters by file-sharing nerds in the spring of 2007.

I recently reread, in preparation for the big Spielberg/Cruise adaptation, H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, and for the hell of it, I also reread 1975’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds, a delectable bit of fan fiction by Manly W. Wellman and Wade Wellman. As you might deduce from the title, the book purports to set the record straight, so many of us having been misled by that troublemaker Wells, about what really happened during the Martian invasion, and how the world’s foremost consulting detective was instrumental in saving the world.

Geeks didn’t invent fan fiction, probably (though I can’t think of an example from literature before the rise of the geek that might qualify as fanfic). But from the lowliest, most atrociously written example of Kirk/Spock "slash" to the rows upon rows of Star Trek and Star Wars novels that crowd out other SF at your local Borders, fanfic is, like it or not, one of geekdom’s great contributions to world literature.

That’s not a bad thing. We Xers may have been the first generation of kids to be plopped in front of the tube from infanthood and left to fend for ourselves, but fanfic is proof positive that we are no mere passive consumers of pop culture -- we’re active participants in interpreting it. Technology has made it easy for us to take it further than ever before, as with fan films. (Attention: The folks who brought us the hilarious "Troops" have a new Star Wars fan film for our geeky pleasure: I.M.P.S Relentless, "an epic documentary... of the best damn job in the galaxy.")

But that’s not the proper measure of the influence fanfic has had on the wider culture. This is: A fan film won the Oscar for Best Picture a few years back. And one of the grandest names writing literary fiction today, Isabel Allende, has a new book out. It’s called Zorro, and it’s fan fiction. It might be prettied up some, but let’s call it what it is.

Who knew? Isabel Allende is a geek.

If there is such a thing as an evil geek, spammers surely qualify, clogging up our email boxes and wasting our time. But if there’s one thing spam may be useful for, it’s gauging our anxieties on a cultural level. Vying for dominion of my in-box these days with the Cialis and Viagra pitches are unsolicited emails with subject lines like these:

Rates Hit 40 Year lows
Rates are Rising - Lock in yours Today
Rates are rising lock in today 30 sec app
Refinance home loans
Bills to pay? Get the funds you need...
Overnight Account Transfer
Are you tired of debts?
Get the funds you need, Quick payday deposit by tomorrow
Astounding Loans hassle free

What does it all mean? That more people are worried about money than they are about their limp dicks... which is a relatively new development: these money-woe spams weren’t coming in a such deluge even six months ago.

I mentioned in my review of Land of the Dead the feeling that something huge and bad is barreling toward us. If spammers do what they do because it works, because people respond to these pitches, does the new desperate tenor of the spammers offer a hint that our crappy economy is about to collapse? (Like how econo-geek Jim Kunstler is trying to tell us at his brilliant blog Clusterfuck Nation?)

We Xers need to worry about this because, as with the zombie apocalypse, we’re gonna be the ones left cleaning up the mess.

My first reaction: Great, now us gal geeks have more competition from the popular girls:

"A nerd is an excellent provider and a guy who puts you first," says E. Jean Carroll, Elle magazine's love and sex advice columnist. "He'll turn out to be a great father and a great husband."

And, she insists that a woman who is willing to stick it out with a nerd and get past his quirks will be handsomely rewarded. "Don't give up on him too fast," she said. "If you stick with him, he's going to turn out to be really great."

Of course, the article assumes that there are no gal geeks:

But to get to that authentic nerd, chic women have to be willing to embrace their own inner geek and accept the guy for who he is, chess trophies and all.

No girl would ever have a chess trophy on her shelf, I guess... at least no girl worth mentioning.

[from the New York Daily News]

I dunno: Is a geek guy merely just a new accessory for a fabulous fashionable girl to hang on her arm? Or does this hint at a new appreciation for the geek lifestyle? This doesn’t give me a lot of hope -- Beauty and the Geek? Can’t girl geeks be beautiful? Don’t the people behind this embarrassment realize that no genuinely geeky guy will be satisfied with a woman with an IQ lower than what she tells everyone her shoe size is?

The Daily News article does mention what could be a valuable resource for lovelorn geeks of all genders: Geek2Geek, a dating site that matches folks up based on their favorite board games and gadgets and such. But girl geeks already knew how hot it could be to find a guy who likes to Fluxx.

This is Cassiopeia, generally known as Cassie. She’s rather put upon, and has been for ages. She’s 15 years old, she’s been with me since she was 5 months, and in that time, she’s endured a change of residence; the death of her sister, Andie; the arrival of Mrs. Kennedy, which roused her from a grief-stricken funk into a fit of pique; another change of residence; and the arrival of Sammy, which so thoroughly discombobulated her that she’s only just lately recovered to something like her old self.

A friend of mine likens Cassie to Margaret Dumont in the old Marx Brothers movies, a regal lady trying desperately to retain her dignity in the face of insanity all around her. Poor thing.

There’s this beaten-down weariness to Land of the Dead that’s unlike your typical gore-and-shuffle zombie movie, and -- even though this is Romero’s Big Hollywood Film -- it’s unlike anything that the typical big-budget splatter flick has going for it, either (but you see it in Cinderella Man -- picture Russell Crowe boxing zombies, and you’ve got it).

Click on over to FlickFilosopher.com to read the rest of my review of George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead. The film -- and my review -- has lots of GenX significance. Of course, I’m seeing GenX significance in a lot of stuff these days: I’ve got geek philosophy on the brain.

Mmmm, brain...

AlwaysOn and Technorati have named their Open Media 100, a list of the bloggers and other online pioneers who are changing the way we as a society get our news, how we as a society approach the idea of what it means to be informed.

It doesn’t matter who’s on the list (though it is an interesting group; check it out). What matters is that the list exists, that an aggressively independent rabble of geeks and Xers -- much of the Open Media 100, I’d guess, would qualify as both -- is mad as hell and not taking it anymore... and that this rabble is making enough of a dent in The Establishment to get noticed.

As with all else having to do with life, the universe, and everything, this is but a new iteration in a never-ending cycle -- bloggers are, as many others have pointed out, nothing but modern-day pamphleteers, like Thomas Paine and the writers of the Federalist papers, who were anonymous at the time. And while there’s been lots of debate and consternation over the political activism of a certain segment -- perhaps the most popular segment -- of the blogosphere, it’s worth nothing that not all of the Open Media 100 are politically motivated, except in the sense that they might be said to be anti-corporate media. Like the "bloggers" of the Revolutionary era, those of us speaking up online do so out of a sense that there are wrongs to be righted, balances to be restored, and unheard voices clamoring to be heard.

Xers have been living in "interesting times," in the Chinese sense of the phrase, all our lives. The need for bloggers and independent journalists, and the niche we’ve been able carve for ourselves, suggests that times are probably about to get a whole lot more interesting.

In honor of the resurrection of Herbie the Love Bug, here’s how he measures up against his fellow famous autos. (For the fake-car impaired, that's Marty McFly's Delorean on the left and KITT in the center.)

I remember when I got bitten by the video-game bug. It was one glorious Christmas morning late in the 1970s, and Santa had left a Coleco Telstar Arcade under the tree. It had three games and they were all basically Pong. And oh my god was it a revelation, that you could control things on your TV. I was hooked.

In high school, my honor-society pals and I traded hints and tips for all the Infocom text-adventure games, passing notes about how to get the Babelfish. (I’d have gotten in on the sharing of the actual games, too, except I was already on the wrong-but-better side of a technology gulf: Today, I’m a Mac devotee while everyone else is on PCs, and then, I had a Commodore 64 while everyone else had Atari 2600s.)

I never really got into the first-person-shooter craze, but I was in a definite minority. At the now sadly defunct Internet magazine I used to work at -- *cough* Yahoo! Internet Life *cough* -- slow afternoons around the office were filled with the shouts of the geek editors shooting up their fellow geek editors over the office network.

Today, we still revere the lowly Pong, we can download Zork for free, and soon, we’ll be able to snack on Doom, The Movie, starring Karl "Eomer" Urban and The Rock. Of course.

Does news get any stuffier than business news? Does business news get any stuffier than Forbes? Well, geekiness has punctured even this pinstriped domain: Forbes.com is running a feature on what it would cost an ordinary billionaire to turn himself into a caped crusader.

Now, there aren’t all that many billionaires in the world, and Forbes, as it happens, is also the magazine in the gray flannel suit that produces an annual ranking of the world’s billionaire-iest billionaires. I’m surprised the mag didn’t go that extra step and give a little nudge to some of those on their exclusive list. Forbes has told these people what they need to do -- now, all each of them needs is a cool name to inspire fear in those who would use fear as a weapon... or a name that at least reflects their own fears.

And so, I pick up the challenge thrown down by Forbes and offer a few suggestions:

Voleman (George Lucas)

The Weasel (Donald Trump)

Aardvarkdude (Steve Jobs)

Skunkman (Ted Turner)

The Badger (Larry Ellison)

Ferret Boy (Bill Gates)

The Platypus (Ross Perot)

Lemmingman (Ralph Lauren)

I don’t drive so much anymore. I sold my car more than a year ago, and now, when I need to get somewhere mass transit can’t take me, I use a Zipcar. Or I’ll rent a car the traditional way for a weekend away. I don’t miss car ownership one tiny bit... except for the fact that I don’t listen to the radio anymore. That’s something I used to do in the car, and only in the car.

But I don’t really miss that, either. We’ve got an awesome university station from Fordham here in the Bronx, but the commercial radio in NYC pretty much sucks. Who wants to hear the same damn Goo Goo Dolls song every hour, interrupted only by Jessica Simpsons crap and idiotic DJs and endless damn commercials? Not me... though I still can’t help but turn on the radio if I’m tooling around doing grocery shopping in my Zipcar. And so I was stunned when, on a recent weekend, one of the local corporate goose-steppers was playing Hall & Oates and Van Halen and Huey Lewis and Joe Jackson -- a whole bunch of cool stuff that brought me right back to high school -- as well as older cool stuff. Damn: they played a Carly Simon song. It sounded more like the Fordham U. station than anything I’d heard on commercial radio before -- they were barely even playing any ads, it seemed.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d stumbled across the new so-called Jack format that’s popping up all over U.S. radio markets. This particular station was only doing it for the weekend before going back to their "all Goo Goo Dolls, all the time" format, but I bet they switch over entirely eventually, and soon. Because I knew the instant I heard this eclectic mix of tunes that it was a desperate reaction to the competition corporate radio is facing from iPods, satellite, and cable, all of which offer more selection and more control. (My digital cable at home offers something like 40 commercial-free channels of all kinds of different music -- I’ve usually got the Big Band & Swing channel on while I’m writing.)

Not that Jack is gonna save radio. Plenty of people can’t stand Jack, and justifiably so -- it still cannot replicate the genuine eclecticism of a real music lover’s CD or MP3 collection. And Jack has no more personality than the more-limited playlist its replacing -- I’d still rather listen to an interesting and knowledgeable DJ who is allowed to put together an engaging and diverse playlist, who’s allowed to play stuff for a reason other than "this new cloned boy band is on a label owned by the same corporate overlord as this station."

And satellite is making greater inroads. USA Today is reporting that automakers are starting to offer new-car buyers a choice of either XM or Sirius equipment in their new cars. (This VHS/Betamax type competition in proprietary hardware can’t last forever -- satellite radio will really take off when the same equipment can pick it all up... but that’s another discussion entirely.) Reuters is reporting that BBC Radio 1 will soon be listenable over Sirius... and if you’ve ever heard some of the spectacular offerings BBC Radio broadcasts, you know to be excited about this.

The narrowcasting and the niche programming we’ve gotten used to on the Web and thanks to toys like MP3 players are the cause of this -- people know there’s an alternative to corporate "entertainment," an alternative that’s hardly "alternative" in the sense of the word we’re used to. "Alternative" doesn’t mean "cult" anymore: it means "I’m damn sick of being told what I’m supposed to enjoy." And maybe radio will be forced back to its roots as a means of truly local broadcasting, one whose content isn’t dictated by MBAs in another city. Wouldn’t it be cool if we geeks brought corporate radio down to our size? It seems we’re halfway there already.

Know why I love geeks? Because they're not only obsessive, they share their obsessions with the world. Which has always been the case -- early SF fans created fanzines to spread the good word -- but it’s so much easier now with the Web. For instance: One intensely devoted fan of the sadly departed animated series Futurama has logged all the silly taglines that appeared in the opening credits... not by copying them down and typing up a list, but by screen-capping the precise moment from his DVDs. And he’s posted them on Flickr for all of us to giggle over. Fox may not appreciate that this is a gesture bursting with love and generosity, but I do.

I could write a lot about the self-referentially geeky content of Futurama itself -- and I’m sure I will someday -- but the show seems to have inspired a lot of folks to do silly things along the lines of what I talked about recently: the "willingness to combine things we love in unexpected ways." I can’t figure out where this:

originated, but I find it highly clever and highly amusing.

It’s not that I ever really doubted that those Geek Squad TV commercials were advertising a real service, but you can bet I did a double take when I saw this car yesterday. Because certainly there was always a nagging suspicion that it couldn’t quite be true, could it? Valiant geeks arriving the nick of time to save computers in distress? It seems too... primally cool to apply to us. Sure, probably most of us geeks have had the experience of doing tech support for our parents or our nongeeky friends, and certainly those people can be awfully grateful when we demonstrate something so profound as how to change the desktop image or set up a browser home page.

But we weren’t alerted to a citizen in distress by a batsignal or a red phone, and we didn’t swing into action with rappelling gear or arrive in cool wheels.

Geeks as heroic? How refreshing...

Playstations and television are replacing pets in the modern home as families discover the hectic pace of their lives leaves no room for animals, according to new research.

Oh, no!

In some cases, children are even turning to virtual pets instead of the real thing.

That may be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.

Rudimentary virtual pets such as Tamagotchi continue to sell, and in October Nintendo will release a virtual pet game, Nintendogs, in which virtual dogs will respond to voice commands and bark at Nintendogs on other nearby consoles.

No, I take it back: this is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.

[from The Scotsman]

How could anyone not have room in his heart -- and in his home among the DVD players and flatscreen plasma TVs and the Swiss Army Knife USB drives -- for Sam:

Sammy has a better story than many people I know. See, a few years back, a friend of mine overheard, on the bus, an elderly German lady who lived in our neighborhood telling someone about "Sammy" and how she was "a slave to him" (it’s somehow even funnier with her Old World accent). My friend figured she was talking about her husband. She was talking about her cat. And this is that cat.

What happened was that last year, this nice old lady -- whose name, coincidentally, was also Maryann -- was in the hospital for a long time and then ended up having to go to a nursing home or somesuch and couldn’t take the cat with her. The neighbor who’d been looking after Sam was having a hell of a time finding a new home for him, and they were talking about putting him to sleep. There was no way on Earth I was going to let anyone put an animal down merely because a home couldn’t be found for him, so here he is.

Sammy’s been with me for a little over a year now, and my other cats have finally resigned themselves to his presence: Cassie (whom you’ll meet next Friday) has learned to ignore him, though Mrs. Kennedy, in her infinite stupidity, continues to be fascinated by him, keeps trying to make friends with him. Sam, who lived alone with one old lady and no other cats for all of his 14 years before he came here, appears to have no clue what these other furry things are.

I adore Sammy, by the way, but I am not a slave to him. He’s learning to live with that.

In honor of Christian Bale's donning of the Batsuit, herewith the full Batman spectrum. That's Clooney in the middle, BTW: the nipples are the dead giveaway, and what did him in.

Well, actually, they just want our money. The big fat greedy bloodsucking corporations, that is. Not that they haven’t always gone after us -- which flavored-sugar-water company was it, years ago, that tried to entice cynical Xers to buy their crap by pretending that they were eschewing attitude and talking straight to us? Not that it matters which corporation it was -- they’re all the same, thinking that our bullshit detectors are just our own expressions of "attitude" and not, you know, bullshit detectors.

And they’re trying again, not by attempting to ape our worldweariness but by trying to appeal to our techno love of gadgets:

Sirius Satellite Radio said Sprint will offer some of its radio programming over its wireless phone network to gain subscribers.

"We can expect more of this kind of combination as the companies try to differentiate their offerings," independent telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan said.

[from the Chicago Sun-Times]

No, we can expect more of this kind of ridiculous combination because companies think they’re being "cool" -- and hence they think we’ll think they’re cool, too -- even when the combinations make no sense. Does anyone really want to listen to groovin’ tunes on their cell phone? This is exactly the opposite of playing 70s-era video games on your Playstation Portable -- the cheesiness of the graphics and the gameplay is the point there. But no one wants to listen to Dave Matthews or ABBA or whoever through a tinny cell-phone speaker.

And then there’s this:

Now playing at the new McDonald's flagship restaurant in Illinois: Digital-media kiosks for burning CDs, downloading cell-phone ring tones and printing photos.

But the world's largest restaurant chain is tinkering with various possibilities in technology and design to try to ensure it is a hangout of choice in the future.

[from the New York Daily News]

Hangout of choice? People hang out at McDonald’s? People want their photos reeking of hamburger grease?

Except... wait a sec. Is it possible that geek stuff like using electronics for things they aren’t really suited for, just because you can, has escaped into the wild, where those who aren’t true geeks want to play with it too? Could it be that all the popular girls in seventh grade are listening to Britney on their cell phones and printing pix of last Saturday’s slumber party while they gobble french fries?

Could it be that we’re to blame for this? That we made the geeky lifestyle so appealing, so essential, that everyone wants it?

Naaah...

As a child, he embodied the Generation X childhood in his acclaimed role in Empire of the Sun that, though the character was of a different era, was everything we were: Left to his own defenses, his little boy became hard and cynical, but that blossomed into a self-reliance, a streetsmarts, and a fierce independence. As an adult, he’s portrayed both the very worst we Xers are accused of being -- self-centered and selfish, to a murderous degree, in American Psycho -- and the very best we can be: His Batman is the very model of how we mature Xers will use the particular strengths we developed via our rocky childhoods to, hopefully, save the world from itself. That probably scares some older folks, but hey: You made us this way.

Christian Bale was named one of the "Top 8 Most Powerful Cult Figures" in the 10th-anniversary issue of Entertainment Weekly, and is it any wonder? We Xers love our cult figures, especially when they look like us.

You know why this new Batman feels so potent and important and necessary? Because he is. Because the world, the real world, feels like it’s falling apart, rotting away at its core from all manner of injustice and greed and indifference. Because we share this Bruce Wayne’s incoherent grief and shattering rage at the misdeeds of the powerful and the cowardly timidity of those supposedly in the right. Because the world is desperate for a champion like this, who channels fury through compassion and gets things done.

Click on over to FlickFilosopher.com to read the rest of my review of Batman Begins.

I’m filled with geeky delight to be able to say that this is, without question, the greatest comic-book movie ever made. I’ve felt similarly about some other recent comic-book movies, and the thing is, it’s always true. X-Men was the best comic-book movie ever... and then came Hulk, which one-upped it... and then Spider-Man 2, which supplanted that one... And now we have Batman Begins. We must be in a golden age of the comic-book movie if each new one is even better than all the amazing ones that came before, right?

I had so much to say about BB that I never even got around to mentioning the extraordinary cast, every one of which is the kind of actor who elevates everyone else around him... and when everyone’s like that, the raw creative power onscreen just about blows you away. Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Ken Watanabe, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Linus Roache... Man, what a cast! (Yes, Katie Holmes is cute and all, but she’s not quite in the Morgan Freeman stratosphere, I think even her biggest fans would concede.)

What a film. It’s everything we geeks go to the movies for.

Social, economic, health, and environmental disasters on all scales, produced by human hands. The 1980s were so crammed with ‘em that even in this double-size Touchstones, I still didn’t have room for:

o 1980: U.S. boycotts Summer Olympics in Moscow
o 1981: attempted assassination of the Pope
o 1982: Tylenol product-tampering scare
o 1983: Marine barracks bombing in Beirut
o 1984: Bhopal chemical disaster
o 1984: Soviets boycott Summer Olympics in Los Angeles
o 1985: Crack cocaine appears
o 1987: October stock-market crash
o 1988: medical waste washes ashore on Long Island
o 1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska

They say that we Generation Xers have no sense of the future, that we live in the now without regard for consequences -- famously, more of us believe that UFOs are alien transportation devices than believe that Social Security will be there for us when we get old. (And that was before the current administration started futzing with it... which only confirmed our fears.) But even if that UFO tidbit is not true, it rings true, which is why the meme spread so successfully.

Xers generally are not hopeful for the future, but is it any wonder, when the years of our adolescence or very young adulthood were spent watching the world seemingly fall apart through a wide variety of stupid human failures, from sheer incompetence (drunk ship captain runs oil tanker aground) to outright maliciousness (Tylenol scare)? One man with a gun or a bomb, one tiny O ring, one little plan to sell weapons to the enemy... This is why we make and consume stuff like The Matrix and Lost: Of course planes crash. Of course the machines are going to enslave us. What else should we expect from them?

The utter lack of a sense of reverence for anything at all is one of the things I love most about geeks... and often, it’s the things we love most that are the greatest butts of our snark.

That is not the case, however, with The Curious Incident of Tom Cruise’s Celebrity Meltdown Over Katie Holmes. We might have to claim Cruise as a Generation Xer, just barely (he was born in 1962... and I am going to get around to creating a working definition of what exactly "Generation X" is soon, I promise), but he’s certainly no geek. But the multiple layers of derision and intellectually superior condescension that come together in the Free Katie movement -- as typified by FreeKatie.net -- warm the cockles of my cold, cynical, desperate-for-amusement geek heart.

Scary. [image snatched from FreeKatie.net, which snatched it from Defamer]

Everyone absolutely knows that the Cruise/Holmes’s "love affair" is mere publicity grab for the new movies both of them have opening this month, right? He’s in Spielberg’s updating of War of the Worlds, she’s in the Christian Bale/Christopher Nolan Batman revival -- all of which makes the entire thing so stupid, because it’s not like a new Spielberg SF flick and a new comic-book flick were going to have any trouble at all attracting audiences... unless the PR flacks who clearly engineered this bizarre "relationship" are looking to pull in everyone’s mom who watched Cruise behave like he’d gone off his meds on Oprah’s show, jumping on the couches and howling like a crazy person about how not gay he is. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Anyway, the Free Katie people are seeking to get the poor girl out of the Scientological clutches of Cruise, who honestly believes 70-million-year-old aliens infect his brain. And you can buy a T-shirt to support this worthy cause.

The wags behind the campaign are funny and clever, of course, but they’re more than that: they’re right on the frontlines of Generation X, proving that we are no mere consumers of Hollywood’s pabulum -- we can throw it right back in their faces and laugh. And make a coupla bucks in the process, too.

Not sure if you’re a geek? Have you done any of these things?

Made an origami Yoda? (warning: PDF)

Kidnapped a Dalek?

Pissed off a major corporation by satirizing -- with love -- their cash cow wizard boy?

Gotten paid to blog about a bad 70s TV show?

If you answered Yes to any of these questions, you may already be a geek.

We’ve all had that experience of staying up till 3am playing Tetris so frenetically that when you do finally drag yourself off to bed, all you see when you close your eyes are the tumbling blocks that have been burned into your retinas. Ms. Pac-Man used to do that to me, too, after hours at the skating rink dumping quarters into the machine (think: 1983). I still get the urge to play a few games when I come across a Ms. Pac-Man machine, and sometimes I even give in and waste a bunch of time and money.

A long time ago, clever geeks developed the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, which allows us to flash back to our nerdly childhoods by playing games on our PCs from companies with names that make you weep with sentimental longing for the past: Intellivision, Coleco, Atari. And now, those same geeks have figured out a way to run those hoary games on the drool-inducing Playstation Portable.

I dunno, it just makes my dorky little heart sing to know that really smart people are pulling all-nighters so that we can all wallow in disco-era nostalgia by manipulating chunky, 8-bit graphics on a piece of technology that looks like it was snatched from Captain Picard’s ready room. Geekiness doesn’t get any geekier than that.

[via Slashdot]

I recently gobbled up Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede’s Sorcery and Cecelia, a delightful little trifle that’s what might have resulted if Jane Austen had learned to write at Hogwart’s School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. The novel’s subtitle is "or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country," and that kinda gives you a sense of the playful tone of the book, which takes the form of a series of letters between two cousins over the course of the London "season" in 1817. Kate has been swept off to the city for all the society doings -- the balls and dances and comings-out of respectable young ladies -- while Cecelia is stuck back home in Essex, but even though their only contact is via postal mail, which keeps each of them days behind the other’s news, they still manage to jointly fly headlong into social catastrophe, maneuver their aristocratic betters in a tea-party of a chess game to resolve the disaster, pick up some rudiments of proper magic (such as how to use charm bags to ward off evil spells), and of course fall in love with dashing and fascinating young gentlemen along the way. The whole thing is wonderfully clever, sophisticated fun (even if it is rather mysteriously labeled "young adult fiction"), and I’m looking forward to reading the sequel, The Grand Tour: Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality. The sublime wit and supremely understated snark implied by the subtitle alone tickles me something awful.

Sorcery and Cecelia is emblematic of a certain impishness in geek culture: a willingness to combine things we love in unexpected ways. And it’s not just books I’m talking about: it’s everything from self-described "brick artist" Nathan Sawaya’s life-size sculpture of Han Solo in carbonite made out of Legos to all the many dioramas mounted in Peeps -- those disgusting blobs of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup some people consider confections -- commemorating such things as The Lord of the Rings. It indicates a certain instinctive urge on the part of creative geeks to not only create but to comment on the pop-culture universe out of which the new material springs. Fine art and high culture have always engaged in that kind of commentary about the fine art and high culture that has preceded it, but what geeks are doing suggests that "low" art -- or at least some "low" art -- is worth exploring and re-exploring, too.

I’m fascinated by this catblogging thing that all the bloggers are into, even the political bloggers and others who usually write about utterly un-cat-related and un-adorableness-related things. Carnival of the Cats, a metablog about catblogging, explains its own existence as a "non-political respite from the vehement echo chamber that the Blogopshere tends to spin itself into during the week. It also demonstrates that even the mightiest or meekest of pundits still have a love of cats in common." All of which is also a pretty damn good explanation for the phenomenon of catblogging.

But why do bloggers -- and by bloggers I mean geek bloggers, because I think it’s safe to suggest that blogging about anything is nothing if not geeky (in that good way I’m trying to promote) -- why do bloggers love cats so darn much? Of course there’s the whole tiger-on-your-couch, Wild Kingdom-in-your-kitchen thing that appeals to cat people of all ages, but I wonder if a love of science fiction and fantasy, which is a dominant meme among geeks and perhaps a defining characteristic of geekiness, is a contributing factor? (Cat ownership is rampant among serious SF/F fans.) SF/F trains you to recognize that the way things are isn’t the way things necessarily have to be, enables you to see the cultural programming we’re all subject to, helps you see the strings that pull us all in a way that not everyone does... and it does that by introducing you to alien societies -- whether they’re in the future, on another planet, or in a magical realm.

And cats are certainly alien in a way that dogs aren’t. Not to put down dogs -- some of my favorite people are dogs -- but they just aren’t as complicated or mysterious as cats. Individual cats each have their own agendas beyond all that obvious napping and eating, and the continual discovering and rediscovering of that is part of the intrigue of living with cats.

All of which is merely to justify my own indulgence in flogging kitties on the Web, metaphorically speaking, of course:

This is Mrs. Kennedy. She’s not named for Jackie O. or anything silly like that -- she’s named, because I am a geek, after a character in a movie, a series of movies, actually: Napoleonic sailor Archie Kennedy (as played by Jamie Bamber, now all over Battlestar Galactica) in the British Horatio Hornblower films. And she’s named after Archie because, like him, she was a meek little creature until she got thrown in the slammer (in her case, the carrier in which I transported her home from the shelter), at which point she turned into an escape-crazed maniac.

She’s cute, huh? And good thing, too, because it’s pretty much the only thing to recommend her. She’s the world’s dumbest cat -- I’ve witnessed her sniff at a burning candle, get her whiskers singed, and go back and do the same thing again 10 seconds later -- and she’s a mean little minx 90 percent of the time, too. Her looks are her saving grace... and the fact that the other 10 percent of the time she isn’t being a little monster, she’s bursting with the kind of personality that goes along with being rock stupid and constantly rediscovering your own tail.

Starting a precedent: If it's Thursday, it must be Geek/Dork/Nerd day...

I’ve got an essay up over at The Internet Review of Science Fiction (free registration is required to read the site) about how Anakin Skywalker fits into mythological traditions that turn up all over the globe. I know a lot of fans think Lucas has let the mythmaking thing go to his head, and maybe he has -- I’m not interested in getting into a debate about it. But I mention it because I think almost everyone would agree that if Anakin/Darth Vader is any kind of "hero," he is emphatically not heroic in his Vader phase.

So why is Darth Vader turning up selling everything from Burger King hamburgers to M&Ms?

I mean, sure: Dark chocolate M&Ms? It’s about bloody time. But what is being suggested by a "Darth Mix" of somber colors and a red M&M done up like Darth Maul? "Eat this candy... and turn to the Dark Side"? Am I the only one who finds this a tad uncomfortable?

But the M&Ms and the creepy Burger King TV ads aren’t the worst of it. I touched on this in my review of the film at FlickFilosopher.com, how icky it is to have a mass-murdering maniac with evil superpowers selling stuff to children, and that was before I came upon this:

This is truly demented. "Lava Berry Explosion"? Holy crap: why not just have a burned-to-a-crisp Anakin on the box, howling in agony as all the nerves in his dermis are cooked away while his former best friend looks on and refuses to put him out of his misery? Why not engineer the Pop Tarts to smell like burning hair and frying human skin while they’re toasting in your kitchen? (In the IROSF essay I touch on how Anakin’s journey through the Dark Side might be considered akin to a crucifixion such as those the mythological figures of Jesus or Odin endured. Passionfruit of the Christ Pop Tarts, anyone?) Cuz that’s what these artifical-everything breakfast treats are commemorating: a man being roasted almost to death... and surviving to live on another 20 years or so in what can only be a neverending hell of emotional and physical wretchedness and torment.

Breakfast of champions? Oh, wait, I forgot: Ani’s not on the Wheaties box, he’s on Corn Flakes. My bad.

Have you seen this Nike commercial, the one that starts out looking like Chariots of Fire and morphs into a sneaker ad? Man, I’m loathe to bring any more attention to a company that uses child labor to make $200 running shoes, but the ad so perfectly encapsulates the geek approach to pop culture that I can’t help it. (You can watch it here if you haven’t caught it on the tube.)

From its perfect reenactment of that famous scene from Chariots of Fire, with the runners jogging in slo-mo down the beach and the inspiring Vangelis music, the real world slowly intrudes -- someone trods on a manhole cover in the surf; a taxi scoots by along the shore; fire escapes and parking meters slide past on the beach. One of the runners, we eventually learn, is running along a busy city street -- it’s his new Nikes that make him feel as if he’s jogging barefoot in the sand.

I’d bet the rent money* that whoever conceived of this ad is between 25 and 40: because this is how we Xers take the pop culture we’re fed and make it our own. We see allusions to the stuff we love everywhere; we can’t help but quote from a movie or a song when it seems appropriate (usually, it seems irresistible to do so); we don’t just passively consume what’s handed to us, we rework it into the soundtrack in our minds, into the movie of our lives that plays in our heads constantly. I don’t know whether it’s either a healthy or unhealthy thing that so much of how we relate to the world gets filtered through someone else’s images and words -- I just know that it happens.

I may never buy a pair of Nike sneakers (though I have to confess that a pair of shoes that makes it feel as if you’re running barefoot are rather intriguing), but I’ll never forget this ad. Because it recognizes that my understanding of myself and the world around me frequently percolates through a filter of iconic pop culture imagery.

*Offer not valid anywhere.

No, it’s not your local comic-book shop, it’s a whole damn neighborhood in Tokyo:

At his favorite neighborhood cafe, Shunsuke Yamagata, a college student who proudly calls himself a nerd, smiled shyly behind his horn-rimmed glasses at waitresses hurrying about in black Minnie Mouse shoes and lacy, racy mini-dresses inspired by Japanese comics.

For Yamagata, 20, it was just another night out with the pocket-protector crowd in Tokyo's neon-splashed Akihabara district, where "costume cafes" are the latest of hundreds of new businesses catering to Japan's otaku, or nerds.

[from The Washington Post]

I’ve never owned a pocket protector, and I suspect that no one under 40 ever has -- didn’t they go out with fountain pens? -- and ya just gotta love this: "Eyeglass adjustment kiosks compete for space with shops selling nondescript dress shirts and thick leather shoes."

Yeah, there’s a lot of stereotyping going on, and damn, the only women mentioned are the fuck-me blowup-doll waitresses in the nerd cafes whose "uniforms are inspired by the French maid-meets-Pokemon outfits of adult manga" and those who "greet patrons at the door with a curtsy and the words ‘Welcome home, master.’"

Yuck.

But a couple things leapt out at me:

"Sociologists and urban planners compare the phenomenon to ethnic and social enclaves such as New York's Chinatown or San Francisco's gay Castro district, born of a blend of discrimination and shared cultural cues." Heh! I’m not the only one to suggest that geeks and queers have some problems in common...

"With some analysts estimating the Japanese geek market to be worth as much as $19 billion a year, companies are jostling to cash in."

Aha! So then someone is going to start one of those cafes for girl geeks, where Indiana Jones or Captain Mal Reynolds will greet me at the door with a sardonic grin and the words, "I love a gal who loves adventure"?

I don't remember the first two events, though older Xers will. But I was old enough -- and already cynical enough -- in 1981 that my first thought upon hearing that the Americans being held in Iran had been released was: Well, isn’t that awfully suspicious, all those hostages getting set free at the very moment of Ronald Reagan’s presidential inauguration.

Even if it weren’t so damn easy to be cynical about the political situation today, I think we’d still be seeing the explosion of political bloggers dissecting civic bullshit -- people like Duncan Black at Eschaton and John Aravosis at AMERICAblog, the writings of both of whom I devour daily. We were primed for it. This is how you create a generation that has no confidence in its leaders: you make sure their first lessons in social science include an American war of aggression failing miserable, a president resigning in what should be shame giving a victory salute as he scurries from the White House, and another president flaunting his dirty trickery from the very moment of his installation.

Hoorah! Spaceflight Now (and lots of other sources) reports that the Mars rover Opportunity is finally free of the sand dune it’s been stuck in since the end of April, thanks to a weeks-long and undoubtedly pizza-and-chocolate-fueled effort on the part of NASA geeks to get it moving again. (What can’t geeks do? The rover, which was of course designed by geeks, is a year and a half into a mission originally planned to last 90 days.)

The thought that that plucky little robot has been literally spinning its wheels for a month without ever giving up just about melts my heart, in a similar (but much happier) way that the thought of the Mars Pathfinder fruitlessly trying to call home to Earth after the batteries on its lander had run down made me unspeakably sad. Man, I remember like it was yesterday sitting around watching TV all day on July 4, 1997, waiting for word -- and pictures, holy crap: pictures -- from the red planet that the lander had landed and the rover was roving and that we were on Mars again for the first time since Viking. And now we’re there again, and it’s too bad it ain’t people walking around in the Martian sand, but damn, those rovers got spunk, don’t they?

I was born a month after humans walked on the moon. I remember absolutely everything about that day when I was junior in high school when the Challenger shuttle blew up. Inseparable in my mind are the return to orbit of the shuttle and the offer of my first job in publishing after I dropped out of college -- they both happened on the same day in 1988. Generation X has been witness to the beginnings of human exploration of space at precisely the right tender age to imprint the excitement of it on our brains. We’re hardly the first generation to enjoy or create science fiction, but we’re the first for whom it hasn’t all been entirely science fiction.

Of course, not every member of GenX appreciates this. I remember, maybe a year or two after graduating from high school, where I had never made a secret of my geeky proclivities, running into a former, nongeeky classmate who was working as a cashier in a drugstore where I was shopping. We fell into conversation, and I noted with geeky glee the fact the some customer was paying with a credit card that had been personalized (an option that was just starting to be offered by the banks) with an image of the space shuttle blasting off. And this former classmate said, "Oh yeah, you were always into that science fiction stuff." I didn’t say anything, but I recall thinking, "Science fiction? This is science fact -- it’s happening now."

We’re all living in this world of rapidly accelerating technological change -- where, within the Xer lifetime, we’ve gone from black-and-white TVs showing three channels to global online networks of thousands of illegally downloadable movies and TV shows; from painful smallpox vaccinations that left us all with unmistakable scars on our upper arms to human cloning. But it seems to take the geeky mindset to get a real grasp on the impact all these cool toys will have on everyone. Sure, we geeks have an affinity for new technology and an irresistible urge to find unusual ways to use it, but intrinsic in "geekiness" seems to be a recognition that it has the potential to change everyone’s lives... that it’s not merely silly "science fiction" that’s easily dismissed.

And that, ironically, is part of why I suspect geeks are drawn to science fiction, and why science fiction is so big a part of Xer culture, not just in the form our stories take but in the metaphors that really speak to us in general. Of course the genre existed long before we came along... but if one literary tradition could have been specifical