culture: February 2006 Archives

Wish I’d known about the first Comic-Con in New York City earlier than, oh, the week before it happened: it sounds like it was a ton of fun. Says ManhattanOffender.com:

The ambience, a cross between islamic fundamentalism and pure camp, is catching and mystifying at the same time.

(ManhattanOffender.com has lots of pix and junk.)

This is major evidence of the triumph of the geeks:

The Javits Center was packed tight all weekend for the first New York Comic-Con—as Newsarama reports, Saturday's crowds were, thanks to an aggressive local media campaign, "not a lot in terms of a comic book convention, but a lot in terms of a rock show." As people lined up all over the front of the convention center, the earliest panels began before many fans had even gotten onto the main floor; the show had completely sold out by 12:30 and state police were keeping a tight rein on people coming in and out of the exhibition.

[from GalleyCat]

Like a rock show.

This is what happens when geek toys take over the world but geeks themselves don’t get to decide how to use them:

Tech makes working harder, not easier

Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research....

The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.

[from Reuters via CNet News.com]

You can’t blame the technology for this: computers are still just stupid machines that do what we tell them to do. All the cool tech would make work quicker and easier if the suits who make corporate decisions didn’t interpret “hey, workers are working quicker and easier” to mean that “hey, we can give workers more work to do.”

There's a perception that geeks -- particularly science fiction fans -- are so wrapped up in knitting Spock ears or whatever to be fully involved in anything going on outside the fannish world. But I gotta say that my "Bush spied on me" T-shirt, which I'm wearing today, is a big hit, and there's a guy wandering the con wearing a tricorn hat and a T-shirt that reads "Tyranny Response Team," Boston being something of a bastion of American freedom and such, at least in earlier eras.

Still, every panel seems to descend into a discussion of trying to figure out just what the hell is happening on Lost.

Here's some meta-blogging: it's 4:49pm, and I'm about to go into my panel on blogging with Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Cory Doctorow and others. Cool...

Wired is on the curious case of the LEGO people. No, not these LEGO people...

[from PodBrix]

...but the not-plastic folks at the LEGO company. It’s like this:

Say it ain't so, Johnny -- say it ain't so. You ain't sold out on us, have you? I mean, we all managed to overlook the fact that Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was based on a theme-park ride. But there's no way to avoid the fact that your mug is now gracing the packaging of chocolate-covered sugar bombs.

Why do you make us cry, Johnny?

This is almost as bad -- not quite, but almost -- as the ain't-third-degree-burns-grand Star Wars Pop Tarts...

As I head off to Boskone, herewith the last word on Arisia, and it’s all about the cool and geeky artists whose art I enjoyed, some of whom I got to meet, too.

The hit of the art show was for me, I think, the extremely cool items from My Mad Lab, way-neat Tesla coils and brains in jars and other such necessities for the evil lair. This unnamed artist’s stuff is hands-on, too -- press a button and something lights up; press another button and the oozy liquid in the jar with the brain gurgles. I’ve got a pickled alien baby in a jar (seriously -- I’ll show you some time), but it does not light up or gurgle.

One of these stories is honest-to-God real (culled from the San Francisco Chronicle, actually), and the other is honest-to-God fake (culled from The Onion). Can you guess which is which?

Kerry Makes Whistle-Stop Tour From Deck Of Yacht

Onion or AP?

Bush talks of health in speech at Wendy's

Onion or AP?

Politics continues its journey beyond satire...

Alone today, and feeling okay about it? Then you’re not alone:

Forty-three percent of adult Americans, or 87 million people, describe themselves as single -- but only 16 percent are looking for love, the survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.

Fifty-five percent of US singles say they have no interest in looking for a romantic partner. That feeling is especially pronounced among women, or those who have been divorced or widowed.

[via Yahoo! News]

Or maybe you’re not alone but can’t stand the sickly sweetness of this invented holidays traditions? Then you’re not alone either:

This Valentine's Day, retailers are thumbing their noses at hearts and redirecting arrows at Cupid himself.

Traditionally sweet symbols and sayings are getting tweaked in the card and gift aisles, resulting in teddy bears that are more wry than warm and fuzzy and candies that are more sarcastic than saccharine.

[from USA Today, via Yahoo! News]

Bah. Who needs love, anyway, when we’ve got the Internet?

(Virtual candy hearts personalized at ACME Heart Maker)

Scott Adams nails the tragedy of the girl geek:

There's more...

I saw the Leonard Nimoy/Aleve ad the other night, and it cheesed me off. Yeah, it’s cute, I guess, that the painkiller helps Nimoy do his Vulcan salute in front of a crowd of rabid Trekkies, but why do the Trekkies have to be such rabid nerds?

Attend an SF con with me, and you will see that I am the first to rag on the really nerdy, raised-by-wolves, totally unsocialized fans, and I’m completely with Dorothy Parker in that whole “if you’ve got nothing nice to say about people, come and sit next to me” thing. But even I have to admit that the worst of the scary fen are not like the costumed idiots depicted here. It surprises me that some big name fans, like SF and comic writer Peter David, are so enamored of the ad: “The new funniest commercial of the evening [Super Bowl evening, he means], although probably only because we're fans.” But see, it’s precisely because I am a fan that I’m so bothered by this commercial. It disses us geeks, and it misrepresents us, and that makes me mad.

(You can watch the ad here -- scroll down to the subsection headed “Bayer.”)

Much, much better is the way-geeky MacGyver ad that MasterCard ran during the Super Bowl. Mac is an uber geek, but this 30-second minifilm doesn’t make fun of him so much as it celebrates him -- there’s gentle ribbing involved, sure, but it’s lovingly done. The folks behind this ad -- including Richard Dean Anderson -- clearly have a deep adoration of Mac and his scientific dorkiness. The same can’t be said of the Nimoy ad -- someone saw a chance to make fun of Trekkies, and took it.

That's geeks for ya: Leave it us to turn the most contentious issue troubling the world -- at least at this nanosecond -- into a nugget of pop-culture detritus. And so we have Mohammed Dance, which is doubly geekalicious in that it not only reduces a major battle in the ongoing global culture wars into an online tchotcke, it also invokes nerd nostalgia by harkening back to the Web's glory days of 1998.

Or else we slap it on a T-shirt.

If only folks would embrace the One True Carbo-Faith, we could all live together in peace and harmony and alfredo sauce. If you've been touched by His Noodly Appendage as I have, then join me in a celebratory dance! (suggested by a wag on Metafilter)

I can’t quite put my finger on the why of it, but I think we just saw the end of Boomer dominance of pop culture. Well, I didn’t see it, actually, because I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, but that’s where it happened, at halftime.

It’s not that the Rolling Stones -- the ur prophets of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll -- were performing at the supreme symbol of American aggression and consumerism and aggressive consumerism -- you know, about as far from the counterculture as you can be. The Stones sold out years ago; the Rolling Stones-branded credit card was, I’d have thought, about as selling-out as they could go, but even if this appearance proved me wrong, it was just a matter of degree.

I don’t think it happened, either, when the halftime producers banned people older than the band -- not older than the band members, older than the band -- from watching the concert stageside (though they later loosened that restriction somewhat). And it wasn’t, either, that those same stageside fans had to pass a criminal background check that none of the band members themselves would have passed.

I think it happened when the producers killed Jagger’s mike for the last word of the line “You make a dead man come” in the song “Start Me Up.” The spirit of defiant rock music died right then. “No sex, please: we’re Americans,” is what that moment said. So much for free love.

Sex? Not so much. Drugs? Not unless it’s Viagra. Rock ‘n’ roll? RIP.

The Victorian Internet has finally kicked the bucket:

After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams.

[from LiveScience]

But we’ll always have steampunk...

So there he was, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, taking a tongue lashing from his disappointed mom. Who had trusted him, and he had abused that trust and let her down.

It was rather delicious to see James Frey sitting there on Oprah’s couch and just enduring it. Delicious because he deserved it, the lying rat -- no, he’s worse: he’s a lying rat who’s made a bloody fortune off his lies. And he has proved himself even worse-worse on Oprah: he’s a sniveling lying rat who doesn’t even have the balls to claim his lying as his own and say, “You know what, Oprah? Yeah, I lied. And you ate it up. And so did your sheeplike viewers. And now -- heh -- I’m gonna go lie on a beach in the Caribbean. Suckers.”