Posts Tagged ‘Geekery’

iPad: Not the Apple of my i

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Dear Apple,

I remember a time not that long ago when I was in love with you. You were so young and pretty. And I could drop my first love, the iBook, from a billion feet in the air with no damage. In geek parlance, I admired your constitution score.

Times have changed. With the release of the iPad, it’s like I truly see you for the first time in all your soggy douchiness. You tout yourself as “magical.” No, you are not “magical” — you are an ordinary device in an increasingly crowded field, and a shortsighted one at that. You allow publishers like that other douche nozzle, Macmillan, to jack up the price of ebooks and milk your customers. You’re pissy at Google for having the nerve to compete with you in a free market. You make using iTunes with non-Apple tech like looking for a Cheerio in a cow patty. And lastly, how did your marketing monkeys not see the MAXiPad jokes coming from space?

I am so disappointed in you, Apple. I feel used — used like the 10-cent media whores Steve Jobs has to suck off to get the fawning press he does.

I am ashamed to admit that I still dig my iPod, but I suppose we can be fuck buddies until something better comes along.

Sincerely,
Dirty Hooker

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We are nerds, hear us roar

Monday, January 4th, 2010

If you’re cruising for a new podcast, check out Tyrannosaurus Regina, where I and three other women talk about all things nerdy. You can find it on iTunes by doing a search for Tyrannosaurus Regina, or go directly to our site.

The site is a work in progress, as is the podcast, so suggestions are welcome.

Topic #1: Why aren’t there more female nerds? Topic #2, to be recorded this weekend, is about those supreme time wasters we call Facebook games. Are they really games or Facebook’s evil attempt to get us to spend real money on virtual money?

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How to score with (boy) nerds

Friday, December 11th, 2009

I qualify “nerds” because there was a terrific post about scoring with female nerds at The Park Bench, which inspired this one. After speaking* with Devon, I put together this primer on dating male nerds.

Be interested in his obsession
And he WILL be obsessed with something, whether it’s Battlestar Galactica, forensic science or making chess pieces out of recycled yak dung. Being genuinely interested makes life easier for everyone, but “fake it ’til you make it” also applies.

Be aggressive
Boy nerds have taken a lot of rejection since high school. A LOT. He may not recognize you shoving his head into your breasts as flirting, in which case you’ll need to come on stronger. Nerds are very smart and very, very dumb.

Have breasts
Nerds are still men, and men like boobs.  Anything that emphasizes your breasts (say, shoving his head into them) will let him know you are a woman and that he should consider the possibility of having sex with you at some point in the future.

Build a World of Warcraft toon now
The good news is that you won’t be trapped watching football on lazy afternoons. The bad news is that you’d better be ready to part with $15 a month for a World of Warcraft account. A toon is a WoW character you control, and you will need one if you want to spend this time together. Start building now, because your level-15 noob just won’t cut it when he’s doing level-80 raids. It’s OK. While this seems lame now, you will TOTALLY FUCKING LOVE IT BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME.

Feed him
The average nerd isn’t so dense that he will die of starvation, but he may consider Whoppers and beer a balanced meal. If you encourage him to eat real food and take care of himself, you might prove invaluable in keeping him alive.

Be prepared to make bizarre abstract arguments
Like, who would win in a fight, Caprica Six or Megatron? Q or Elminster? This is nerd philosophy. Embrace it and your nerd will embrace you.

Wooing a nerd helps if you are also a nerd. Odds are, though, that your nerdiness will have a different flavor than his, so it helps to brush up on the basics. Your learning curve will be steeper if you are not a nerd, but it can work if you are committed and persistent. Go get ’em, tiger.

* Nerds don’t speak. We IM. Even ones who live together.

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A book a week? Am I on crack?

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Many have tried. Many have failed. But here I go: I am going to try to read one book a week. It shouldn’t be hard, in theory: Until I graduated from high school,  I sometimes read three books a day. Social awkwardness is made, not born, kids. But somewhere in adulthood, I got distracted by other things, and now reading is a struggle.

That’s not quite right. I’m literate, I promise: Making time to read is a struggle. I keep getting distracted by shiny hobbies, like cooking and crafting and cleaning up dog shit. And I read things all day long for a living, so reading outside of work is like a janitor mopping floors for kicks. But much of what I edit is deeply terrible, and I need to rediscover the love.

So I’m going to set some ground rules for myself:

1. No books that suck. If, 50 pages into it,  I want to spork my eyes out, the book is gone. This ain’t high school, where I HAVE to wade through “Moby Dick.” There is absolutely no reason I have to subject myself to Ann Coulter. I’m a grown-up: I bought the book, I can burn it if I want to.

2. No book is off limits. It doesn’t have to be great literature, it just has to have words. I’ll even allow for audiobooks. I don’t “read” many of them, because my sleep circuit fires when people read me stories, but they will do just fine.

I should be able to do this. I’ll review the books I read and let you know how it goes. What books do you recommend? Any I should stay the hell away from?

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My apologies to Twitter and William Shatner

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

I was sold on Twitter when I realized it could help me stalk William Shatner.

I saw Shatner once in person on a college trip to Montreal. The other English Honor Society geeks and I were there to see a stage production of “Twelfth Night” with our faculty adviser, Professor Byrd, in a bus a friend had dubbed The Byrdcage.

When Toni and I spotted Shatner, it was like the full force of a thousand 14-year-old girls had been unleashed on an unsuspecting Canadian populace. There was screaming. There was squealing. There were high-pitched cries of “IT’S WILLIAM SHATNER!”

The only thing that stopped us from running out and tackling him was that we were enormous weenies.

Hey, stop judging me! You saw how Kirk took out that Gorn. The Shatner is not to be trifled with.

I never imagined 50 people would be following me on Twitter. Fifty isn’t a hell of a lot when you consider that Barack Obama has 2,530,372 followers, but it’s about 45 more than I expected. Every once in awhile, it drops to 48 when a few people realize they accidentally followed me instead of Kid Rock.

So, my apologies to William Shatner for stalking him. And to everyone on Twitter for not being Kid Rock. I’ll try harder.

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Sex and the future

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Devon and I were watching an absolutely wretched episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” last night that sparked a debate about holosuites as sex toys.

In that ep where Odo and Kira finally hook up after wasting most of the episode listening to lounge music in the holosuite, I wondered what freaky things people would do in there if Trek were more like real life — or even more like “South Park.”
Moral question: Is having sex with a hologram cheating, or is it more like using a super-advanced sex toy? Devon noted penetration as the benchmark, but many toys are designed for that, and lesbians can have sex without it, so we’d have to start by defining “sex.” If virtual reality advances that far, will marriages break up over illicit Jacuzzi time with fantasy people? And how does this impact the concept of a threesome? Is it truly a threesome if there are only two biological life forms there? And what if the hologram is programmed to look like one of the other two participants? Is this a creative solution to a problem or the height of narcissism?

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