geek.teacher

In the last week, here’s what I’ve been reading/watching/playing:

Books:

• Our Dumb World by The Onion – This has been bedtime reading for a while now.  It’s great parody of an atlas, as it’s very dense but often hilarious.  For example, this bit on Hong Kong:

An exotic seaport off the coast of China, the Hong Kong province is plagued by massive, well-choreographed brawls that break out almost daily on every street corner.  The dazzling, high-speed, and acrobatic violence puts every citizen at constant risk of being thrown off a two-story balcony onto a pile of cardboard boxes.

• The Incredible Indoor Games Book by Bob Gregson – I haven’t looked at this book in years, and it reminded me of some fun games that I was able to play with my students for PAT on Friday.

Comics – I read almost everything, so some highlights and low points:

• Countdown #1 -  I already trashed this.
• Fables #72 – Cinderella is awesome.
• Mighty Avengers #12 – If you’re reading Secret Invasion and not reading everything else Bendis is writing at the moment, you’re nuts.
• New Exiles #5 – I already trashed this one, too.
• Ultimate Spider-Man #121 – The only Bendis book you don’t need to read if you want to keep up with Secret Invasion, and it, too, is great.  This is a nice done in one story that wraps up the typical high school baby project for health class.

TV:

• How I Met Your Mother – More Robin Sparkles?  Thank you!  Bonus for The Dawson balding.
• 30 Rock – Some delightful continuity this week that’s going to lead to interesting places, and, even better, more Will Arnett on my TV.  It also had my favorite line of the week.
• Lost – Poor Sayid.

Games:

• Just Cause – While it’s certainly not a great game, it was worth the $15 I spent on it.  It’s a fairly simple open world game overall, but I just find the concept of freeing tiny villages from tyrannical rule very appealing for some reason and always want to do just one more.  A grappling hook and a parachute both go a long way to making the typical open world experience more fun.
• Crackdown – This was another $15 game, and it was way more enjoyable than I thought it would be.  I finished up the co-op campaign with Brian, and it was pretty fun.  Again, having a fun way to move through the open world with awesome jumping abilities definitely improved the open world gaming experience for me.

One of the things that is simultaneously hilarious and frustrating about having nerdy pastimes is dealing with nerd anger.  Sometimes it makes you want to laugh, and sometimes it makes you want to punch someone in the face.  Worry not, I do not fail to see the irony in that statement.  The funny thing about it, of course, is that nerds are always sitting, waiting for mainstream acceptance of their hobbies, but the nerd anger makes it that much harder for people to accept them.

I would posit this comes from some compulsive beast inside the nerd.  It’s that which takes ownership of the hobby, compelling us to read and interact with everything related to our chosen hobbies.  I know that I am not immune.  I’m proud of myself when I choose not to read one or two comics a week because I dislike them, but at the same time, if I am in some way convinced that it might be important to know about later, I will continue to read things that I actively loathe.  Case in point number one, right now, would of course be Countdown.  Why did I read every issue of a shamefully bad series?  I was promised importance, so I was compelled to read it for myself instead of just getting spoilers somewhere.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there, I’m also compelled to read series that I’ve followed for ages, even if they have devolved into mediocrity.  Just this week, for example, Countdown wasn’t even the worst book released.  That would have to be this week’s issue of New Exiles.  I haven’t loved Exiles since Judd Winick left, and that was almost five years ago.  and now the series is downright terrible, but I still read it.  Self-loathing is one of the clear characteristics of the nerd hobbyist.

Anyway, I started off on this rant on nerd anger because Tom Brevoort shared his own dark past as an angry nerd, complete with savaging the motivations of the creators.  It’s a fun look at how the arguments kind of stay the same even as the specifics change.