Nerdly Advice: Lightning Round
Apr 13Most of the time, nerds force advice onto anybody they make eye contact with. You can tell it’s coming if you hear words like “Actually.” But sometimes nerds need advice and have nowhere to turn without damaging what they believe to be their credibility as wise sages.
Nerdly Advice is a safe and anonymous haven where you can ask your nerd questions and get nerd answers full of Jeff’s delightful misanthropy. This week, we tackle several different Important Questions. Have a question of your own? Email us at nerdlyadvice (at) gmail (dot) com.
Jeff, should I buy an iPad?!
I like the idea of the iPad a lot. I’m a believer in lightweight, intuitive-interface tablet devices making a lot of changes in the way we do a lot of things (I worked in the health care industry for awhile, where I think the iPad can do huge things in terms of revolutionizing the way patient data is charted and analyzed). Some pundits can complain about the iPad murdering innovation, but what it’s really going to do is get a bunch of people in the industry off their asses and working to make a better, more user-friendly tablet while Apple will keep refining its hardware until it gets it right. I don’t believe it’s had the perfect iPod until the recent iteration of the Nano, and it cribs a lot of features from the Zune, whose newest version is basically a matter of preference over the iPod Touch – long strides from a competitor whose first offering was a joke.
The iPad has flaws. It will get better. Or a competitor will fill those gaps with a superior product. Get that. Unless you have a giant pile of money. Then you should buy two and send one to me.
What am I going to do after LOST is over?
You might want to consider falling in love or adopting a pet. Maybe starting a book club or designing a board game.
The Bin – 4/2/10
Apr 02
Have you heard about this? This “Bin” thing? There’s this thing, see, it goes on computers and it comes from the wall. Well, not from the wall, from a cord that comes out of the wall. I think it’s electric.
So you plug in this cord or sometimes it just floats around, this stuff that goes into computers; it floats around you in the air. It puts stuff on your computer. This internet stuff. And these people, they like things and they put it on the internet because I guess they have nothing else to offer the world? And they call it the Bin.
Nerdly Advice – Boy Trouble
Mar 17Sometimes nerds need advice. Jeff is good at substituting snarky one-liners for actual solutions to people’s problems, and that makes him an expert. He says it’s like a popular syndicated advice column as written by an obscure comic book character. He calls what he does Nerdly Advice.
Have a question? Email it to nerdlyadvice (at) gmail dot com.
Dear Nerdly Advice,
I’m a geek girl in her mid-20s, and I’ve never had a romantic relationship. I like to think I’m intelligent and interesting, and there have been plenty of geeky boys I’ve been attracted to, but I’ve never seen a spark of interest on their parts — or known how to identify it, if I have. I find I communicate best with people I have something in common with, and I can have great conversations with these guys, but it never goes anywhere beyond that. Sometimes I feel like nerdy guys are only interested in women who look like Emma Frost or Kitty Pryde (which I definitely do not), but I like to hope that isn’t really the truth. After all, I wouldn’t expect the guys to look like Superman!
So my question is this: how does a geeky girl go about meeting interested geek boys to date? What are the social protocols of nerd dating? What are the steps to overcome the social awkwardness of nerddom — on their part and mine? And how do you successfully flirt with a nerdy boy when you don’t look like Wonder Woman? I’ve seen a lot of advice columns give advice to nerdy boys looking to date girls, but I haven’t seen anything about nerdy girls wanting to date (nerdy) boys, so I’d love to hear any thoughts you have.
Thanks,
Lonely in Latveria
Hi LiL,
There is no better way to psych yourself out of dating than letting yourself get hung up on body image issues. Especially if you’re projecting Greg Land-drawn physiques onto the situation. I mean, those women Land is tracing are professionals, after all.
Attraction is not just a physical thing. There’s a mental element to it, too and at least in my experience it is the more powerful of the two. In short, and I know this sounds hella trite, it doesn’t matter what you look like. I mean, hell, people date me and I look like the love child of Grizzly Adams and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. So looks don’t matter.
Well, I mean, hygiene matters.
It sucks and it’s like tearing a band-aid off, but sometimes the best way to find out if someone is into you is simply asking. In last week’s peer into the mind of the geek boy, I pointed out that we can be stultifyingly shy at times and, for good or for ill, it will take some kind of confident advance by one of the two nerds caught in a romantic detente to get the other to commit units outside their borders. Trust your gut; not the butterflies-y feeling you get, but your gut. It will likely know if there’s real chemistry there or a one-sided infatuation, if you can make yourself consult it.
It’s okay to ask him. He won’t get weirded out. In fact, he’ll probably be relieved that that ice has been broken. That’s not me saying you have to be the aggressor, either. Just confirming that if you are, it’s alright as well as acknowledging that boys are dumb.
Final piece of wisdom: it’s not a race. Rushing into a relationship just to be in a relationship only guarantees that you’re going to be in a bad relationship.
The Bin – 3/12/2010
Mar 12
Remember when your friendly neighborhood Alert Nerds used to like stuff every week? We’ve taken that feature and rebuilt it, made it stronger, faster and full of links, miscellania and like a YouTube video or something. We call it The Bin, even though it’s the Internet and there isn’t, like, a physical bin that we’re putting this stuff in.
Stuff We Like This Week
Jeff: So, there’s a Hawkeye and Mockingbird ongoing. That’s a thing. I love Clint and Bobbi both separately and as a couple, so I am psyched about this. One of my favorite, formative comics storylines was the time travel epic where Bobbi got stuck in the old West and the Avengers fought Rama Tut.
Final Fantasy XIII is a beautiful game, but I find myself only being able to sink maybe two hours at a time into before it starts to overwhelm me. It struck me that I’ve purchased every first-run Final Fantasy (the main series, not like Chocobo Womens’ Prison or what have you) game to hit the U.S. starting with the improperly-numbered Final Fantasy II on release day. I’m not sure what that says about me, but I do love Final Fantasy.
Matt: I discovered Doug Benson’s I Love Movies podcast one day while searching the internet frantically for Patton Oswalt clips to improve my mood. If you love movies too, and comedy, you will love this podcast. Benson invites fellow comics and actors to sit on stage with him and bullshit for forty-five minutes about movies. New movies, old movies, random movies. Benson’s funny as hell, and his depth of knowledge is part of that; maybe I’m alone but nothing makes me giggle more than a well-placed obscure reference. When he’s got fellow smartasses like Oswalt, Paul F. Tompkins, or Brian Posehn with him, it’s comedy gold. Crawl through the archives to catch the episode featuring Bob Odenkirk, the one with Adam Carolla andn Oswalt, and the recent episode featuring Leonard Maltin Game namesake Mr. Leonard Maltin.
Chris: I’m at GDC, so this could be short and what-can-I-take-on-the-plane oriented. I’m watching Don’t You Forget About Me, which was a documentary about John Hughes, made a few years before he died. It inspired me to download Weird Science for the flight home. I’m watching the shit out of the Tron trailer and listening non-stop to the Tron title track, released at Comic Con last year. Matt is spot on about I Love Movies, and I’ll toss one more into the pot – Mike Schmidt’s 40 Year Old Boy podcast, which is a rarity in podcasting. One guy talking for over an hour. But this guy is an experienced comedian with a sordid history to draw from – lots of laughs.
And finally, GDC – I’m here in a support capacity. All the big stuff for my game comes out later. But I did get to see modNation Racers (PS3) which is due out soon – I think some of the social things, a la Little Big Planet, are going to be fun for a lot of people. Imagine improving your ladder rank not solely based on your racing skills, but on your car skinning skills? Racers earn points for people using their car art, etc. Stuff like that.
I also got to play a lot of Lead and Gold – basically, Team Fortress in the Wild West, only it brings a lot of nice design decisions to the mix. Plus you can shoot a guy’s hat off, which is awesome. That should be coming out soon.
Link Stew
Curious, scared, and baffled by this art project, “Trilogy,” which takes the left side of Star Wars, the middle part of Empire, and the right side of Jedi and plays them on the same screen. Not by time but by visual, so it’s like a movie mashup beyond compare. Fascinating.
Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull is INSPIRED.
Etc.
The Bin–3/5/10
Mar 05
Back in the day, we used to just like stuff every week. We still like stuff, but now we mix in links, videos and other random claptrap. We call it the Bin, and it will steal your heart away.
Alert Nerd: Our True Geek Confessions!
Feb 17Brace yourselves, gentle readers, for these are our…TRUE GEEK CONFESSIONS.
