More Nerdly Advice
Sep 01Nerds have questions, and we have the answers.
Every week, Jeff dips into the Alert Nerd mailbag and sheds the light of his questionable wisdom onto the things you want to know. We call it Nerdly Advice.
This week, we have an etiquette question about the One True Batgirl.
Catching Fire Giveaway!
Sep 01
You all read The Hunger Games, right?
If the answer to that question is “no,” please stop reading this IMMEDIATELY and get thee to a bookseller/library/other place where you might find book-like things. Because this is easily one of my favorite things I’ve consumed all year, and when asked who I would recommend it to, I usually say something like “you know, people who like things that are awesome.”
Suzanne Collins’ gripping story focuses on a post-apocalyptic future wherein a ruthless government selects a group of random kids to battle it out to the death in a televised game of survival. When 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen’s younger sister is chosen to compete, Katniss volunteers to go in her place. What follows mixes a heady cocktail of crazy-brutal adventure, delicious teen romance, and deft commentary on our increasingly televised culture.
And now there’s a sequel, Catching Fire, and you — yes, YOU, lucky Alert Nerd Reader! — can win the book and some exciting swag.
Three lucky folks will win…
*A limited edition Catching Fire t-shirt, suitable for wearing to cons and post-apocalyptic death battles
*A collectible mockingjay pin, like the one Katniss wears in The Hunger Games
*Your very own copy of Catching Fire
To enter, simply leave a comment answering the following question: are you Team Peeta or Team Gale? (If you have no idea what this means, guess. We won’t bust you for not being intimately acquainted with the Games-verse just yet.)
Rules/fine print: The giveaway is open to participants with a United States mailing address only (international readers can enter if you have a friend in the States who can accept your prizes by mail!). Entrants under age 13 must have parent or guardian permission to enter. The giveaway runs from September 1 to September 25. Winners will be announced on or around September 30.
Check back with us throughout the month as we’ve got some thrilling Games/Catching Fire-related posts cookin’.
In the meantime, here’s the book trailer.
Stuff We Like This Week: August 28 Edition
Aug 28
In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.
Why I Just Dropped X-Force From My Pull List
Aug 28Over the past year, I’ve been nothing but unilaterally positive about the comics coming out of Marvel’s X-Office. “If you had told me that I’d be reading both X-Force and Cable and enjoying them a few years ago, I’d have laughed at you,” is a sentence I’ve uttered more than once. And while I’m still digging Uncanny and Cable quite a bit, I’m not the fan of Warren Ellis’s Astonishing X-Men that I should be and, while I love Mike Carey’s work, I hate Gambit, which makes me doubtful about whether or not I’ll stick with X-Men Legacy.
But what I really want to talk about right now is X-Force; my relationship with it is problematic. It’s a team made up of characters I like doing reprehensible things and, in doing so, painfully reminding me that character development is the largest, weightiest Sisyphan boulder in comics. It’s being written by a creative team that won me over after inheriting New X-Men from a team (Nunzio DeFilipis and Cristina Weir) that I was incredibly smitten with. The art by Mike Choi and Sonia Oback is phenomenal.
X-Force is, unarguably, the best written and best looking comic that features a sixteen year old girl being tortured with a chainsaw that is on stands today. That’s right, folks. X-23, the teenage girl clone of Wolverine, is being held captive and dismembered with a chainsaw.
Are you fucking kidding me?
For a book that is purportedly about a black ops X-Men team, the title has consistently been more invested in traumatizing X-23, a character that Yost and Kyle created. That’s downright fetishistic on a level that makes Chris Claremont’s obsession with Kitty Pryde/Storm/Psylocke seem tame and healthy.
Nerdly Advice, Part The First
Aug 25Welcome, true believers, to the first of what I’m hoping will be several thousand installments of Alert Nerd’s newest feature, Nerdly Advice. This week, I’ve got a pair of lurid queries that I’m going to boldly navigate, dispensing sage wisdom in my wake like a Pez dispenser that has wisdom in it instead of candy.
