Alert Nerd Press Spotlight: Do You Want to Grok My Avatar?
Mar 24
In college, I made my own ‘zine. It was called FanGirl. It had a purple cover, a stapled spine, and multiple unfortunate font choices. I still have many, many fond remembrances of parading down College and Telegraph Aves in Berkeley, dropping issues off at Cody’s and Pendragon, hoping someone might be drawn in by the cute cartoon astronaut girl on the cover.
All of us at Alert Nerd have “I made this!” memories like that (ask Matt about his Clara Peller ‘zine sometime, won’t you?) and I think that’s one of the big reasons we started Grok, our little PDF ‘zine that houses essays, fiction, and general silliness centered around nerd culture. And Grok led to Alert Nerd Press, which has now published multiple book–like things. We’ve got some pretty dang crazy plans for ANP this year, so I thought it might be fun to keep you up-to-date via a monthly column that spotlights various aspects of stuff we’re working on: upcoming releases, Grok contributors, random incriminating pictures of Chris and his proton pack collection. It will be an absolute delight, I’m sure.
Lost 6.8, "Recon"
Mar 21
(epically cool Sawyer sketch above via artist Grant Gould)
One of my favorite parts of the vast Lost landscape has been the quasi-sorta Luke/Leia/Han allegory of the Jack/Kate/Sawyer love triangle. I’m not a huge fan of the triangle itself, mind you, just the fact that the producers have always referenced that other Star Wars triangle when discussing Jack/Kate/Sawyer. Which must mean that they’re giving us subtle hints for a “OH SHIT KATE’S MY SISTER” reveal in the final episode. Cannot WAIT.
Let’s be honest; without all the Jedi nonsense and the daddy issues, Luke’s nowhere near the most interesting character in the Original Trilogy. Without the constant episodes focusing on his alcoholism, his stubbornness, his need for control, and every other personality quirk the writers can muster, Jack’s nowhere near the most interesting character on Lost.
Sawyer isn’t, either, to my mind. (For me it’s gotta be Benjamin Q. Linus.) But there is something incredibly compelling about the Han Solo of Oceanic Flight 815. This week, we get a big fat reminder of that, not just from our boy on the island but from his counterpart in the flash-sideways timeline.
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.
Lost 6.7 "Dr. Linus"
Mar 10I never trusted Henry Gale. From second one, I knew he was up to something. I wanted to torture him with a nail gun. It was the eyes, I think. Those eyes.
My first thought, to crib from Robert Browning, was that he lied in every word. And Henry Gale was a liar. And a killer. A horrible little man. He wasn’t even Henry Gale, late of Kansas. He was Benjamin Linus, and everybody hated him for it.
How things have changed.
People who write off the craftsmanship of Lost and reduce it to a series of implausible twists and interminable teases have a crippled view of the show, and Ben Linus’s arc throughout the past five years has been a testament to that. Last night’s episode was a significant hour for him.
The question that has dogged us all season is one of destiny. We’ve seen that Kate is always, well, Kate and that Sayid is never not a murderer, but we’ve also seen John Locke become a rational man, watched Jack deal with his obnoxious interpersonal issues and now we’ve seen Ben choose integrity and compassion over authority and power not just once, but twice, once in each world.
This season, as we start to learn more about Jacob and his lassez-faire way of rolling, his maddening lack of specificity, it’s easy to see both how he can turn the Others to his whims and why exactly it would make them seem like evil pricks. We’ve watched Ben move from zealotry to agnosticism and it has humanized him in unexpected ways. He’s given the island his daughter, his father and his entire adult life and when he was not rewarded with a medal and a parade, he lashed out angrily. In that way, his murder of Jacob is the most human act we’ve seen him perform. I know that feeling, the feeling of being the good child in the Prodigal Son parable; odds are you do, too. It would be easy for Ben to be spiteful and to choose The Man In Black/fLocke/whatever we’re calling him in fitful, angry vengeance; he doesn’t, though. He grows. He’s a dark man who chooses the light – a contrast to last week’s episode where we watched a dark man consumed by darkness. Maybe – just maybe – Jacob saw that coming, too, and sacrificed himself to save Ben in the end.
