Trivial Pursuits

"Shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers."

Tuesday the Second of December, Two Thousand and Eight

The phrase "is the shizzle" was also used at one point.

Today at work, I composed an email which contained the phrase "in my pants" no less than 14 times. Good day!

mechanically posted by Martin Marks at 10:49 in the evening // comment? by:

Monday the First of December, Two Thousand and Eight

All of this came out of a conversation about how Rick Astley's performance at the Macy's Day Parade was probably the wrong venue.

I just learned of Nerd Pride Day, which is, by pure coincidence, the same day as Towel Day. I disagree entirely with their "rights and responsibilities" list, which reads to me like it was written by a rather condescending neurotypical1, or, at the very least, by someone with entirely the wrong definition of "nerd"2. However, I rather like the idea. I've been dreaming of a Nerd Pride parade for years now. Frankly, I don't understand why there isn't one.

Let's face it: nerdiness is actually a good deal like queerness3. Both are deviations from the norm, one in personality, the other in sexuality. Both have historically been considered freakish by the mainstream. (Remember that before its repurposing and eventual reclamation, a "geek" was literally a sideshow freak.) Both nerds and queers have been pressured to conform with the mainstream, to change their very identity in order to fit in better. Despite the nascent pride movements in both communities—which date to about the 70s in both cases—millions of Americans are still in one closet or the other (or, indeed, both). It's gradually become more or less acceptable (even fashionable!) to be "out" in America—if you're middle-class, descended from Europeans or Asians4, and living in one of the more progressive coastal cities. In both cases, the style of the subculture has seeped into the mainstream—yes, I'm equating Geek Chic with metrosexuality. Both are also turning out to be far more common than the mainstream realized (or, perhaps, every bit as common as the mainstream secretly feared). And while this November was a defeat for anti-intellectualism and a victory for homophobia, it's important to remember that the former is the main reason we got stuck with eight years of Bush in the first place, and that it's certainly not dead. So if the queer pride movement gets parades, why oh why don't we?

Admittedly, we tend towards introversion—which is, I suspect, both a cause and effect of nerdiness—but that's mostly true around neurotypicals. My experience has always been that nerds love meeting other nerds, and they especially love being nerdy around other nerds. After all, we do have conventions, which are basically indoors pride parades. But we need to get out in the open, not hide ourselves away! We need to tell the world that we're here, we're dorks, get used to it! We need to embarass and alienate the better-integrated members of the nerd community by dressing in ridiculous costumes and reinforcing all the unfair but not-entirely-untrue stereotypes about us! We need, in short, to take to the streets! (I'm thinking probably Portland.) In any case, I'm putting May 25th on my calendar... and dreaming.

Notes:

"Neurotypical" is typically used to describe people who aren't autistic, but I find that definition far too limited. I am using it here to mean anyone whose brain is not wired the same way a nerd's or a geek's is. I mean no prejudice in my use of the term, though I admit it's a bit dismissive. But just as the gay community would not exist without "breeders", human society in general would not exist without NTs.
Admittedly, the word is poorly defined. Myself, I draw a basic three-way distinction between "nerd", "geek", and "dork". A nerd is someone who delights in accumulating knowledge with no practical application in general. A geek is someone who seeks to learn everything about a particular field. ("Boffins" are a subset of geeks, whose fields of interest have practical applications, and who have actual technical abilities.) A dork (aka anorak, otaku, or your own preferred perjorative) is someone who bores people silly with their inability to stop spouting esoteric knowledge. The three overlap quite a lot, naturally—in particular, virtually all nerds and geeks tend to have dorkly tendencies. Thus, I am, generally speaking, very strongly nerdy with several geek-foci, ranging from Futurama to linguistics—the latter makes me a low-level boffin as well—who is working very hard to be less of a dork. (Incidentally, as this footnote indicates, I am in fact a nerdiness geek.) However, plenty of people define things entirely differently. The difference between "nerd" and "geek" seems to be at least partly regional, with West Coasters often having the exact opposite intuition.
I use the term "queer" here in the loosest (and least derogatory) possible sense, to include anyone deviating from monogamistic vanilla heterosexuality—whatever that even means. For that matter, you may have noticed I'm using "nerd" to encompass nerds, geeks, and all those other categories and subcategories I went through so much trouble to break down in that previous footnote. What can I say, it's easier.
Hip hop culture does leave some room for nerds—iff they can rap. Most of the best rappers are, in fact, thinly closeted nerds (which is why nerdcore hip hop is a misnomer; nerdcore is just nerdy hip hop made by white or Asian people). Nerds without lyrical chops, on the other hand, need to keep their proclivities on the down-low if they want to fit in on the streets. (My references for this bold statement are season four of The Wire and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.)

needlessly posted by Martin Marks at 11:29 at night // eight comments by:

Sunday the Thirtieth of November, Two Thousand and Eight

If "Tony's Theme" is not on the Iron Man soundtrack, I am sad.

I've been listening to Surfer Rosa in the car lately, and have discovered a problem: every time "Where Is My Mind?" comes on, I feel compelled to turn the volume up, and yet there is no song on the album that compels me to turn the volume down. So for every 33 minutes I spend in the car, the volume goes up by a notch. I really need to find a solution to this before the distortion on "Vamos" causes my head to implode.

Also: Is it just me, or does Frank Black have a weird habit of trying to finish Kim Deal's sentences for her?

balefully posted by Martin Marks at 5:33 in the afternoon // five comments by:

Wednesday the Twenty-Sixth of November, Two Thousand and Eight

"Doo dee doo, doop doop."

The hard things in life are easy. It's the easy things that are the hard part.

trepidatiously posted by Martin Marks at 6:46 in the evening // comment? by:

Tuesday the Twenty-Fifth of November, Two Thousand and Eight

I bet I can still say it faster than Nate.

To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock
In a pestilential prison with a lifelong lock
Awaiting the sensation of a short sharp shock
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block.
—William Schwenk Gilbert

facetiously posted by Martin Marks at 9:05 in the evening // one comment by:

Nate

Monday the Twenty-Fourth of November, Two Thousand and Eight

"I feel fantastic, and I never felt as good as how I do right now."

I have had the rather bizarre troika of Jonathon Coulton, Daft Punk, and Girl Talk competing for space in my brain all day. It has been extremely distracting. Having "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" on repeat inside my skull was particularly frustrating—it's a great CADDing song, of course, but the constant reminder that "work is never over" finally broke me.

wantonly posted by Martin Marks at 9:34 in the evening // comment? by:

Also, I had never heard of The Telegoons before!

This is immensely cool. The Beeb may have taped over all the early Doctor Who episodes, but they didn't throw away the internal correspondance that led to its creation, and now they've put it all online! It has a lot of very interesting things to say about the state of early-60s science fiction, about the assumptions the BBC was making about its viewers at the time, and a rather bizarre take on what the Doctor's motivations should have been. It's fascinating stuff.

aimlessly posted by Martin Marks at 9:09 in the evening // comment? by:

Sunday the Twenty-Third of November, Two Thousand and Eight

"Stop me if I'm wrong. Stop me if I'm wrong."

The last sentence makes the article. (Also, the Schlitz.)

soulfully posted by Martin Marks at 1:12 at night // five comments by:

Friday the Twenty-First of November, Two Thousand and Eight

Chirp chirp.

I really need to end my habit of making small meaningless noises to myself for no reason. One of these days I'm going to start making them when other people are around, and shortly after that, I will be making them when I am alone again, because I will be institutionalized.

vertiginously posted by Martin Marks at 9:08 in the evening // eight comments by:

Thursday the Twentieth of November, Two Thousand and Eight

"We fear change."

...why are there mountains on Gmail?

Apparently cause of this is why. Huh. And just to make sure everybody took advantage, they made the default theme a slightly uglier version of the classic theme.

parenthetically posted by Martin Marks at 7:41 in the evening // two comments by:

Tori
Tori

Wednesday the Nineteenth of November, Two Thousand and Eight

I kind of miss film.

Well, I have my new film scanner, and it's pretty cool. I didn't realize there were scanners at that price point that could do what I needed. However, I am now discovering just what a hell of a state my negatives are in. The problem is that an 8 x 10 enlargement is roughly sixty times the area of a film frame. An invisible speck on a negative is a huge white blotch on an enlargement. There are lots and lots of invisible specks on these negatives. Tomorrow I'll buy some canned air—maybe I can at least get the little tiny hairs off. The rest I'll have to painstakingly clone out in the GIMP. That will be awesome.

The real sadness is that I don't even have negatives for many of my pictures, for whatever reason. I have only one print of my single favorite photo I have ever taken (and even that has a damn dust speck on it). Yet I have all the negatives from the roll I unwisely pushed from 400 to 3200 ISO, as well as from when my shutter wouldn't open more than halfway. Oh, and all the infrared portraits—which would have been a bad idea on their own, but given that my film camera uses an infrared sensor to count frames... yeah. (I actually did somehow manage one or two decent prints off that roll, after a lot of darkroom work.)

painstakingly posted by Martin Marks at 10:58 in the evening // comment? by: