What’s that?  Alright, then.  I do remember it.  See, I’ve been in these digital, online, cyber-networked parts for a while.

Lately I have been seeing nerd rage as a near fashion statement.  Stop it.  Here is some advice from a veteran:

You need thick skin.

The next time you hear about the next comic book turned movie, just imagine that your skin is as thick and impervious as Wolverine’s skeleton.

Let’s put this another way.  You don’t truly belong on the Internet until you have reached a state where flame wars, lolcats and German “candy bar” pictures are equally as boring.  This is good advice for everyone who is of legal age and plans to spend any time in this digital space.  Self-proclaimed nerds should be especially mindful of this ethic.  After all, the Internet is natural habitat of the shut-in.  You can’t even fake being a nerd if you can’t fake belonging on the Internet.

You’re Probably Not As Nerdy As You Think.

You’re not doing yourself any favors.  How did you react to the movie Superman Returns?  Pick the closest.

• You watched it, but couldn’t figure out if it was like the old movies or not.
• You totally got that it unofficially picked up from Superman 2, and discussed it with others.
• You quoted Mallrats.
• You quoted Larry Niven’s Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.
• You pulled your near-mint copy of Adventures of Superman Annual #3 from its bag and board to prove that Lois Lane could never do that, and yes, it’s canon.
• You went even deeper into the rabbit hole — far enough to lose respect among your peers.

Really, you have no point claiming to be any kind of nerd if you couldn’t at least name “Larry Niven” in the discussion.

This is only one example.  How deeply were you truly invested over the last bit of “nerd” culture that you spouted off about?  I’m willing to bet you weren’t invested enough to scream so loudly.

Advice for the Future

Don’t call yourself a nerd or a die-hard fan unless you can quote the history and minute trivia of a subject in detail.

There’s nothing wrong with being a fan.  There’s nothing wrong with being a casual fan.  Be open and honest about your level of personal involvement with the subject at hand.  Otherwise you end up a 20 year old liar who “was a fan” of a comic book from the first issue — 25 years ago.

Seriously.  You don’t want to be the guy who claims to have been a lifelong Avengers fan and is angry that they left out the Wonder Twins.  Just come clean.  Your mom bought you a couple of comic books when you were nine and you’re curious to see what the movie does.

Don’t lie to us.

If hearing that a movie was in the works inspired you to purchase a book or a graphic novel then, again, be honest.  Tell us you found out about the movie on some web site, dove into the source material early, and that you’re curious to see how the movie does.

Here.  Let me start.

When my wife and I first moved in together, we wanted to see a movie. She wanted a fantasy film, of which very few end up in theaters, but I mentioned that the first Harry Potter movie was showing.  She looked at me like an idiot.  I told her I understood, but that it had Alan Rickman in it and maybe wasn’t all bad.  She heard “Alan Rickman” and had me in the car within seconds.  Later, she bought the books.

A couple of years later, I quit smoking.  In order to keep distracted, I read the first five books of the series.

Yes, I read all of the books eventually.  That doesn’t make me a Harry Potter nerd.  Nor am I any longer a smoker.

Don’t rage.

Raging is how you end up looking like a jerk and ruining it for the rest of us.  Even if you are the hardcore nerd, the rage is just sad.  You know damn well that there is no way to cram thirty years of lore into a two hour film.

Conclusion

Most nerd rage that I see lately has been about what Hollywood, Michael Bay, George Lucas or Uwe Boll have done with motion pictures.   I hate to say this, but cramming into a theater with three hundred other people while the same multiplex has two other screens showing the same movie to equally crowded rooms isn’t really doing a lot for your nerd cred.  When the video game that makes you so geeky sells more copies at $60 in its first week than any teeny bopper selling a $15 cd then you are not part of some obscure counter culture.  In fact, you probably just made the case that Lady Gaga fans are more underground than you are.

But mostly, you shouldn’t care.  Nothing will ever take away the first black and white comics that gave birth to your fandom.  Nothing will erase the autograph that you got from an author years before he got a movie deal.  No bad movie with Jeremy Irons will ever destroy that feeling you had when you THAC0 finally started making sense.

So, relax.  The rest of the world will devour whatever fad just made you tense up.  Then, the rest of the world will move on.  You will always have what is special to you.

Kotaku got hacked. I couldn’t change my password in time due to system overload, and lost my star.  I’ll take some of the punishment for this, but it wouldn’t be a problem if the entire Gawker conglomerate had not been hacked.

Over time, the system at Kotaku changed. It became much easier to see starred, approved, and unapproved messages together. In my experience, a person had to choose between only the most popular conversation or an ugly view of all conversations.  Wading through the unmoderated trash was the only way to see the moderated posts.  Those were not always the nicest reads, either.

The stories also wandered further away from the core topic of video games. Pictures of cosplayers were a favorite target, but a lot of guilt-based articles were also appearing.  Gender issues began bubbling up very frequently.

My breaking point was when a guest blogger, Dr. Nerdlove, was upset. He took his girlfriend to a comic store, where ONE of the locals gawked at her and made her uncomfortable. His conclusion, and the thesis of his story, was that men are too privileged.

His proof was the actions of the one man who made Nerdlove’s girlfriend feel uncomfortable. His proof ignored the others in the store who he admitted told the hapless local not to treat women like that. He followed this proof up with male privilege by explaining that a character in Arkham Asylum wears a skimpy outfit.

A video game character was wearing a skimpy outfit.  That was proof that half of the human population is over-privileged and should loathe themselves.

This ran a little contrary to my personal experience.  The cops effectively told me after being beaten for three hours by a woman to take it without complaining or go to jail.  I relayed this and other problems from my past where being the male meant effectively the same decision.  Take it standing up or face legal punishment.  My challenge to Kotaku at that point was twofold:

• Can we please see individuals as individuals rather than herding people into useless groups?
• Can we also just talk about video games or should I leave?

The community told me to STFU and leave.  Their comments were pretty much in line with the site authors launching an offensive against their own readers.

As a side note: how in the hell is someone as insecure and prejudiced as Dr. Nerdlove even in a relationship, let alone in a position to give relationship advice?  I’m not sure this guy should ever be taken seriously again.

So now South by Southwest is in town.  Today, Nick Denton of Gawker bemoaned at the festival that online comments are a joke.  Well, Nick can eat his anguish.  He and his staff made editorial decisions that fostered this decision:

• Science and culture sites that seek to reason out why men only seem to think about sex.
• Kotaku, a video game site that treats its male readers like idiot, sex-starved creeps.
• Fleshbot, a site that serves graphic sexual material.
• Jezebel, a site built off gender conflict.

Right off hand, Gawker has divided its readers into two camps and set them against each other.   Some of it should be friendly rivalries: car fandom at Jalopnik, for instance.  Some people will take it too far, and that goes to my second point: The editorial staff took it too far.  These people should be looking at their divisive tripe and asking if they would post it about one of the other camps.  Does Liu Kang dressed in only a pair of slacks mean women are privileged?

The important question was never asked.  It is still not being asked.  Who really wants to continue visiting a site just to be insulted by the people in charge?   This is such a basic question that it’s sad to see them only now sort of facing it.  Sadly, they are still skirting the issue.

Even ignoring that, their sites spent years allowing trash talk to thrive in their comments.  What were new users supposed to think was acceptable when that same fighting was already so rampant?  These are the choices left to people:

• Post an insightful, well crafted comment and hope someone noticed.
• Post a quick, inflammatory comment and watch the attention roll in.

The point of being social is to communicate with the rest of the group.  What was the better choice for new readers hoping to belong?

It was up to the staff at Gawker to recognize their growth then direct their community to something more productive.  They failed.  It was up to the staff at Gawker’s sites to inform and entertain without alienating their readers.  They failed.  They have tried to set up Kotaku Core, which filters out the needless trash.  They failed again by reminding us that they will still publish needless trash.

Now, Nick Denton is blaming his readers for following their example.  Fail.

Whip Gawker into shape first.  Stop treating people like they should be divided up into arbitrary groups then insulted for belonging to any of them.  Make this a strict rule for your editorial staff.  Then, make it a strict rule for the people who comment on your site.

The Global Community of yesterday had a set of rules we called Netiquette.  Gawker sites never bothered to adhere to those rules.  Denton should not expect to see the same Global Community while throwing their rules aside.

I’m not annoyed by any individual dubstep song.  Even that such a word exists hardly bothers me.  The premise of a singular sound that an artist pigeonholes himself into does irritate me to no end, but that runs in every genre from the very real Flanders Recorder Quartet on up to Dimmu Borgir.

I’m also amused.  I was old enough in the 1980s to remember that brand of heavy metal.  I always knew the sound had roots in my parent’s generation yet was somehow made dumber.  I listened anyway.

Hair metal was almost manufactured to be extremely accessible.  The drum beats were spaced out from each other but played hard (ie, Twisted Sister, RATT, Quiet Riot).  Basslines could frequently consist of very few notes so long as the rhythm was intact (Falling to Pieces by Faith No more).   Everything else was played aggressively, and the quality of lyrics was a joke.  Those bands followed paths blazed by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick and Jimi Hendrix.

Hair metal looked like sheer stupidity to our parents, who had seen masters of the craft also step forward to pioneer the sound.  As all popular music should, to be honest.

Dubstep does all of these same things.  Sure, there aren’t five guys in leather chaps parading around a stage any more.  A lot of these guys look like nerds when you can even see them from behind their gadgets and/or masks.

Yet, dubstep comes on the heels of acts like Moby, the Crystal Method and the Prodigy, who in turn followed the likes of Thomas Dolby and Gary Numan.  Older fans of electronica listen to this stuff with the same disbelief that our Hendrix-loving parents felt listening to Cinderella.

Dubstep has also set aside the work of electronica’s forefathers in favor of producing electronic cock rock.  There are long passages between the drums, overly simplified bass rhythms and distorted melodies.  The tools are different but the method remains the same.

Do you think this is false?  Imagine, then, the rhythm section of a 1980s heavy metal band has been asked to cover a Skrillex song.  Are the drums going to be that difficult for the heavy metal star?  Does the bass player need to do much more than bend a string rhythmically?   Can’t you even imagine the keyboard player frantically looking for the “Atari Dropped in Bourbon” patch on his instrument?

Close your eyes.  Picture that scene and imagine what happens after the drummer counts out the rhythm.  One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  It’s not hard to imagine at all.

Dubstep has also achieved the honor of angering this generation’s parents.  We’re wondering why we waited for Fatboy Slim to fall off the map if you were just going to replace him with this crap.

My congratulations to the new generation of music fans.  They actually remade hair metal in their own image without blatantly aping this long-dead trend.  You’re even pissing off your parents in interesting ways.

You did such a great job that you even fooled yourselves.  Keep up the good work.

The guy is great at what he does.

If anyone in Austin is looking to hire a local magician or even just see a video of one in action then please check out Black Bert’s site.

““I don’t think we gained anything from Durbin,” said Robert Donovan, U.S. assistant treasurer for McDonald’s, at the ATM, Debit and Prepaid Forum.”

There are a lot more details in the article, which I urge you to read from its proper source.

So, the banks are legally not allowed to set their own prices on debit card transactions.  Instead, two businesses – possibly more – have been counting on Durbin (D) to boost their own profit margins at another business’s expenses.  Our leaders in Washington agreed, presumably stating it was for everyone’s good.

Is it?  The businesses want the service at the price they named regardless of what it costs the bank to process.  Out of curiosity, which of you is able to set their own price at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart?

Worse – is it really in our own interest to cheer our leaders for demonizing and injuring some giant businesses for the benefit of other giant businesses?  You know the guy is just going to stand on his record of being “anti-corporate” after pulling this slimy con game.

And what of the banks?

• Hated by the population they provide services to for daring to charge for those services.
• Demonized and hobbled by the government.
• Openly abused by the businesses their services support.

I’m sure that will work great right now, but what happens in six months?  No one thinks this can end well.  The problem is that no one is thinking beyond their own hate and fashionable anti-corporate sentiment.   The banks aren’t saints, but I’m having a harder time finding any moral party in this event.

I left school dreading the last bell of the day so that other people would not need to reach up or speak out. The teachers got in on the act when I turned 10. It couldn’t be helped then, either. They were having feminine problems. Please contact McKinley Elementary in Wyandotte, Michigan if you have any more questions about these events.

It kept happening, for the record, well into my twenties.  No one could help committing violence.  They could not help the knives or the broken bones or the beatings or whatever else they inflicted on me.  They were just not as lucky as me.

So, I have been watching the Occupy movement with dread. I do not want the people working for their share to live in fear due to the unaccountable “unlucky” just outside their doors.  Too many people in the Occupy movement seem to stand for the following line of thought: If I can not have the money then no one can.  Too many others seem to feel that we are are all entitled, and I fear for that more.

Entitlement does not stop with money.  It never has.  It never does.  It never will.

Entitlement will always extend to a second mindset.  The society that is born entitled to money will spread that entitlement to other aspects of life.  Feeling a lack of self-esteem?  Earn respect in a gang.  Feeling lonely?  A six pack bought with scrounged dollars is all the consent the entitled man needs.  This isn’t theory or any repeated talking point, but a way of life I consider myself lucky to have survived.  I hope never to live in that kind of filth again.

“But that’s not happening!” could rightfully be the words any critical thinker should rightfully be thinking right now.  Except, that Human Events has been keeping tabs on the various rapes – especially the willfully unreported ones - occurring on various Occupy sites  (source).   Please bear in mind that Human Events is horribly partisan.  Try not to read the comments, either.  The contempt for other humans there is on par with the juvenile trash to be found on Yahoo News or the Daily Kos.

Back to the point.  No one deserves to be attacked like that.  Every individual, even the cradle-to-grave entitled, makes his or her own choices.   This puts the responsibility of the rapists to answer for their actions.  However, if the Occupiers insist on collective rights then I must insist on viewing them as a collective.  These attacks are only the start of their entitlement collective.  They are also to be expected under the entitlement mentality, as is the protection of the rapist at the cost of his victims.

The third mindset is what you see in the European riots.  The entitled will destroy a thing simply because they can not have it.   When, and I do mean when, America reaches this state, I will hold the Occupiers and every human being who willfully supported them responsible.

Count me out of this collective.  Do whatever it takes to revise that 99% figure.  Most assuredly, the committees and masses of underemployed college students can handle this one math problem:

Please solve this problem then send word to whatever necessary committees will revise the 99% slogan to something more accurate.

The Occupy movement is neither entitled nor allowed to count my presence among the people they claim to speak for.

I have been pushing myself to remember things.  These things were lost to the day-to-day life of being a grown-up.  They were lost to my regrets of having not acted in favor of what I believed was a more patient, long-term commitment to myself.  So I have been trying to remember.

I remember one year, the thing I wanted more than anything else for Christmas a copy of Borland’s C+ Compiler.  I lost many Friday nights to a beat up, cigarette-stained computer and learned to chip away pieces of code, one function at a time.  I remember the pile of books from outlet stores, or from the computer show (on opposing weekends to the gun and knife show) at the Gibraltar Trade Center.  The books were outdated but not yet obsolete.  I remember coding by the light of a CRT monitor, augmented sometimes by a scented candle or a dim fluorescent light from around the corner.

Was that what I loved?  I loved doing it very dearly.  It was still a means to a bigger end.

I loved building worlds and telling stories.  I loved telling the machine what to do so that the machine might some day immerse an audience in a work of fiction that I had built.  This was a passion started in 1984 that began to find its maturity in 1993.  This was another tool, such as my drums and my paintbrushes and the scraps of fiction that filled my bedroom.  They were all tools for something wonderful with a unified theory that I only believe I only recently learned to name.

This all stayed with me all the way up until the day I became a full-time wage slave.  ”I have made it,” I thought on that day.   Then, I had two jobs.  One was working on almost all levels of web design and the other writing creatively for a video game.  ”Hell, yes.” I shouted to myself.  It was a literal shout.  It was a cry of joy.  I was creating.  I was blazing forward in life.  Then, it stopped.

It atrophed.  The details aren’t important.  It atrophed and I bear the full responsibility for it.

I wrote a horror podcast for a while, and will probably start it up again soon if only for Halloween.  I even made contact with some heroes of mine in ghastly arts.  I used to admire them for their work, and still do.  They have put a second layer of being really awesome people on top of that admiration.

I’m trying to remember the punk I was at 20.  Not just the one with technicolor hair who, one night, would see Lords of Acid play a concert and the next cruise around a parking lot blasting Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos to irritate the neighbors.  The lonely, angry, bitter punk who saw his future in a blank IDE.  It’s not difficult to remember that sense of bitter hope.  Atrophe torments a soul in ways that stagnation could never touch.

So, here I go again.  Pumpkin scented incense, bad lighting, and two not-stained CRT monitors.  My five years as a smoker are eight years in the past.  I am learning to take fuller advantage of HTML5, stuff we used to call DHTML, and databases.  I am coding a tool that will help me tell fantastic stories.  It will help other people tell their wild tales.

Horror movies, Zombina and the Skeletones, ghouls made of fabric hanging from the walls, a five cup coffee maker, <canvas>, javascript and MySQL queries.  Perhaps, even, an expression of the unified theory I couldn’t name in high school.

Screaming in code.  Hopefully, again, in triumph.

I had a nightmare around two years ago.  In this dream, I beaten and arrested over something trivial.  Nothing this depraved has ever actually happened to me.  Situations close enough to it have occurred.  The police did not join in the festivities, but they did nothing to stop them.

Two years ago, that nightmare inspired my first vision of this Apocalypse.  That bad dream would not only inspire a lot of notes for a story that never took off but would be a crucial element of this adventurer’s journey.  The only problem was that it was an aimless journey.  I knew what I wanted to say but had no reason to say it through this character or the world built around him.

The time between that first attempt and now has been wonderful in that I have made a lot of great friends.  I have been finding strengths I thought were lost to the worst of times.  In other parts of life, I have been fighting against slow, painful atrophy.  It was in one of those moments of near desolation that I thought it might be clever to translate my worst feelings into a post-apocalyptic tale.

If I’m going to wallow in it then I still want something in return for the effort.

I remembered this character and the world built around him.  Flashes of trials, enemies, friends, pain and triumph have been coming to me.  The events leading up to the story were suddenly re-imaged with a stronger purpose than to get the story going.

I bought a small, hardbound notebook to serve as an honest bible for this tale.   New characters, motives, organizations and events are coming to mind almost faster than I can find to make notes of them.

Knowing me, this may well fizzle out.  Odds are great if my past is any indication.  I still need to finish project:whiteworm — something only a handful of friends have seen detailed.  Some other shiny project may capture the energy that is going into this.

Also, I’m supposed to be on a break from writing to work on all the parts of life that hit terminal atrophy.  Oops.

Its presence in his record collection – and please remember these were the days of big vinyl disks – kept my hands and curiosity at bay.   That album cover is burned into my mind like a smoldering scar.

Those who know me can understand why it’s much less frightening to see Fred Kreuger in a nearly perfect mirror image of the same album cover.  ”Freddy’s Greatest Hits” recently came to my attention by way of a blog devoted to the foolhardy days of vinyl.   Here are the covers, side by side.

Okay, so right now it only looks a prom photo with two people who settled on desperate, last-minute dates.  I’ll put a different perspective on this.

That smirk on Freddy’s face is as good as a bloody fingerprint.  He knows he’s up to something.  I’ll bet it’s this.