To be clear, I don’t want to dismiss or ignore the rhetorical importance of a sitting President of the United States expressing his personal support for marriage equality. I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members [...]
Fake Geeks, Poser Nerds, And A Question Of Values
I spent so much time the other day being perplexed by the idea of geeks caring about who’s cool that somehow I managed to miss something about the second verse of the song in question. Try to cop my style but I’m the real thing While you played sports, I played Magic the Gathering Never [...]
I Thought Geeks Didn’t Care About Cool
As the part of the launch of Felicia Day’s terrific-looking new Geek & Sundry channel for YouTube, she and The Guild premiered a new video for a song called “I’m the One That’s Cool”. Here’s a sample of the lyrics. Oh, no. Don’t pretend I didn’t see You roll your eyes at my gaming tee [...]
The American Skin Of Trayvon Martin And Miles Morales
Apparently in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, Bruce Springsteen quite deliberately has been playing his song “American Skin (41 Shots)” on his current tour, including this stop on Florida on March 23, well worth watching. Springsteen first performed the song back in 2000, having written it about the police shooting death of Amadou [...]
Jordan Burchette: Men’s Shitness
Today’s dust-up involves one Jordan Burchette, who had some seemingly fantastic things to say about this past weekend’s New York Comic Con. Comic book conventions are among the few remaining refuges of sincere, unaffected fun in an otherwise odious leisurescape of extreme binge drinking set to techno or gun claps. They’re enjoyed by people of [...]
An Epidemic Of Bullying
Disclaimer: This likely is the single most rambling and incoherent mess of a thing I’ve ever written. It starts off in one place and ends up in another place that, while not entirely unrelated to where it began, evolves fairly artlessly and disjointedly over the course of the many paragraphs that follow from that beginning, [...]
Funeral As Spectacle
I admit it. I love the Westboro Baptist Church. Which is not to say I have any love for what they believe, or what they do. But I do find their stubborn and warped persistence, in the face of basically no one taking their particularly weird form of bigotry seriously, sort of charming while also [...]
Old South Whitewashed By NewSouth
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear up front: Alan Gribben of Auburn University and NewSouth Books have every right to publish their edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, since the work is in the public domain. That legal right, however, doesn’t mean they are right to do so. Twain himself defined a “classic” as [...]
Patton Oswalt’s Geek Singularity
Posted at some point yesterday but apparently mostly unnoticed until today is Patton Oswalt’s call for the death of geek culture. Worth it if only for the conversations it prompts, much of it reads like the construction of a giant sign wishing kids today would get off Oswalt’s lawn. Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet [...]