Archive for the ‘nerds’ Tag
As a human being we all have likes and dislikes. I like computers, science fiction, books and especially really well-done sarcasm. I’ve posted many times about sarcasm, and I’ve listed all of the reasons why I’ve used it over the years and how it has benefited my life. I’m going to share with you some examples of sarcasm which might help clarify things and possibly help you to better understand it. Here we go . . .
- ENLIGHTENMENT is a deeper, more transcendent understanding of life that usually hits about a quarter of a second before you die.
- EQUALITY is the noble principle of fairness and equal representation for all, as evidenced on television by the fact that Hispanic people get to play all the domestics, African Americans get to play all the gang bangers, and Asians get to play all the convenience store owners.
- EXECUTIVE is a distinction given to certain bathrooms, denoting that those allowed into them are, unlike the rest of us, able to produce defecation that smells like fragrant fields of flowers.
- EXTREME is often used as a preface to imply that everything from your energy bar to your facial tissue is that much more kick-ass.
- FAMILY is a group of people you spend eighteen years having dinner with every night before realizing you have plenty of better things to do.
- FEMALE is a person whose ability to generate human life pisses men off to such an extent that they decided to pay them anywhere from 5-25% less for doing the same job they do.
- INTIMIDATION is using fear to browbeat or coerce. A tactic often employed by Marine boot camp drill instructors, Mafia enforcers, and people trying to sell you a quality preowned Kia.
- LEATHER is a type of material that when worn as a jacket helps even a bad-ass biker look like a member of the Village People.
- SOCIAL NETWORKING is a way of imagining that you still have social skills and can network even though you are surgically attached to your computer and never leave your house.
- SHAME is the realization that nobody else thinks the thing you were caught doing was as wholesome as you thought it was.
There you have it, a few prime examples of what sarcasm really is. Here’s a challenge for you, write a paragraph full of sarcasm and then read and explain it to the person who you are in a relationship with. It will undoubtably be a real learning experience for you both.
Here’s something I’m often called but trust me, it isn’t Sarcasm.
GEEK
(Either someone who bites the heads off chickens or anyone who is inordinately obsessed by a particular area of interest such as computers, science fiction, books, and sarcasm)
I spent a good part of my day yesterday trying to get a fourteen year old computer to once again work properly. I’ve been a computer gamer for a very long time and started when the games were just text-only. I finally settled in permanently with the X-Box because of my life long loyalty to Microsoft. Don’t sit there and shake your head, all those years were a great deal of fun and taught me a great deal about computers and software.
As the games became more sophisticated the older games fell by the wayside. Having spent my hard earned money for these games I refused to just discard them. I saved the floppy disk games, games on CD’s, console games, and any other that I sincerely enjoyed playing. All these years later most of them remain unplayable but alive and well in my files.
I’ve became interested in reviving some of these old games after receiving from my nephew an Atari 2400 Anniversary console that contained dozens of the ordinal Atari games such as Pong, Asteroids, and Centipede. My nephew is a computer nerd like me and after a telephone discussion a year ago he shipped me one of his older computers dating from the late nineties. It’s one of the few I’ve been able to find with a working floppy disk drive and I also wanted to use it to convert many of my older games on floppies to CD’s. It would give me a much better chance at playing them once again.
I love computers but they are extremely frustrating to work with. The computer companies in their attempts to protect their software have made them extremely difficult to copy and to reuse. It seems to me that most of their technological advances with game consoles and computer games are purposely made incompatible with previous generations. It forces consumers to constantly spend their hard earned money on upgrades of both software and hardware. My best recent example for that was X-Box One which will not play any of the hundreds of X-Box games made for previous X-Box versions. That sucks and has only convinced me never to buy one.
Yesterday was like giving CPR to someone who is on his last leg. During shipment cables for that old computer were knocked loose and it took a while to get them all replugged into their proper places. I finally was able to get it to reboot with Windows 2000 but that’s when the real fun began. Using parts from a number of my past computers I finally found a mouse that would work with the unit. The monitor worked fine and I thought I was home free. I still had no sound and no working keyboard and I don’t know why. The keyboard I have was from a newer model and there was no way it would ever work with this old machine.
One of my chores for this summer will now be to visit as many yard sales as possible to find a keyboard and mouse from that same era. It should be an easy find since almost every yard sale has computers and parts for sale. With any luck at all I should have this machine working this summer and I can pull out my old Doom and Quake games and relive those earlier days that I enjoyed so much.
I find myself extremely frustrated but having many years of computer experience it wasn’t unexpected. I’ll just walk away for a while, turn on my X-Box 360, and return to the world of Halo to kill a few thousand aliens. It always makes me fell better.
Nerds rule !
What compels almost every group of humans who spend any amount of time together to break into smaller groups based on any number of societal reasons? We have the geeks and jocks, the pretty and not so pretty, the brains and the dummies, the sexually different, and just about anything else you can think of. One of the worst outcomes of group dynamics is bullying. Whether it’s verbal, physical, emotional, or cyber it continues regardless of the steps taken by our society to stop it. The end results of bullying are ugly and include awful things such as suicides, murders, beatings, and a life long emotional issue for the victims to deal with. Nothing good comes of it.
I’ve experienced most of these things first hand growing up. They started for me in Middle school when I was a short and skinny nerd being bullied by a much older and meaner student and his pals. I dealt with it as best I could until a few years later when I grew about a foot and put on forty pounds. Then all of a sudden their nonsense stopped and they moved on to other smaller and less hostile targets.
In High School I had the misfortune to be socially placed into two different groups. On one hand I was a jock who lettered in a number of sports but I was also confined to the weirdo category because of my artistic bent. At sporting events it was OK to be seen with me but all of my jock buddies avoided any type of friendship off the field. I was independent enough to deal with it but how well I did is still up for discussion. If I handled it so well why am I continuing to talk about it after all these years? A good question to be sure but one I really don’t want to answer. I suspect the scars on any bullying victim never go away completely.
I’m only bringing it up now because of what I observed only a day or so ago. I was riding by a local high school and classes were letting out. I observed no less than five or six distinct groups standing on the same sidewalk. They were talking amongst themselves in their own groups but ignoring the others. I could see the obvious differences immediately, sport related jackets in one group, weird clothing and hats in another, musical instruments in a third and as always a small group of sad looking kids who were the obvious outcast group. I was immediately transported back to my early days when I was the guy who walked through the many and varied groups wondering why I wasn’t being accepted. It was a little bit of time travel I could have done without.
I have no answers or solutions and apparently no one else does either. I see on TV the reports of student groups standing up and fighting against bullying. They wear their cute t-shirts and attend their cute meetings and accomplish very little. The people that need to be attending those rallies and listening to the speech’s are the bullies themselves and the school administrators who have the power to discipline them. The bullies watch those activities and laugh them off with a shrug and a smirk. Then it’s business as usual the very next day. It takes much sterner consequences by the powers-that-be on the bully’s before we can expect to see any improvement. Our politically correct school systems make that damn near impossible. Drastic problems require drastic action and doing nothing at all is cowardly and unforgiveable.
Last week I casually mentioned my fascination with Victorian women and some of the responses I received were interesting to say the least. Still, the more I read the more interested I became in that time period. That resulted in further research to satisfy my strange yet engaging Victorian fixation. I realize that I’m taking a real risk in ruining a life long sexual fantasy but what’s life without a little risk.
As I’ve always been told by friends and family alike, "be careful what you ask for". My research into the Victorian age revealed some of the downsides of the era. The social intercourse of the time had many strict rules for behavior including rules for just visiting someone. Here’s a quote from a Victoria Domestic Manual explaining the rules of "calling on someone".
"Those who mix in society are in the habit of reminding one another of their existence, either by personally calling on each other during certain hours, or by merely leaving their cards at the door."
Those visits were normally made by single women and idle men between the hours of 1-5 pm in the city or between 12-4 pm at the country house. A call was to last no more than fifteen minutes and was made twice a year and on certain special occasions.
1. After the birth of a baby – either in person or by a servant
2. On the marriage of a daughter – usually the day after the wedding
3. After a death – no calls were made until the lady of the house had sent round her cards "to return thanks for the inquiries" made during the time of
mourning.
4. Prior to a long absence from home – ladies then called on their friends
When a lady making a call is married and her husband is too busy to call, she may leave his card for the master of the house.
In leaving cards for a married couple, a lady is to leave one card and the man should leave two.
Formal calls on certain special occasions should be returned within a few days. If not a formal apology is required and expected.
Refreshments are not required in town visits but in the country they should be made available if a caller comes a long distance.
Could you imagine having these sorts of rules in place now. All of our younger generations would be required to drop a card when they visited anyone. I can only imagine what those cards might look like. It would break out into individual groups like everything else seems to do. You would have Hip-Hop cards, Nerd cards, Artist cards, Sports Cards, and Designer Cards for every occasion. The look of the card would become another peer pressure item with competition making their costs skyrocket. Plain old black and white print would no longer be cool but gold embossed print with an accompanying graphic or photo would the next step. It would be the next new old thing for the 21st century. What will come after that? A return to bell bottoms, mullets, or my all time favorite, girdles.
People need to realize that something stupid a hundred years ago is still stupid today. I hope we haven’t just run out of new and original good ideas. It’s too depressing to ponder, so I won’t.
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