Quantcast
Channel: Jack's Place - The Blog
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 127

A Steampunk Looks at Nerds

0
0
          Yeah, I know what you're thinking.  There's a whole subset of society consisting of, well, most of you, who believe that "steampunk" is just another word for "nerd."  I'll get to you shortly.  For everyone else, long-term readers among you have watched me struggle with motivating myself and producing useable copy since I returned from my hospitalization over a year ago.  A writer's muse is a wacky blend of pal and pest, of foe and friend.  There's times you'll swear he's swell, by heck, and times when you could wring his neck!
          See, he's back from wherever muses vacation, and throwing himself into the job, coming unbidden to provide things that surprise me as I'm typing.  And how did I coax him back?  I gave up.  I stopped spreading my notes and maps out every morning to stare at without result, and started turning on my Xbox.  Apparently he's a big attention whore, and when I turned out the lights and left the room, it wasn't but a matter of hours before he was begging me to come back.
          But wait.  Ignoring him was only part of it.  I've also discovered that another part is keeping my projects close to the vest.  I have lost a couple of good ones, I am convinced, by simply telling everyone about them.  Once I get some dynamite notes going, there is a tendency, at least with me, to share, and doing that seems to dissipate the tension, and the urge to continue just evaporates.  Now that may be all well and good, but if I'm not going to share my projects, just what, you may ask, am I going to put on a writer's site?
          I'm going to write about the things that inspire me, hobbies, friends, games, TV and movies, and anything else I can think of.  I am often asked by my non-writer friends where I get my ideas.  They seem to think I live in an alternate universe where I see these things going on all the time.  I don't.  I live, work, and play right alongside the rest of you, and have remarkably similar experiences.  It's what that big ball of spaghetti between my ears turns them into that's different.  So, let's get started.  Here are some of my inspirations!

          I know these nerds.  I'm not being insulting.  They are the self-styled nerds of the Nerd Lunch blog and podcast.
Picture
          C.T., Jeeg, and Plee are some of my oldest friends on the internet.  I started blogging in the fall of 2010, coming very late to the dance.  My first host was Blogger, and one of their cool features was a "Next Blog" button that would toss you randomly onto someone else's site to peruse.  The Nerds were an early hit, and from the first visit, I was hooked.
          They were, back then, a pure print blog, much like this one.  They had established it to keep in touch after they had left school and scattered to begin their careers, and their subject was, as it is today, popular culture.  I found myself reading about everything from Mountain Dew flavors to why jocks get to act like they own college campuses.  Much to my own surprise, I found myself hanging on every word of nearly every post.
          The format back then was that they would take turns posting an article that studied some aspect of pop culture, I would spend five minutes reading it, ten if it really made me think, and offer up a comment if it really moved me.  That went on once or twice a week, and enjoyable as it was, it's difficult to move the masses with a format like that.  Early on in my following as well, Plee kind of faded away.  His career is as an attorney, and I get that a successful attorney must work pretty much every minute that he's awake.  His rare posts were sharp and insightful, and well worth waiting for.
          Somewhere close to three years ago, C.T. partnered with a young lady named Savannah to produce Nerd Lunch the Web Series.  These were professionally produced videos that ran for 10-15 minutes, and dealt with some nerdy activity, and a lunchy activity.  Savannah brought attractiveness, a sharp-edged voice, and a blistering sense of humor that played off of C.T.'s personality to perfection.  Unfortunately, they discovered that producing a 15 minute video every week was a full time job for them and their film crew, and it shut down after three episodes.  That's too bad.  It was a definite high point of my ride with them, and the episodes remain on the site for viewing, something that should not be missed.
          When the Web Series went away, it was replaced by the feature that celebrated its 200th show on the 13th, the Nerd Lunch Podcast.  I have to say, if the Web Series couldn't continue, the Podcast is a worthy successor.  With Plee unable to commit to the time required, C.T. and Jeeg found a perfect fit for the third man in Paxton Holley, host of the Cavalcade of Awesome blog, another pop culture commentary that is certainly worth following on its own merit.
          With these three as a moderating panel, and a guest, the "Fourth Chair," usually a blogger or friend of theirs with a particular interest or expertise in the week's current subject, these guys tackle subjects from blockbuster movies to the relative merits of fast food hamburgers to classic infomercials promoting products that must have come out of insane asylums.  As each Podcast runs for 90 minutes, there is plenty of time for humorous and entertaining, and dare I say, educational banter.   Often-seen features include such gems as Nerdstrodamus, Pop-Culture Eraser, and Guilty Displeasures.  They do the occasional location episode such as when C.T. traveled to Texas in search of the perfect barbecue, and when the gang recorded their show material live on the floor of the Chicago Comics Entertainment Expo.  A strong bonus is that they have been fortunate enough to retain the services of Savannah to do their voiceovers.  Their guests are often nerds of their own stripe, but not always.  They have included a girl in Australia ("coming to you from the future") who knows her way around a barbecue herself, a fluent Klingon-speaking actress who appears in the annual production of A Klingon Christmas Carol, and inkers of commercial comics.
          The obvious intention here is to get you to join the Nerd Army.  "Why should I set aside an hour and a half to listen to this?" you might be asking.  "I'm not interested in who's directing the next Batman franchise, or Doritos new Guavacado Roadkill Chiliquiche Chips."
          What I'm here to tell you is that you are interested in these things.  Sure, you don't sit around thinking about them, but they exist in your daily life, and unless you live in a hermetically sealed cabin with no TV or internet service, you rub up against them every day of your life.  You'd be astonished what a deeper insight into some of these seemingly inane subjects would bring to your enjoyment of routine daily events.  Plus, it's audio.  It doesn't ask you to do anything but turn it on.  Listen as you grind on the treadmill or fold your laundry.  It can make a mundane chore pass quickly, and the belly laughs are free.  Just tell 'em Jack sent you.  They'll know...


Picture
          In my last post, I reported on receiving some games for my birthday.  On Sunday, the 11th, Bonnie, Sidra, and I set up and played The Dead of Winter.  This is a zombie apocalypse game in which a random group of survivors has to carry out random tasks to win or lose as a group while an army of the dead sweeps down on them.  Just to spice things up, everyone has a hidden agenda assigned by a random card, and one of the players may be a traitor, working to bring down the others.
          For a number of reasons, we cannot recommend it.  We played the introductory scenario, and that went well.  It's designed to ease you into it, plus we overlooked a couple of rules in our novicehood that would have made it harder, so we set up for one of the "real" scenarios, which are randomly assigned by a card draw.  In this one, we had to collect fuel from the surrounding area to get us through the winter.  Each turn, one of the players had to place a fuel card in a holding space, and if nobody did, the game would end in a loss.  On top of that, each turn there is a crisis that must be addressed, or the morale track moves a step (or two) closer to a loss through crisis mismanagement.  Let the game begin!
          Short narrative:  Zombie tsunami!  It was a tossup as to how we lost about midway through.  A wall of zombies broke down a barricade and entered the main compound, leaving only a couple of survivors out in the ruined town who now had no refuge to return to, but on the next round, no one had a fuel card to contribute to the kitty, and the game ended in a crushing defeat.

          But the simple fact that we lost isn't why we don't like it.  We lose plenty of games that we love to play.  Mice and Mystics and Pandemic can stand as a couple of examples.  No, this felt "off" in a couple of ways, and neither has anything to do with this being a bad game.  It's an excellent design, well thought out with rules that interact to create a smooth and logical framework of play.  But this subject doesn't lend itself well to board games in general.
          Bonnie didn't like it because of the "crescendo of doom" feel.  You kill five zombies, ten replace them.  You can't concentrate on the main goal, because there's always some immediate crisis seizing your attention.  But that's the nature of a zombie apocalypse; most of humanity has become these slathering monsters who want nothing more than to eat your brain.  Sidra and I, as veteran Left 4 Dead players, have a different complaint.
Picture
          See, Left 4 Dead throws you down in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and if you haven't been there, here's how it works.  You go out to forage, to get from A to B, to find an injured comrade, or whatever.  You try to be quiet and unobtrusive as much as possible, but it's never long before all holy hell starts breaking loose in every direction simultaneously, and you're inundated with howling, slobbering, ravenous legions of undead.  There is no planning.  There are no discussions.  You react, and pray that by chance your partner's actions compliment your own.  In Dead of Winter, a turn-based card game, everything freezes while players compare notes, formalize plans, discuss possible repercussions, and all sorts of things you don't do when a solid wall of zombies is coming on a dead run.  You just don't feel like you're immersed in what's being depicted.
          So Dead of Winter has probably joined Out to the Black, the Firefly card game, on our Do Not Play list.  It's really a bummer paying $50 and up for these great-looking games only to find them not worth a second play.  There has to be a solution beyond throwing good money after bad.  I'll let you know if I find it, unless you tell me about it first.  I'd be grateful.
          This coming Sunday, we're taking a look at Stone Age, a game about the quest for civilization.  I'll let you know whether that was any good.


          So yes, I'm a nerd, and have been since before it was cool; if I wasn't, there would never have been any Beyond the Rails, or anything else I may produce in the future, as my nerdiness is essentially where all those ideas originate.  I embrace it, and have for a long time.
          This is the new-look blog, all about the stuff I do, and that my friends do, that gets me thinking.  And while I'm not going to be talking about any new projects, I have posted Chapter One of Stingaree, the novel I'm currently working on.  You can find it by clicking the appropriate tab at the top of the page.  If you have any thoughts, opinions, or ideas for future posts, I'd love to hear them!  Those looking for a steampunk read are invited to visit Empire Booksellers, a co-op of independent steampunk authors with fresh new stories to tell.  And of course, you can find me and a bunch of my punky friends planning our latest hijinx at Scribblers' Den, my home away from home.  As to this, I envision a post about every two weeks.  The next window on my current schedule is on November 4th, by which time I may have accumulated something new to say.  Meanwhile, I'll see you around the web; maybe we can have [Nerd] Lunch together!

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 127

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images