Overthinking Memes: Idiot Nerd Girl

Today i'd like to begin a series where I needlessly overthink various internet memes.  I'm going to start things off with our dear friend Idiot Nerd girl and what it means for gender relations.  Trust me, you're going to love it.

Idiot Nerd Girl for reference.

Fundamentally, the concept is Anti-Poseur.  Nerds have a long history of being Anti-Poseur and we absolutely RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE when someone gets a niggling detail of our particular fandom wrong, misquotes our favorite heroes, or disagrees with us on which fandom is superior.  This is not a laudable trait, but it is demonstrably true-just spend time at any convention.  Despite the feminist interpretation of the subject that somehow translates into All Dudes Are Rapists, this meme isn't truly about gender so much as a lack of the encylopedic knowledge that nerds tend to accumulate in lieu of any information that could theoretically prove useful.  This is not misogynist rage; it is simply hipster rage.  Nerd culture is at a sociological peak and there is an unspoken, but very strong agreement still present in the culture that you have to suffer for it, which many many many of the people who were nerdy when it wasn't popular did.

I'm not trying to come off as Old Schoolier Than Thou.  I don't give a shit.  But being asked to prove your cred (and that is exactly what it is, the same instinct as gangster rappers, skateboarders and any other nominally outcast subculture-you have to prove your cred) is not participating in Rape Culture.  It is participating in Nerd Culture and you don't have to be a girl to deal with it.  Generally it is restricted to your favorite fandom and I feel what the culture is really lacking is some sort of Jeopardy themed geek-off to determine who is the bigger waste of good DNA and has memorized the most irrelevant facts.

There is real, serious misogyny within Nerd Culture-ask any girl that has been to convention and is cosplaying "out of body type" or maybe google the term "Cosplay is not consent."  I am not even saying that geeks are free of the bullying instinct-in fact if you read any fandom based forum or go to any fandom based convention, you'll find it is as viciously darwinian as anyone else's, if not more so.  But folks, firing up the Feminist Black Flag about this meme is much ado about nothing.  Nobody likes fake people.  It isn't restricted to your gender; you just haven't noticed it until now, because you didn't participate until it became popular.

Shamefully Yours,
Chris By-The-Throat

A General Rant

Every time I think my disgust with federal politics has reached it's watershed, they come up with amazing new ways to shock and disappoint me.  It's to the point where I can't even come up with a specific rant for each particular sad case of petty minded vermin fucking good people over; I would just be repeating the stuff I've said about everything from the Patriot Act to Benghazi to the fucking Whiskey Rebellion.

So here's my generalized rant, directed at random.

Fuck you and your fucking insanity.  There will be no utopia and pretty soon no civilization if you keep it up with your bullshit.  Every word out of your stupid fucking face hole makes it more likely that American cities will burn in my lifetime.  If you love God and infastructure more than you love controlling the lives of American citizens, you will just fucking stop.

The world can only take so much utopian circle jerking.  I'm not some hardcase that believes that government cannot help anyone, but it isn't treason or idealism to see that there is a point of diminishing returns and that we are well past it.  Further fuckery will only create a self fulfilling prophecy that can only end in smoldering ruins.

Still, after the inevitable happens, any federal bureaucrat will be welcome in the Free Republic of Scumfucktopia.  We'll need people to muck out the stables.

A Crisis of Faith

Life moves on in Babylon, with or without me.

I've found myself experiencing a crisis of either confidence or faith as the days move on.  Personal dramas are high and I often mope to no good purpose.  It attacks my resolve on every front.  And the blog languishes in idleness because I don't want to spread my disease among the community, as it is the only community up to this point that has welcomed me.

But I'm here, alive and un-incarcerated, for the moment.  I am still working hard to improve myself-to get my own life together so I can possibly think about helping others.  My goals are not impossible, merely insane.

You will see more of me in the future.  But if you've been wondering where I was, that's it.

And I ain't licked yet.

The Perils of Pathfinder: World Creation Process

So I'm finally getting things going on my Pathfinder game.  Basically I'm set up with 2 different player groups on different days, once per month on each.  Player level 4, mostly human party, a lot of first timers, nothing groundbreaking.

Most of my previous campaigns have not strictly even had a setting; it was just my bastard psychopath PC's wandering from one burning town to the next.  So this was really my first time creating my own setting that would have a persistent state beyond the current adventure.  So I was basically starting from zero, but there is a surprising amount of good information in the DMG on the mechanics involved and I haven't had any major problems so far.

The first image that came to mind for me was the skyline.  I could see a big lighthouse on the southern end of some little island on a wide river, with a big arched bridge connecting it to a little rural hamlet and palisade fort.  It developed a little further when I realized that the palisades were made of petrified trees, far stronger than they should be, and thus the region was named the "Stonetree River Delta."  It is a vast swampy area based off of turn of the century New Orleans, dotted with rivers and lakes and mysterious islands and some buried sins.

Anyway, I more or less built it from there, adding bits of libertarian propaganda (Oh yeah, the PC's are going to have to pay taxes and HOW THEY WILL HATE IT BWAHAHA) and background story until I had it ready for what amounts to my final test.  I looked over the info I had at the time and wrote down 99 adventure hooks as fast as I could.  It must be a pretty good setting because I had all 99 in less than 45 minutes.

Anyway, that's the muthafuckin' happenings on my Pathfinder game.  We go live with the tutorial dungeon in about a week.  I'll let you know how it goes as time progresses.

Lessons Learned: Vacation

#1: Melon balls are delicious, even with tangerine pulp.
#2: Melon balls are dangerous.  You can't even taste the alcohol.
#3: There is some debate over using Red Dragon Inn as a drinking game.  Apparently demanding that players chug Salt Water when they draw the Troll Swill drink card is "an excessive vomit risk."
#4: Talking down the guy who is tweaking in the hot tub and thrashing about like a harpooned whale is a communal effort-no one can stand to do it for more than a few hours.
#5: Damage to the orifices is cumulative.
#6: Depending on your rum and coke level, a guacamole and steak sandwich on potato bread is quite delicious.
#8: Stoned Hippie vs. Tweaking Marine in an impromptu wrestling match ends exactly how you expect it to. Even if the hippie gets surprise.  But the hippie is the only one that gets any sleep that day.
#9: Being snowed in is a blessing and a curse, but the curse part mostly manifests to the single guys (and my lovely wife) mildly put out by a general lack of pussy. Still, if we'd have been inviting people. the famously picturesque hills of Brown county would be littered with frozen sexy corpses.
#10: If you think you are going to get any blogging, roleplaying, book editing or work on your Pathfinder game done, you are out of your fucking mind.

Don't Mind the Dust

Just doing a little housecleaning in Scumfucktopia.  Added Linoge to the blogroll with the basic reasoning of "What was this guy doing not on my blogroll?!?!?"  Removed a couple of dead blog links. *Moment of silence*  Added a link to my tag guide on the sidebar in case you missed the post, and made it so you can access each tag from that particular part of the page.  Added the litany against fear, just because.

I'm going on my well deserved vacation and may be sporadic or prolific depending on my drug and vagina intake.

WE RIDE.

Hey, I haven't blogged about cartoons lately...

You know why the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie was panned so bad by fans of the show?  It isn't necessarily because Aqua Teen Hunger Force fans are a bunch of douchebag hipsters.  Mostly, it was because Mastodon appeared at the beginning, blew everyone's face away, and then did not appear in the rest of the film.  They set the bar too high in the first minutes and then gave you what was basically a long episode of the show.  

That whole movie should have been about Snack Food Mastodon showing up in places from the show and ruining everyone's shit.  The main cast shouldn't even have been in it until the very end, whereupon Snack Food Mastodon ruins their shit and closes out the movie with another song.  THAT would have been a movie to remember.  Instead we all sat in the theatre with our buzz slowly wearing off going "Man...should have gotten the DVD so we could get high again."  

It isn't too late, Adult Swim.  Snack Food Mastodon: The Series would do pretty well.  Why?  Because there is nothing more awesome than Mastodon.