Author: Jer Clarke

What makes nerds “nerds” is that they care to an irrational depth about certain specific things.

I’ve always felt like this was the basic idea behind what it is to be a nerd. All the trappings about computers, Magic cards and Dungeons & Dragons (stamps, movies, music etc.) really just comes down to a focus on details. It’s great to find a definition that sums you up in a few words.

The quote is from Daring Fireball, which is really only about Apple and Macintosh but somehow manages to be a great read all the time.

Maybe it’s just my frame of mind lately, but I can’t help interpreting most forms of excess as some or other kind of niche pornography. Case in point is this Bravia ad (bravia is some kind of TV made by Sony). It was publicised a year or so ago when Sony pulled the stunt of letting 250 thousand super/bouncy-balls go at the top of a street in San-Francisco. The end result, found here in a few different versions (I recommend the long one), is so intoxicatingly playful it seems like calling it anything but porn just doesn’t get the message across. If you don’t have time to watch it now save it for a day when you want something really beautiful and easy to watch. I wonder if kids would get off on this as much as adults do…

Just in case you were wondering, here are some other examples of the $X-Porn phenomenon:

• The Poseidon Adventure – Inarguably Disaster-Porn, really just a series of 12-minute scenes in which something invariably explodes (generally water-gushes near the end of the sequence), everyone almost dies and one unlucky person (usually not who you were expecting) does die. Features two full drowning/suffocation snuff scenes and lots of tunnel/claustrophobia action (also some great kiddie-disaster-porn scenes (“mooooommy! saaaaave me!”)
• Digg Labs Visualisations – Info-Porn at it’s best. This application watches the activity at Digg.com, a news filtering site, and gives you two views of where the activity is occuring. Useful and neat? Of course! But it’s also completely unnecessary and kind of creepy considering you’re watching the movement of real people. (A similar example of info-porn is the RSS-Screensaver that comes with MacOSX. Great for when you want to lose two hours staring at text elegantly flying all over your monitor to amuse you.)

Hate to make a big deal about it, but I’ve been getting some pretty amazing comments on random posts lately, thought I’d share.

Responding to a comment I made on this post about the recent election (where I made some dismissive comments about the Bloc Quebecois, Jean-Francois Boudreault had this to say:

fuck english canada canada doesnt like québec ,well guess what i hate your fucking guts too we will win the next référendum please believe dat fucking pussys

and later:

i want canada to hate québec ,to hate me so i can get my country as quick as possible hate us please hate me hate le FIER QUÉBÉCOIS QUI VEUT SA NATION , LE CANADA NE SE DÉFERRAS JAMAIS DES PATRIOTES COMME NOUS

After which he just gets belligerent:

jeremy clarke is a pussy

My response.

It may be interesting to note that the conversation later continued in email where he unambiguously judged me for being an “anglo-saxon”, quite literally taking a sensitive socio-political issue and putting some serious and strained effort into making it a racist endeavor as well (I mean really, anglo-saxon? As if there’s any real genetic difference between UKers and The French). Thanks for making my opinions look clean and respectful Jean-Francois, you racist prick.

On the “Can’t take a joke” front we have “joey”, who was upset that some people said nice things about this picture:

this website is fucking stupid.
Since when is a picture of a fucking stop light “beautiful.” What a bunch of fuck sticks. And did you guys see this guys zombie-sex porn site? Yes, I am serious.

http://simianuprising.com/zombierotica/

Fucking douchebag. Fuck you.

Again, thanks for the input Joey, you might want to check out this post though, as I take credit in it for the joke site I built and licenced Creative Commons. If you were joking you need to work on your jokes. If you were serious you need to relax, man, or the internet is gonna make you pretty angry a lot of the time.

Finally, the craziest of all, from Jess, a girl I had the most intensely romantic night of my life with at grad 8 graduation prom (I went to a “middle school”) and who moved away the next day (can you spell “trauma”?), on this post:

Wow, what a thing to find while stumbling through Google…
My picture on your website…

It’s weird to think that my Google Pagerank means that mentioning someone by name in the blog means that vanity searches lead back to me (that post was on the first page of a google for her name). I may have to stop saying horrible things about people from my past after all…