Case in point: yesterday my neighbor informed me that I had a mole living in my front yard and I was elated! My brother-in-law offered to set up some sort of barbaric trap to snare the poor creature, but I wouldn’t fuckin’ hear of it. Without Mole, how will Ratty and Mr. Badger ever keep Mr. Toad out of trouble?
Fronting far more than can be reasonably expected: MC Frontalot has a number of shows lined up for the month of August. Specifically: “Aug 23, Seattle w/ Optimus, Goondocks, Router, and Beefy; Aug 25, PAX in Seattle with the usual luminaries (Minibosses, we expect); Aug 29, [JUST ANNOUNCED:] Brooklyn with Jesse Dangerously; Sep 14, Richmond IN, Earlham College (Earlham ppl only, sorry); Sep 15, Tempe AZ, Kingdom of Loathing Con.”
Get your Gabe on: Nerdcore News’s Gabe has thrown out an open invitation to anyone in the Seattle area for this year’s Penny Arcade Expo to meet him, Syn, and a gaggle of other nerds at Gameworks on the evening of Thursday, August 23rd. Straight from the horse’s mouth: “From 9 p.m. 'til they close, you pay 10 dollars and you play all the games you want for the rest of the night. Plus there are some drink specials and the bar menu is half-off. So there's that. Food, games and cheap drinks! I'm also thinking - hopefully Thursday - of getting as many people as will come (please let me know here or via e-mail - dystopia.is.now at gmail) together for a bit of a 'round table' interview.” Gabe also promises that a new edition of Nerdcore News will be available soon.
From the vault: Super Dragon X has just added another hot track to his MySpace player, though I hesitate to use the term new. “Back in the Day” is another collaboration with Aussie MC Grandmaster Pink, but this one is just now seeing the light of day. Check it out; it’s well worth your time.
Not necessarily nerdy, but…: Whether you know it or not, you’ve doubtlessly seen the work of photographer Neal Preston. In his decades long career, Preston has photographed some of rock ‘n’ roll’s most important artists… and also Madonna. Spinner.com recently “gave [Neal] the space to collect his favorite photographs into an online gallery where he recounts personal anecdotes with each picture.” Music dorks will want to pay special attention to the iconic images of the late, great Frank Zappa and his childhood friend Captain Beefheart. Thanks to Jake for hipping me to this.
Third-hand Information: According to Beefy’s blog, syndicated morning drive-time DJs Bob & Tom have been talking about nerdcore of late. I don’t listen to Bob & Tom - or, y’know, radio in general - so can anyone confirm this seemingly outlandish claim?
Get in the ring!: BOSSFIGHT’s Dark Prince was nice enough to put up “some quick and dirty uploads of a few of the performances from San Diego Comic-Con at the Capcom booth.” You can check out Ultraklystron performing “Open Source Lyricist,” Ultraklystron and Nursehella busting out “Shoujo n' Shonen,” and my man Beefy doing his new track “Tabletop” all over at Bright Cove.
Hyperwhite?: Earlier this week my pal Church hit me up with this NY Times article that explores, among other things, linguist Mary Bucholtz’s belief that self identified nerds are, in fact, “white to the point of excess.” In response, Journalista chimes in with the idea that “one shouldn’t discount the possibility that nerd culture is pro-something, rather than anti-black culture, or that it may in fact have nothing whatsoever to do with race.” Finally, Jason (from my new favorite blog Geek Studies) supplies a more even-handed assessment of the intermingling of racial identity and nerd culture.
Seriously; everywhere!: And lastly, here’s another jewel to Church directed my attention. It’s a YouTube clip of the handiwork of some cat who mods old Chuck E. Cheese animatronics. Unless you’re bereft of free time (like me), you probably caught this on Boing Boing.
4 comments:
That video never gets old.
More nerds discussing the Bucholtz paper: http://www.angriestricecooker.com/2007/08/01/high-school-nerds-hyperwhite/ There's a link to the actual paper (PDF) in there. It's dense reading (in both senses) but the above link does a fair job of giving you the jargon decoder that you'll need. (Think you know what 'fractally recursive' means? Think again!)
(That KoL link doesn't seem to go to the right place. That or the news got bumped.)
Damn.
Was it something I said?
Damnit! My mailserver is bouncing back these "somebody responded" alerts. :/
How come that dude's sequences are so much more realistic than the routines the bots were *made* to perform? I wonder.
I'm gonna try and read through that PDF later this week... though I reckon it'll just put me to sleep.
I need to read the original paper before making final conclusions, but based on what is posted here, I have to wonder about her conclusions.
She seems to have focused in on science nerds and was surprised to find that their language was Euro-centric? Could it be because most scientific work uses Euro-centric language? And, kids especially, but all of us to a certain degree, use language that mimics the language that we are exposed to. This may also explain the prevalence to Latin based vocabulary over Germanic based. Doesn't most scientific language use Latin based vocabulary?
That all said, the forth coming book could still prove worthwhile. If for nothing else then the discussion refuting the work could provide an interesting jumping off point for further discussions.
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