Teh Geeky One*

A note to family and the two of you who still read this for the very occasional knitting content: there will be none of that today. This is totally about me being a geek. No knitting or family content will be provided. Also, I feel like it's going to be pretty long. And I'm not going to be explaining the acronyms unless you ask really nicely in the comments. Proceed at your own risk.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with a friend** wherein I mentioned that I was tired of companies trying to get me to change technologies. I'm a videophile, but really, the switch from video to DVD was enough for me. I'm perfectly happy with DVDs. Really, I am. And we own a bunch of them, so I was really not looking to switch to Blu-Ray and having to buy all the same movies yet again. Then my friend told me that you can still play your DVDs on a Blu-Ray player. And he extolled the virtues of their prettiness. And also pointed out that the PS3 is a Blu-Ray player that comes with a gaming system added on for not much more than the cost of a decent stand-alone player. These are all pretty convincing arguments, and the trifecta*** convinced me to ask for a PS3 for my birthday.

So Kit, because he has a hard time saying "no" to me (I think it's the big brown eyes), ordered me one. There's a saga involving P.C. Richard's, UPS, and a signature, but it eventually (through yet more effort on Kit's part) came safely to me on Monday. I hooked it about fifteen minutes after it got here (yes, I know it's not my birthday yet. Shut up.) and it only took me that long because I had to take it out of its set of three nested boxes. No, I am not kidding.

By the time I got it all hooked up it was pretty late, and we didn't have any Blu-Rays yet, and we only had the one game that came with the bundle (he got me the 160GB large box with Uncharted: Drake's Fortune) and I'm a little too spazzy with it to be comfortable playing it with an audience. As much as I enjoy video games, I lack the thumb skillz to actually play a lot of them. So I played it for about 5 minutes, just to check it out a little, and I put it away.

You see, Kit goes to the local gaming store for some D&D action on Thursdays, so I knew I'd have a chance to play around with my fancy new toy to my heart's content tonight. I even popped into GameStop and picked up a couple of additional games (Oblivion and Ironman, for those keeping score at home). I have been excited about playing these games all week.

So while the kids were watching their pre-bed TV (live action Tick on Netflix Instant, which is considerably less painful than many of their other choices, but there are only 9 of them so I pretty much have them memorized at this point), I picked up a book that arrived the other day, because I've been trying to get back into reading more and during the 35th viewing of an episode of any show seems like a good time to make some progress along those lines. The book I grabbed happened to be Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton.

I do not remember the last time I picked up a book and read it cover-to-cover in one sitting, though it was almost certainly before Becky was born. (Wait, when did the last Harry Potter come out? That was probably it, though that was mostly so Kit could get to it fairly quickly.) Despite my desire to totally geek out on my PS3 tonight, I knew as soon as I'd read the first chapter that I was going to spend tonight reading this book. And I did. And it was totally, totally worth it.

A little background on how I came to have this book at all: I'm not really a Star Trek person, though I've been exposed to enough of it that I can keep up with basic discussions about it, and I did watch STNG for a season or two, so I knew who Wil Wheaton was****, but never really cared one way or the other about Wesley Crusher. So when people I respect kept tweeting and/or linking to his blog posts, I started following him just because I find his writing entertaining. And also, he seems like a pretty cool guy. And a total geek. So I figured, what the hell?

I both belly-laughed and had tears well up at several points while I was reading. I felt nostalgic, and like I was hanging out with some cool guy, and like geekiness was cool (to be fair, I mostly think geekiness is cool anyhow, but I'm aware that lots of people don't). At some points I just sat back and enjoyed his stories, and at a couple of points, I had some personal epiphanies. Pretty fucking good for <300 pages. I chose wisely when I chose analog over digital tonight.

* This was an actual typo, but it fit with the theme and gave me a giggle when I noticed it, so I left it.

**This conversation actually happened at least three times with at least three separate people.

***"Perfecta" is in the Firefox dictionary but "trifecta" isn't? WTF?

****Yes, I also knew him from Stand By Me, among other things he did when he was younger.

posted by Laura Y. @ 8:04 PM