cool kid report

Every Wednesday, new comic books arrive at comic book stores and nerds line up to buy them and read the latest exploits of their favorite hero, explore strange worlds seldom considered in other media, or at least get a chance to see some newly drawn breasts. This is true in most of the US. Nerds who live in the Dakotas belong to a lower caste and have to wait until Thursday because UPS hates them. Normally, a nerd would have his pick of new Marvel comics reselling him a story he already knows and has read several times, or DC comics replacing old heroes with hipper, younger, modern versions of the same hero, or responding to sales by restoring the old hero from death and replacing the newer, hipper, less liked by the existing audience replacement. This was not a normal week at the comic book store.

This Wednesday, this nerd arrived eagerly at the comic store, knowing full well that no interesting comic books were shipping this week. Every comic there was either boring, childish, or bogged down by too much backstory for me to justify without first reading the entire backstory, a process which is much like pulling up an oak tree to get at its roots.

In the end, I bought a Star Wars comic book that looked moderately interesting and a JLA/Avengers comic that has been available for several months. Had I been so inclined I could have purchased several Spider-man or X-men comics, as at least three of each came out this week.

The only other item of note in the store this week were the two girls. This is primarily aberrant because they were neither parading around a small child nor waiting impatiently for an errant husband. No, these girls were more of the girlfriend/potential girlfriend disqualified by extra thirty pounds variety. This was reinforced by their extended conversation with a store employee. What drew these special ladies to this comicly informed retailer? Probably his mohawk or ability to pull multiple comics off the shelf for customers.

The aspect of thes girls that I noticed most was not their ability to exist in a comic book store or date a comic book reader, but the way the stood around, blocking an entire section of comics, as if they didn't notice the rest of the store. This is quite analagous to the way many much more attractive girls stand around the rest of the world. Its possibly one of these "hyper-girls" would also stand around a comic book store the same way, but in any know comic book store this type of girl quickly decays into two uglier and less annoying girls after a few milliseconds and is therefore they are never observed in such an environment.

So, instead of finding what I was hoping for at the comic book store, a lot of empty space between me and a rehashing of of the classic story of the offspring of Spider-man's costume, I got pretty much what I would have expected from the outside world. Next week, Avengers returns to its original numbering and there's (another) Rogue #1! It's going to be hard waiting an entire week for that.

Currently reading: Marvel Team-Up #10: Timebomb!
Shame of the day: New keyboard resisted my attempts to convert it to Dvorak.
Cubicle addition of the day: A new computer (!)

The forerunner of "mp3" player technology has acheived near universal acceptance, having been accepted and purchased both by the "girls eager to remove songs from hard drive" and "hand these nerds something to put linux on" communities.

The iPod has become as much of a status symbol as anything else these days. In fact, I would much sooner get a broken iPod and pretend to listen to it than purchase a real one and have to worry about keeping its battery charged. This would probably not have the intended effect of deterring people from talking to me as I rock out to my imagined iTunes on my stylish iEarBuds but rather compel passerbies to engage me in boorish iConversation which no amount of gesturing could stop.

As anyone who keeps up with trendy techno news has already read today, Apple gave its growing fan club a price break on the new generation of iPods while simultaneously allowing members of the older generations to tell stories of how costly it was to be hip back in the early days.

I have a personal problem with iPods, and I feel it's worth mentioning here because you're not likely to see it in any mainstream media. Apple requires you to use proprietary software to transfer music onto the iPod. As far as I know, they don't seem to be using it to egregiously limit the songs which can be transfered onto the iPod, but they could start doing so whenever they release a new version of the software. Some people will argue that this is merely an inconvenience and doesn't much affect the actual usage of the device, but to me it makes a big difference. The simple fact is, there's no technological reason why a user shouldn't be able to plug in iPod into any computer, drag some music files onto the icon and listen to them. Instead, users are forced to install software approved by Apple. The fact that no one makes an issue out of this means that it is unlikely that any mp3 players will bother implementing a better system, simply because no one knows that there's anything wrong with the iPod. In the end there's nothing I can do about it other than offer my antipathy for the trendy device and put linux on as many of them as I can. The rest of you hipsters should feel really cool about spending $300 on a device that doesn't allow you to utilize its full potential simply because Apple doesn't feel like you should be able to.


Currently reading: Uncanny X-men #174: Romances
Shame of the day: Slept in late and missed meeting at work/took guitar pick from the ground and kept it
Cubicle addition of the day: Antistatic wrist and shoe straps. Not very exciting, but almost guaranteed to have very little static charge.