Nerds raise a metric crap-ton of money for Haiti

January 25, 2010 at 2:26 am (Harry Potter, Nerd Life)
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I have never been more proud to be a nerd. A massive group of nerds came together yesterday to raise over $34,000 for relief in Haiti.

Helping Haiti Heal was organized primarily by some head honchos in the Harry Potter fandom, but items were donated from many diverse places. The concept of the live webstream was to be a high tech interent version of the classic telethon. While watching the webcast which featured special guests from fansites, wizard rock bands, and actors from “The Wire” and “Heroes,” people could go to the HHH website and donate from $5 to $100, as many times as they wanted. For each donation they made their name would be added to a kind of raffle for a prize.

For example, every time someone clicked on the donate $100 button, they were entered to win a full set of signed UK edition Harry Potter books, donated personally by J.K. Rowling. Other items included signed books from Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett (I’m not sure if he is actually a Sir, but people call him that online sometimes and it sure sounds official), and original conceptual art for the film “Where The Wild Things Are.” There were over a hundred prizes to be won.

During the webcast, my friends who have submitted to the Twitter craze were getting frantic tweets every five minutes announcing that another $2,000-$5,000 had been made. By then end of the six-ish hour webcast over $34,000 had been raised for Partners in Health, a group that has been trying to alleviate poor conditions in Haiti for 20 years. Obviously, they’ve been working overtime lately.

Quite simply, it blew my mind.

An event like this completely validates peole like me who try and use their fandom to do some good. I hope OCU’s nerd community (and trust me it is VIBRANT) will come out to Carousing with Cupid next month to nerd out and raise some funds for the Harry Potter Alliance (which continues to do awesome things), Haiti (which is on everyone’s mind), and Darfur (which is never on nearly as many people’s minds as it should be).

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Wizard Rock Awareness Day!

April 29, 2009 at 3:37 am (Harry Potter, Nerd Life)
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Today, April 28th, is apparently Wizard Rock awareness day. I was not aware of this. Perhaps Wizard Rock Awareness Day needs an Awareness Day.

If you don’t know what wizard rock is, let me help you to become aware of it.

Actually it’s pretty self explanatory: rock music about wizards, for wizards, by wizards. All of the bands sound different, some are very rock and roll, others have a more dance/ electronica vibe. Some even refer to themselves as “Wizard rap” or “Wiz hop”. The thing they have in common is that their personas and lyrics are inspired by the “Harry Potter” series.

It was started by Harry and the Potters as a joke, but as their friends got into it and started forming their own bands, it grew into a genuine genre, and more importantly, a bonafide subculture.

Okay, I know it sounds weird to you, but to me it’s so natural. Listening to Wizard Rock is just like listening to regular (muggle) music. I’ve even gotten over the embarrassment of explaining it to people. In fact I kind of like having this secret genre of music that my friends and I can keep to ourselves.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to participate in Wizard Rock Awareness Day! The way I see it, the more friends I have to share the secret of Wizard Rock with, the better!

Even if you’re pretty sure you won’t like it (in which case, you, my friend, take yourself way too seriously), I challenge you to give these bands a listen and tell me what you think!

Oliver Boyd the Remembralls - singer/ songwriter from Toronto, very reminiscent of Amos Lee.

Ministry of Magic- fun, and totally danceable. These five guys have amazing voices!

The Whomping Willows- Some of the best songwriting to be found in Wizard Rock.

The Moaning Myrtles- Just because they’re transparent doesn’t mean they’re easy.

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LOST and loving it!

April 17, 2009 at 6:06 am (Nerd Life, Star Wars)
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There is something about the TV series “Lost” that really speaks to the nerdy soul. To those that don’t follow its exploits, the show might not sound so dorky, you know, a bunch of attractive people get stranded on an Island.

But then crazy stuff goes down.

By crazy stuff I mean polar bears, smoke monsters, four toed statues, time travel, walking dead people, and a “magic box” that makes Daddys appear when the Lostaways need to sort out their Daddy issues.

If the nerds needed a reason to love this show, other than the freakin’ time travel (come on, seriously, what more could you want?), it’s because this show had managed to carve out its own mythology.

What do Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Lost all have in common? They have a mythology. Through careful layering of the show, viral internet campaigns, an official podcast, a novel and ComicCon shenanigans the writers and producers have given us a rich back story to the seemingly straight forward tale of survival.

In true nerd spirit, Lost fans can congregate online and discuss their latest theory about who is Jacob and why is there Ancient Egyptian script all over the place. If you havent’t seen the last two seasons it might shock you to know that the Island was once home to some sort of civilization that had very Egyptian tastes in statues and temples. Why am I not telling you more about this civilization? Because that’s all we know.

Nerds go crazy for this kind of thing! So crazy they sometimes contract apophenia.

The writers of the show, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof(“Darlton”) are massive nerds. They constantly work references to literature into the show, as well as references to philosophy and the bible. The most recent episode was entitled “Some Like It Hoth” which is a blatant reference to “The Empire Strikes Back”.

For those of you who saw it: Hurley can suck it. The ewoks rule.

If you used to love “Lost” but have gotten out of the loop, you will be stranded on a figurative Island of not knowing what the eff is going on. But never fear! ABC.com has almost all of the episodes EVER.

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Read like a nerd

April 4, 2009 at 7:30 am (Nerd Life, Nerdy Thoughts)
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 One of the most awesome things about nerds is that they read. Now any normal person with a grade school education reads, but they don’t read they way nerds do. Maybe they read the news paper, a magazine or two, the latest “Da Vinci Code“/ “Twilight“/ novel endorsed by Oprah, but they don’t read simply for the pleasure seeing words run across paper.

 Nerds read for pleasure, pleasure in the smell of a freshly printed book, pleasure in the arc of a story, pleasure in literary themes and motifs. I read everything I can get my hands on. If it’s true love between a book and I, I’ll reread it.

There’s a certain book that I often check out from the library and it always smells like someone has been painstakingly blowing smoke into every inch of the paper and every fiber of the binding. I like to think that when it’s not at my house, it’s in the possession of a tortured young smoker with brooding dark hair and even brooding-er dark eyes. Ever thing about this probably fictional guy broods. Sigh. This is how nerd girls think.

I realize that brooding-er is not in fact a word, but anyone who has ever read a romance novel (and I read everything) can agree that it should be.

Right now I’m rereading a gargantuan volume that includes three novels( the His Dark Materials trilogy, if you want to know). Any normal person would be daunted by the sheer size of this ink and paper behemoth. But not a nerd like me! I laugh in the face of page numbers and glory in the extra five pounds it adds to my purse!

So read books the way you watch movies! Most movies nowadays are based on books anyways, so you’re really just cutting out the gigantic middleman that is the film industry when you read the book instead of watching the movie. Plus, you can score a sweet read from the library for free, but Netflix and Blockbuster will bleed you dry!

 

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Teh LOLspeak omg

March 28, 2009 at 2:31 am (Nerd Life, Nerdy Thoughts)
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Nerds have a love /hate relationship with LOLspeak. We love it because it looks hilarious. When you read, it’s usually not a visual experience. The action or information unfolds in your mind.

 

A good book is good regardless of you much you like the typeface or whether it’s in a pretty color or not. These factors might enhance your reading experience (I happen to be passionately fond of thick, fancy paper), but they don’t improve the quality of the written material.

 

However, occasionally words can just look funny, especially when artistic license is taken with italics, bolding, CAPITALIZATION and teh spelling.  LOL speak, when done well, is like that.

 

What we hate about LOLspeak is when people actually verbalize it. I’ll admit I’ve said “OMG” and “oh noes!“ before, and I do feel like nerds can pull it off with panache.

 

The lame cool kids can’t pull it off, because they say “lol”seriously, out loud, to convey hilarity, and they sound like they went to the Laguna Beach School of Being a Douchebag. Hipsters can’t pull it off because they use LOLspeak ironically, and let’s face it, irony has been done. But when nerds like me say that they need to clean their room LIKE WHOA or that they are “totes” up for sushi it’s adorable. Because we have mastered the art of tongue in cheek.

 

Now some people regard LOL speak as being uniformly evil, and I sympathize with them. In general, if you are not an awesome nerd with your tongue firmly in your cheek you should not attempt to verbalize LOL speak. You will sound uneducated. You will get on my nerves.

 

Where LOLspeak really shines is on its natural habitat: the computer screen. I don’t condone its use in excess; I don’t want to have entire conversations in it. The appropriate use is occasional and amusing. For instance the intended misspelling of “moar” (more)  and “teh” (the) look hysterical. When I hear it in my head I picture it being hollered by demented cavemen.

NEEDS MOAR COWBELL!!!

Heh. Makes no sense. Gets me everytime.

 

Strategic placement of the much maligned “omg” and “wtf” works well, too. It’s recently come to my attention that the use of the LOL after the word is funnier than preceeding it. For example, here are two similar LOLs describing the kind of weather our excitable Oklahoma weatherpeople have been forecasting for le week-end:

OMG SNOW ARMAGEDDON!!!

Vs.

SNOW ARMAGEDDON OMG!!!

See? The second one generates moar more giggles.  The capitalization and varied font size helps.

 

For more crazy fun with LOLs go to the highly entertaining icanhascheezeburger and ihasahotdog. If adorable puppies, kittehs, and the occasional walrus (“MAH BUCKET!”) aren’t your style then you’re a heartless killjoy. Excuse me, what I meant to say is that if that’s not your style check out LOL News.

 

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Page vs. Screen: Southern Vampire series

March 14, 2009 at 6:13 am (Nerd Life)
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One of the occasional pitfalls of being a book nerd is that if a book is really, really good, and you love it like meat loves salt, someone will make a movie of it. And generally that someone screws it up.

Take the fifth Harry Potter book. Not my favorite book, but when I saw the film version all I could think was “ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, BABY, WHO DID THIS TO YOU?”

Books turned movies can be passable, even enjoyable. Few truly live up to the expectations of the book’s fandom. The Lord of The Rings movies were an exception. They were beautifully crafted and spared no expense to create an atmosphere of high fantasy. I’m also really fond of Stardust, which was an adaptation of a novel by Neil Gaiman.

This last week I started reading the Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris. I immediately loved it and read seven out of the eight available books in a week.

The story centers on a crime solving waitress in Louisiana named Sookie Stackhouse who gets herself caught up in all sorts of supernatural business. But mainly the business of vampires.

As we listened to an audiobook from the series on the drive back from Kansas, my friend and occasional chauffeur Renezmary informed me that while there were no movies being made that were based on the series, there was a television show, called True Blood on HBO.

Obviously I had to see them. Immediately (I don’t do delayed gratification well). Thanks to the internet (and internet users who have no fear of HBO’s lawyers) I had the entire first season watched in a few days.

Whoa. True Blood is gritty, it’s dirty, and it feels like a real place. They set up the scenario well and use stellar filmmaking to tell the back story.

The back story is that a few years prior to the first episode, Japanese scientists engineered a type of synthetic blood (TrueBlood). Realizing that they no longer needed to kill humans to eat, vampires across the world took to the television to announce their existence. The attitude towards the vampires on the show is only a little worse than certain attitudes towards the LGBT community in real life.

Although they do mess the story up, the damage was minimal. There is one scene that is absolutely ludicrous and could have been taken straight out of Bella Swan’s daydreams. The end gets kind of muddied up, but they set up the reveal almost better than the book did.

I can’t say for certain what it is about vampires in literature that nerds love so much. We love to talk about vampires as a metaphor and as folklore. We love that so many different cultures came up with the same myths without ever tipping the other off. There’s also a sort of identification with vampires that nerds feel because at some point in our lives, we too have felt ostracized by society.

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Talk Nerdy To Me

March 7, 2009 at 6:00 am (Nerd Life, Star Wars)
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In my own area of nerddom, there are lots of chicks. I don’t mean like slightly more than the usual amount of females, I mean like a ratio of ten girls to every guy at the last major nerd event I attended.

Not very good odds if you’re a lonely lady looking for nerd love.

Author and Nerdfighting Movement co-founder John Green addresses this issue on his vlog, vlogbrothers. Apparently their videos, which address various topics, including, but not limited to current affairs, are watched overwhelmingly more by females than they are by males. The exception to this rule is the two videos which feature a picture of giraffe sex as the screen cap. Go figure.

Green also made a statement in that particular installment of vlogbrothers that “Nerd girls are the world’s greatest underutilized romantic resource.” Obviously this pleases me. Obviously I see what John Green is getting at. I’ve often remarked that the only pickup line that does me any good is “Hi, I’m Erin. I really like Star Wars.”

Which leads me to my next point: nerd boys. You might have misconceptions about nerd girls ( you might think they don’t exist), but you definitely have misconceptions about nerd boys. Either you saw the same girly magazine that I saw back in the day depicting a nerd boy as a male model in chunky glasses and a plaid button down, or you think that all nerd boys live in a state of pocket protector enforced abstinence.  

Neither one of these stereotypes is a typical nerd (no matter how much I might want the male model to be). Nerds or dorks or geeks or whatever, they’re all people who are entirely capable of making connections with other, more female members of the species. I’m not going to mention any names, but I know some HOT nerd guys. In fact, I am driving to Kansas tomorrow to see some HOT nerd guys. Mmmm.

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Fanfiction for newbies

February 28, 2009 at 5:04 am (Harry Potter, Nerd Life)
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Okay non-nerds, ready for your vocab lesson? Today’s nerd word is fanfiction. Definition: fiction written by fans of a TV series, movie, etc., using existing characters and situations to develop new plots. Scratching your head? Let me give you an example; let’s say hypothetically that I am a fan of the Harry Potter books. After the release of the seventh and final book I want more (because Harry Potter has been proven to be addictive). I can go to any number of fan sites and fanfiction sites and read stories that other fans have written about the boy wizard and co.

I’m definitely not saying that these are all well written stories. I’m not saying that these stories are written with proper grammar in mind. And I am certainly not saying that all fanfictions are suitable for the chillins’.

During my brief stint as a fanfic writer, I discovered just how gross some people’s minds are. I feel no need to enlighten you about it. The two dirtiest types of fanfiction are slash and PWP. Slash involves characters doing things that could be described as not heterosexual. PWP stands for “Plot? What plot?” or “porn without plot” depending on who you ask.

Although certain writers of Harry Potter fanfic have garnered huge followings, It’s not my cup of fandom. As far as I’m concerned, nobody does it quite like Rowling.

There is a bit of division between HP fans about “canon”. Canon encompasses everything that happened in the books and everything JKR has said in interviews. For instance, it is canon that after the events of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the character of Hermione Granger returns to Hogwarts to finish her education while Harry and Ron Weasley get jobs. This doesn’t happen in any of the books, but JKR says it’s what happens.

An example of something not canon is the alternate universe in which Harry and Hermione have a romantic relationship. In fanfic, a relationship is called a “ship”. So someone who write stories about a specific couple would say that they “ship” that couple.

People who ship Harry/Hermione are as crazy as the craziest Twi-hard. When it started to become obvious in the series that the characters of Ron and Hermione were meant to be together, they wrote hate mail to JKR and various fansites and basically just refused to believe the inevitable.

 They combined the two character’s names to form “Harmony”, and dubbed it “The Good Ship Harmony” or the “S.S. Harmony.” A move that spawned many nautical jokes when that ship sunk in book seven.

Keep in mind that I’m talking about Harry Potter fanfic specifically, because it’s my fandom. If you want to read stories about your favorite shows, movies or books check out:

Fandomination

Fanfiction.net

But if you’re an HP nerd like me you can go to:

 The Sugar Quill

Restricted Section (for the dirties)

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A “Twilight” Post: Because I can’t help myself.

February 20, 2009 at 11:19 pm (Twilight)
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Last week, I described “Twilight” fans as militant and kind of crazy. Well let me tell you a little more about the hilarious “Twilight” fandom.

 

If you haven’t heard of “Twilight”, then you probably live down a hatch on a mysterious island with a button you have to push every 108 minutes. It’s a bestselling young adult novel about a young girl with no personality (Bella) who falls in love with Edward, a sexy vampire who tragically, has no personality either.

 

There are two types of “Twilight” fans. “True Fans” who take the book seriously and think it is a great work of literature, and what blogger Cleolinda calls the “lolfans”. I am this second kind of fan. I read twilight for the hilarity, to be snarky about it, and…because I can’t stop. They soak those books in a crack infused solution before they sell them.

 

But those true fans now…they do crazy things. The kind of crazy that warms my geeky heart. For instance, some of the have started to say OME, instead of OMG. As in OH MY EDWARD. Which makes some insane sense, because in the books Bella just can’t shut it about how “god-like” Edward is. For those of you who haven’t read the books, Bella’s behavior is unhealthy and downright disturbing.

 

The true fans are in the habit of getting riled up at pretty much everything. At last year’s MTV Video Music Awards, the cast of the “Twilight” movie showed up to …do something, and host Russell Brand cut actor Robert Pattinson (who plays Edward) off in the middle of a sentence. MTV’s inbox EXPLODED.

 

“CHAGRIN!

DEEP MOTHER F***ING CHAGRIN!”

 

Exclaimed one commentor, causing me to laugh myself to death. Babyvampire29 called Brand’s action a “FRICKIN SIN!”Causing me to come back to life so that I could die from LOLs all over again.

 

So, if any “Twilight” fans happen upon this…feel free to tell me how you aren’t crazy. Or better yet, tell me how you are crazy!!!

 

Possibly more on this next week. But possibly not.

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Flavor of Nerd

February 11, 2009 at 2:08 am (Harry Potter, Nerd Life, Star Wars)
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Every nerd has their own “flavor”. I see nerds as being either academic nerds (computer nerds, drama nerds, literature nerds), or pop culture nerds (Harry Potter nerds, Star Wars nerds, Lord of the Rings nerds).  Most of the nerds I know are a combination plate.

My own path to nerdy awesomeness has been paved with thick novels of the princess/wizard/dragon/ magic variety. I was a sluggishly bubbling geek cauldron until the summer of 2007 when the release of the seventh Harry Potter book set off a chain reaction of awesome. I loved the book, but I needed more magic, more Hogwarts. So I ventured to that repository of all things nerdy and otherwise, the internet. What I found there shocked me: community.

The type B pop culture nerd has one refuge: the fandom. A fandom is a group of people who fan obsessively over something. The first fandoms were for athletes, but I doubt hardcore OU or OSU fans think of themselves as part of a fandom. The word just sounds dorky.

Have a specific pop culture interest? There’s a fandom for it.  

There is a Star Wars fandom, an LOTR fandom, and don’t even get me started on the up-and-coming but already famously militant Twilight fandom.

If you want to take a foray into fandom check these sites out:

For Star Wars, go to supershadow.com George Lucas answers questions on this site with kind of shocking regularity for someone as busy and self important as he is. But make sure there’s no one around to hear you randomly yell “What a *&^*#!!!” when you read Lucas’s answers.

Fellow Harry Potter nerds, hasten ye to The Leaky Cauldron they report HP news like whoa, and webmistress Melissa Anelli is BFFs with JK Rowling. She got an exclusive interview with the billionairess for her recent bestseller Harry, a History.

For Twilight, I like Twilight Source. They have a witty podcast called Imprint. But if it’s too tame, there are more hardcore sites out there, like Twilight Moms, who are freakin’ insane.

If Lord of the Rings is your gig, take a gander at The One Ring, which is a really good site despite the fact that it pompously proclaims how good it is on the front page.

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