Tag: Editorial

  • Nerd Is As Nerd Does – The Pagemaster

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    As a child, one of my favorite movies in the whole world was The Pagemaster, for a variety of reasons: I loved books, the voice cast was beyond my wildest dreams, I bore a striking resemblance to Macaulay Culkin in glasses, dragons are awesome, bullies were also a problem for me, and Christopher Lloyd is a personal hero of mine. The character of Richard Tyler did frustrate me to no end, however, as he did not seem properly appreciative of being sucked into an animated world of adventure, and I was jealous of the fact that my own books were not anthropomorphic.

    I still adore that film, as well as the beautifully-illustrated hardback version of the book my parents bought me, and “look to the books” is essentially the driving force behind my interests and goals, be they academic, personal, and professional. I actively avoid thinking about the fact that there are books that I won’t ever get to read, because the concept makes me dizzy. I have been known to buy books instead of food – ramen and PB&J are sustenance, but hardly food – and I am always in need of at least two more bookshelves than I actually own or have space for.

    Over the past few years, however, I found myself slowly reading fewer and fewer full works; I keep track of anything new I finish every year, and so this decline was tracked in real-time. By the end of 2012, when I realized that I didn’t even average one book a month, I decided to start making an active change in how I spent my free time. The dry spell levelled out a bit in 2013, and I managed to get a dozen titles read, though that is hardly noteworthy; 2014 has been significantly better, and I am already at twelve titles, and that will probably be fifteen or sixteen by the end of July.

    As a quick point of clarification, I count comics and graphic novels separately from books, and so the amount of reading I am doing is still more than the average person. Considering that I gravitate toward titles by the likes of Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, and Mike Mignola, it’s rarely a case that I’m reading comics because they are “easier” than books. Hell, the two books I most recently finished are genre fluff compared to something like League, but reading a book is distinctive from reading a comic in ways that I don’t have the right degrees to articulate.

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    Suffice to say that reading a book engages my mind in a way that is palpably different, and I was missing that feeling. I was also finding that writing was becoming more difficult – again, something I’m sure a person with more education in cognitive processes could expound upon – and that simply wasn’t acceptable. Finally, all posturing aside, not reading even a book a month left a bad taste in my mouth, and was compounded by the shame past-me already felt toward present-me for taking a financially secure desk job with a steady schedule, instead of travelling the world and chronicling it.

    For most of my youth, I was a voracious reader, to put it mildly; my parents and grandparents were very encouraging of this habit, but found themselves at an occasional loss as I burned through books with little regard for cost, often finishing titles the same day they had been purchased. In elementary school, our public library had a “bookmobile” that came around each month and allowed us to check out books; they allowed me to check out more than the maximum after only a few visits, and keep a few I particularly enjoyed beyond the due date.

    There were several ongoing series that I read, Goosebumps being the most prominent among them, but as with most young readers I frequently just grabbed books that looked interesting, and often didn’t realize until later – if I realized at all – that they were part of a series. Some of my favorite books and authors were discovered in this haphazard fashion, and there was always a feeling of excitement and realizing there was something more to be read. Probably the best example of this was Harry Turtledove’s “The World at War” novels; I bought the first book, Into the Darkness, at an airport kiosk because it was long and had a picture of a dragon on the front. When I reached the end, it seemed kind of abrupt, but I shrugged it off as “Maybe the author is making the point that war doesn’t always wrap up neatly.”

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    Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when around a year later I came across the second book, Darkness Descending, this time at a grocery store. After finishing it, I used the Internet to discover that the third book was already available in hardcover, but decided to keep reading them as mass market paperbacks. For the next four years – there were six books total – I looked forward to May, the end of school, and the release of the next book. High school came and went, and I was a sophomore in college when the series wrapped up, with a fair amount of my own living and growing up done in between.

    Over the course of my teens, this process repeated itself several times over: The Thousand Orcs, which the first book in its trilogy, is more than a dozen books into the Drizzt saga; Prophecy, the second book in the Symphony of the Ages, came home from the grocery store because it has a dragon on the cover; I bought the BattleTech novel Lethal Heritage because I loved the MechWarrior games, and it was years before I had copies of the next two in that trilogy; my dad was a big Anne Rice fan, and I read Memnoch the Devil before any of the other Lestat books, because he thought it stood well on its own.

    The point is, there was a time when my desire to read overrode any thoughts about making sure to check and see if the book was part of a series, let alone trying to acquire all of the books in said series before proceeding with the first one. In addition to not having the disposable income to make that work, younger me wouldn’t have been able to resist just going ahead and reading the book that what right there is front of me. It meant I read a few stinkers, and there are probably a dozen or more series that I only finished part of, but it produced what most people would consider a very well-read individual.

    Over the years, though, something changed that I can’t quite put my finger on, let alone identify exactly when it happened. I became focused on discerning if a book was part of a larger continuity, and wouldn’t read things unless I could get ahold of the “first” one; this was soon replaced by the drive to “catch ‘em all,” and books were put on the back-burner until I could buy the whole set, sometimes in one ill-advised and overly-expensive swoop. The end result – having a lot of books that don’t really get enough attention – is something I discuss to an extent in a previous article, but I want to focus on some different aspects here.

    The thrill of discovery in a bookstore, or the book aisle of more general shops, has been all but eliminated. I have such a massive backlog of things to read that there is literally a plan in place for what I’m going to read ten or twelve books in advance. There are notable exceptions from over the past year, such as Stephen King’s Joyland and Owen King’s Double Feature, which I bought at release and put aside other things to make room for. Trips to the used bookstore 2nd & Charles have also yielded gems such as Neuromancer and The Quantum Thief, both of which had caught my interest years ago but I had never gotten around to reading.

    There have been one-off casualties of my shift in reading tendencies, too, which I would be remiss to overlook. I pre-ordered Joe Hill’s NOS4A2, thinking it would fit in well with the other King family books from last year, but I wasn’t expecting the 700 page monstrosity that Amazon delivered. To use the most banal phrase imaginable when talking about reading, I simply hadn’t budgeted for the novel to be that long, and had other things on my plate. While the same length expectation wasn’t the case for Dan Simmons’ The Abominable – after Drood, I hardly expected something short – it has also been shelved until that magical day when I somehow have free time.

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    Enjoyment of a work right off the bat for its own sake has also been watered-down by the need to know if it is part of a larger universe, at which point I go all Ash Ketchum, as mentioned before. I was perusing Borders several years ago, well before they went out of business, and came across a novel called Matter, written by Iain M. Banks. I started to get it, but the inside cover revealed that there were other novels in his “Culture” setting, which I had never heard of, and none of which the store had on hand; I put it back and didn’t pick the series back up until last year.

    I did something similar within the exact same time frame with the works of Stephen Baxter, whose novel Ring was given to me, along with numerous other books, when Beth’s parents were getting ready for a move. This time, the web informed me that the book was part of the “Xeelee sequence,” whatever that was. I now have almost all of that series – there are a couple of novellas that are fairly overpriced – but still haven’t read any of them. It actually took a bit of research to determine what books went in what order, because the associations between them are more lax than in a traditional, numbered series.

    Multiple titles that connect to one another without formal structuring is actually a common practice, especially in sci-fi, that goes back longer than I care to appropriately research. In a way these books are designed for people to read exactly the way I used to, by picking up something that looks interesting and just diving in. I’m sure publishers appreciate this style, since it means they don’t have to worry about losing potential casual readers who see “Book 4” printed on the cover and move on to something else.

    The final big shift in my reading habits has been more gradual, and didn’t really jump out at me until I signed up for an online reading site recently and was adding books to my collection. In the past few years, the books that I have purchased and read have been almost exclusively science fiction. A deep-seated love of sci-fi is nothing new, as it has always been my favorite genre, but it used to be interspersed with other genres as well.

    Works in other genres have snuck in there, such as the offbeat pop-thriller Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning, and a few books in Henning Mankell’s excellent Kurt Wallander mystery series, but otherwise I’ve been reading about spaceships or artificial intelligence. I’m currently in the middle of three books – a hard copy of Cibola Burn at home, the eBook of Use of Weapons at work, and the Endymion audiobook while I’m driving – each them a variant of the same essential concept.

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    While this shift is the result of multiple factors, such as a predisposition toward sci-fi on the part of the friends who suggest what books I read, I think the biggest impact has been my increasing tendency to purchase books online. Basically, I buy more sci-fi books than anything else, which means the shopping sites suggest more sci-fi books than anything else. This loop is further reinforced when blurbs on the books I am reading make mention of other books in that same genre, and so on. I’m not complaining, especially since I think science fiction is arguably more interesting and more important than any other genre, but I’ve already decided that the next book I read won’t have any lasers or faster-than-light travel.

    A sub-set of this narrowing in scope is that I have a few authors I follow, and even within the genre the rest fall by the wayside. I don’t have any qualms about picking up each new Dan Simmons or Stephen King book, obviously, and those writers often stray into new territory. Yet a lot of my shelves are filled by only a handful of writers, and I feel that is also negligent on my part as a reader. In the case of authors like Stephen Baxter, or Peter F. Hamilton, I have nearly a dozen books by each, yet have never actually read a work by either of them.

    Looking back on The Pagemaster, I wonder if maybe I judged young Richard too harshly, and ponder if I could ever recapture that sense of being thrust headlong into worlds of horror, adventure and fantasy. Perhaps I am the mysterious and powerful librarian, preparing the way for some young, bright-eyed child to step into those worlds; my hope has always been that my collection will be a legacy worth leaving to my children. In the back of my mind, though, I can’t help but look at my shelves of unread treasure and see the hoard of some great dragon, carefully acquired and jealously guarded, serving no purpose other than to be hoarded and gazed upon.

    At least that version features a dragon and not a sentient spacecraft…

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  • Nerd Is As Nerd Does- Writing On The Wall

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    I’ve been doing a lot of writing exercises lately, and the more I do – and the more I try to write on my creative pieces on the side – the more I realize that fiction may not be for me. It’s not that I don’t think I’m “talented” enough to write fiction, and there are certainly stories bouncing around in my head that I would like to tell. But the words flow most clearly when I’m analyzing, or just recording my thoughts on one thing or another. I know memoirs are big right now, but I’m not sure how well “Memoirs of a Twenty-Something Average Dude” would do on the shelves.

    It’s why my mind turns frequently toward academia, but the whole system just leaves a bad taste in the back of my mouth. Yes, it would be awesome to be in a university environment again, and be surrounded by people who are dedicated to being huge nerds about things I am also interested in. I don’t know what field I would even look into, though; Literature seems like the obvious choice, but not until Lit departments can mentally shut the doors on dusty old libraries, where people apparently stopped writing sometime in the early twentieth century.

    I have found a few programs that also allow for focus on outside materials, like comics or even movies and TV, but they rarely have the prestige of an actual Lit program. Also, after St. John’s and my “Liberal Arts” degree that no one seems to understand in conversation, I am hesitant to spend even more money on a degree that doesn’t necessarily have a field to go with it. Not that Lit is any better; the university system seems dead-set on hiring administrative staff over educators, to the point where all institutions are run like fucking corporations instead of places people learn.

    Nerd Rating seemed to offer a good outlet for writing in the style that suits me, but the sheer lack of traffic and readership understandably discourages me. The number of comments on the site by people who aren’t also writers can be counted without even resorting to using toes; Hell, we can’t even get people to comment or share on Facebook. It’s to the point where I know for a fact that some friends hear about something through NR, then go share the damned Bleeding Cool or Kotaku article about it instead of ours.

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    I didn’t mean for this to turn so bitchy; my original thought was just to talk about how I prefer to write about things, rather than necessarily write things myself. All of this is inherently tied together, though, because I realize that I won’t ever really get to dig into all the books, movies, games, and whatnot out there unless I can land some magical job where I get to talk about those experiences. I realize that having a good job, starting a family, providing for them, and just enjoying the experiences I do have for what they are would be a very good life, and more than what most people could hope for.

    I won’t ever really be happy with that, though. Not with my intellect, and my drive to dive into things, and constantly be thinking and growing and sharing. To rein it in a bit, I guess doing these exercises is a step in the right direction, so long as I keep up with them. “I wish someone would recognize my writing talent” sounds a bit flat when I don’t actually have any writing to shore up my claims. Hell, maybe I could get a piece out of this that I could shop around, or submit as a writing sample.

    The only other struggle – First World Problems to the max! – that I have is balancing wanting new things with actually getting into the things I already have, while still making sure I’m actually having fun. I have stopped bothering to try and keep track of all the games, movies, and books I have that have never been used, or half-used and then finished; it was starting to wear on my nerves. Still, only a lack of funds keeps me from ordering more and more things from Amazon. I started a new sci-fi book series the other night – Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey – and the blurbs on the back mentioned the other great “space operas” this novel brings to mind. Hello eight new books on my “Sci-Fi Series” Amazon wishlist, which is now at sixty-three items; at the point where my lists are so genre-specific, you can imagine how many there are.

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    I’ve been doing my best to keep track of everything new I read, play, or watch each year, but what started out as a fun little memento has become something ominous; I feel driven to fill it more and more with each passing year. “I only read how many new books in 2013? Good Lord. And I call myself a scholar.” This creates tension when I put aside one thing to start something new, or want to play or watch something I have already seen. I honestly had to keep from feeling guilty when I watched Star Wars for “May the Fourth be with you,” and it is my favorite movie. I kept thinking about how I could use that two hours for something I didn’t memorize almost two decades ago.

    Thankfully, I was able to just watch the movie and enjoy it once it started, but the thought was still there. I can’t tell you how much that part of my brain rebelled while I was reading The Lord of the Rings again this year; “More than 1200 pages worth of reading, and we can’t mark any of it down on the list.” Even worse, I realized that my memories of reading the trilogy from high school were almost nonexistent; how in Valinor did I forget THE LORD OF THE RINGS after barely ten years? I was genuinely bothered by how little I recalled, and it still bothers me if I focus on it too much.

    The point I am hopefully working toward is being able to enjoy things, old or new, as they cross my path, or when I decide to seek them out. I shake my head when I think about college and grad school, when I had genuine days off that I spent sleeping until early afternoon, instead of consuming every piece of media possible. That’s a fatalistic approach, living in the past, and so going forward I just have to try harder not to take free time for granted. For instance, there’s new content out for Titanfall today, so we’re going to play tonight; while it’s true I “beat” Titanfall weeks ago, does that really make the time I spend with Erich and Tillman and Beth less worthwhile?

    It’s been years since I watched The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – I’ve already seen it, after all – but I really should watch it again if for no other reason to listen to Slartibartfast deliver some of my favorite lines in film history: “I think that the chances of finding out what’s actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, ‘Hang the sense of it,’ and keep yourself busy. I’d much rather be happy than right any day.”

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  • Nerd Is As Nerd Does- Wanderings

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    I just got back from a late-afternoon walk, something I’m trying to do now that winter has released its grasp from “North of the Wall.” At a recent physical, the doctor told me that I am in moderate shape, but I need more physical activity; unsurprisingly, hours spent in front of a television, monitor, or even a good book do very little for the physique. So I found a nicely-sidewalked road running back behind my townhouse and have been spending at least half an hour each Sunday walking it down to a certain point and back.

    Along the way, I just kind of let my mind wander, mostly because my iPod can’t hold a charge, but also because I hope doing so will let my brain unwind, and maybe even have a creative idea or two. Nothing overly structured, mind you, just some light brainstorming, or thinking about some work or another I’ve been enjoying of late.

    Several times now, I’ve found my thoughts drawn to small patches of woods that stretch off one direction or another from the road I’m following. These are large patches of wilderness, mind you; I doubt you could go far enough in any direction to become lost, out of sight or sound of civilization. Still, they’re little patches of thick trees, bushes, and the like that haven’t been forcibly smoothed over for progress.

    I first noticed them because I was re-reading Lord of the Rings, and my mind came upon the thought that almost all of the places Frodo journeys through would be untamed, trackless wilds. Not only that, but he and Sam journeyed over a thousand miles in this fashion, and repeatedly came upon areas where they weren’t really sure how to proceed.

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    It would be like me deciding to travel from here to Dallas, on foot and occasional horseback, without any help, other than the guidance of a few people who knew some of the areas. Also, I had to use Google maps to find a city that was a comparable distance away. I thought California to begin with, but that’s another extra thousand miles.

    An extra thousand miles that, as it stands, people in recent history have crossed in a fashion very similar to what I just described. From 1804-1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition was tasked with travelling from St. Louis to the west and back, while also exploring, learning, and documenting what they found. This was at a time when people still thought there could be a “northwest passage” waterway that would allow for direct sea travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

    With the technology we have these days – GPS on handheld devices, 3D-modeled satellite maps, etc. – it’s difficult to imagine a time when people thought such things possible, even though it was a scant two-hundred ten years ago. I know there are still trackless, uncharted parts of the world, but they are fewer every year. On a tangential note, while watching a Batman film today, I realized that the secret road way leading into the bat-cave would no longer be feasible; someone would spot it on Google maps, and then “POW!” teenagers are taking selfies there.

    Without these places left to explore, our imaginations have turned to the sky, to “the final frontier” as it has been put on more than one occasion. Star Trek, as it was originally conceived, tapped into that same kind of explorer spirit; the Enterprise travelled countless light-years from Earth, into completely uncharted space, so that the crew could visit unknown worlds. I’m trying to fathom the concept of stepping onto a world that I have no information about, with nothing already there to help me get a sense of direction, bearing, or orientation; I can’t really make that conception work, to be honest.

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    Probably the closest I have ever gotten in my life is video games, especially ones where you are expected to explore an open-ended game world; things like Metroid, Zelda, Final Fantasy, and the like spring to mind from the past, while new additions like Dark Souls and The Elder Scrolls have carried on the tradition. I always like reading about people who are going through old things and find graph paper with maps of Zebes drawn on it, or scribbled notes about what directions to take and commands to use from a text-based adventure.

    Sadly, player accessibility has started to cheat us out of these experiences, and the internet provides instant relief even when the game may not. Yes, Skyrim is an amazing open-ended world, and it can be fun to just set off in a direction for adventure. But almost all of the quests give you a location marker to go by, and fast-travel allows you to zip back and forth between places you have already been.

    Dark Souls helps mend this a little, by having almost no sort of mission structure or hand-holding in terms of location marker; Hell, there’s not even an in-game map you can use. Still, if you get frustrated, there are entire websites – most accessible from a data-enabled phone – devoted to helping guide you through Lordran, complete with descriptions, screenshots, and digital maps of each area.

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    I’m not trying to decry anyone else for wanting to make things easier; I personally have never managed to beat Dark Souls largely because there is so little guidance; yet in my lifetime I have beaten games that offer as little or less guidance, and done it simply by learning the game, or making my own notes and hand-drawn maps; a lot of game used to have both lined and blank pages in the back of the manual intended for that very purpose!

    I’ve done a bit of wandering in my life, though admittedly almost always within civilization. When I moved away from home, I traveled 800+ down roads I had never seen, with just some hand-written direction to go by; I arrived in a brand new city, to move into a house I had never visited. I have travelled to Europe on several occasions, once to spend three months livings – albeit with people I knew – in a completely different city, in a country thousands of miles from home.

    Probably my favorite thing I’ve done was during that trip, when on my own I took a train, and then a bus to get to Paris, where I spent several days just walking around. I plotted my own course from Sacré Cœur, down to the Arc de Triomphe, and then past the Louvre to Notre Dame. I read maps, talked to people, stayed fed and safe, and even navigated the metro without getting injured, robbed, or hurt worse than some sore feet.

    Each time I walk by the woods on the road during my Sunday walks, part of me wants to tramp down into them just for the Hell of it. I might get scratched, bitten, and dirty; people would most assuredly wonder what I was doing if they saw me; yet part of me really feels it would do me good in the long run. If my hope is that my mind might become unburdened by these little strolls, the first thing to do might be drop some of my reservations and expectations. After all, it is supposed to be a dangerous business, going out your door.