There's Also Some TV I Don't Intend To Watch
Sorry I'm late. State law requires that I take kids to the doctor instead of letting the disease devour them alive, inside-out. Death's Waiting Room has been faced and survived. At least now I have some truly vile prescription cough medicine with which to torture my poor defenseless victimized son. I don't really want to, but I have to make sure he knows there are dire, dire consequences to missing school due to illness. My goal is that one day if--God forbid--he should be sitting at his desk in class and suddenly starts bleeding from the eyes and vomiting slugs, there should still just be a leeeetle hesitation about calling Dad to go home. I wish myself luck.

Also I have something I'd like to write about, so no MIHNIoS today. If you don't know what that is, I'd say you're in pretty good shape, life-wise.
...

There's no other way to say it, so I'll just say it. I'm a dork. I was excited about Star Wars coming out. I've seen far, far more than half the episodes of every Star Trek show ever made and every episode of at least one of the series (Deep Space Nine, which I am just dorky enough to refer to as DS9). I think Tolkien is awesome. I have a (modest, but existent) comic book collection. I play lots and lots of computer games. I built my own computer (with a little help). I have a blog.

Come on, do be offended by that last one. Blogging is still fairly dorky. It seems mainstream to dorks like us who write them and read them, but while we're blogging, there are vast segments of the population at clubs or parties or having sex with other vast segments of the population they only just met. They have no idea we exist and it doesn't bother them one bit. And not just because they're hungover either.

Like everything else, though, there are gradations of dork. I'm not a collector of anything in particular, apart from comic books which I gave up around the age of 20. I've never been to a fan convention of any kind. I own no memorabilia of any kind except for a framed original Star Wars poster my mom bought me a few years ago and is still sitting bubble-wrapped in my garage. I don't have an elf-name nor can I read Elvish. I belong to no online gaming clans (though I'm dork enough to know online gaming clans exist) and have no faux tough-guy handle I regularly go by like "Blade" or "/\/\4$+3R ßL4$+3R"... at least I didn't until now. That second one strikes me as pretty fuckin' cool. I claim it. Back away, poachers.

I'm very comfortable with my level of dork. Even though there are several levels of dork above (below?) me which I am not comfortable inhabiting myself, I am at least conversant in those levels so I can usually be amused by them instead of horrified, as someone less dorky than myself might be.

But every once in a while I'm caught off guard, taken by surprise by something so dorky that even my own dork mind was incapable of conceiving of it, or even having an inkling of it.

That's how I felt the first time I saw a commercial for G4 channel's Video Game Vixens Beauty Pageant and awards show. Hosted by Hal Sparks!

It's no secret that ever since the first Tomb Raider game (and probably before that with the old Leisure Suit Larry series) that game designers have been trying to figure out the best way to integrate their target audience's two great passions in life: gaming and masturbation.

To see that kind of creepy tacit understanding broadcast and celebrated in such a public way (Hal Sparks, people!) absolutely boggles my sad blogger mind.

Maybe it's just because I'm old. When I was in my formative years, the only female in any video game was the eminently unfuckable blob of 8-bit color Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Brothers. Well, her and Ms. Pac-Man, whom I do not count as she was obviously spoken for and possessed neither boobies nor vagina, speculatively digital or otherwise.

In the commercial I saw for the G4 show now, apparently every girl in every video game is all boobies and all vagina. And then in between those somewhere is usually a giant gun or a samurai sword with which the walking erogenous zone dispatches zombies.

I guess what you learn as you limp into early middle age as I am is exactly where your limits lie. In some cases you lament your waning youth, wondering if it's all creeping curmudgeon-ry turning you into your Dad the first time you were in the car together when a rap song came on the radio.

And in other cases, the breach of basic common sense is so obvious that you feel completely justified in saying stuff like "the stupid-ass kids with their stupid-ass ideas... and pull your pants up, for Christ's sake!"

So I'm not going to watch G4's Video Game Vixens show. Maybe I would have back before I was having regular sex with someone other than myself and female nudity was still just a theory I had. Even if I were in the mood to be artificially titillated by something other than my wife, I'm not going to waste my time and energy drooling over antiseptic digital representations of womanhood. Especially since I'm already paying good money for my monthly subscription to Pie In The Face.*



This post on Narcissus Scale: 9.9


Pops


*=in case you weren't sure, Pie In The Face is the nation's premier periodical devoted to lesbian clown porn. Go ahead, pretend you didn't know.
- posted by Pops @ 11:59 AM