Isn't This How Your Games Go?

If you play role playing games you know that even the most clever players will eventually have this sort of conversation:

Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: Have we anything resembling a plan?
Herger the Joyous: Ride till we find them. Kill them all.

13th Warrior

Don't You Love Bill Cosby?

While flipping through the Encore Video on Demand options we ran across "Bill Cosby: Himself." Since my copy is on VHS I haven't watched it in quite awhile and it was fun to stop and watch again. Having grown up with the vinyl albums his humor is quite ingrained and Cosby-isms litter my daily speech. Need to agree with someone? The answer is "obie-kaybie." Someone tailgating? Time to mutter "go around, buddy, go around." If you love Cosby, too, you can check out his official website at www.billcosby.com and follow him on Twitter.

Get Your Groove On

Oh Captain, My Captain

Tonight Nathan Fillion (@NathanFillion) said that if he got to 100,000 followers he would show up at Comic Con on Saturday and "whip that place into a frenzy." How could I let Captain Mal down? I re-tweeted for over an hour to drive up his hits. Can't you help a Captain out?

I'm From Outer Space

Wow, that's bad

Do you ever have a food item that sounds like it should be good, so you keep ordering it when the memory of the last one fades? That's me with the McDonald's Iced Mocha. This time they have outdone themselves. It tastes like a stale coffee bean that has been rubbed around an ashtray.

Michael Jackson: America's Child

Right now at the Michael Jackson Memorial Smokey Robinson is calling Michael his "little brother." Love him or hate him, you've also known Michael for the last 40 years (or all of your life), probably as well you know most of the members of your own family. He grew up in our collective conscious and is, more than anyone else, America's child. Since there are expected to be at least one billion viewers of the memorial today he is America's best known child. One of our friends from Russia was crushed by the news of his death and said, "You don't understand. In the 1980s Michael Jackson WAS America to us, and we loved him."

Is Geek the New Gay?

Over the weekend I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends and had the following conversation:

Him: ...so when I was in England all the shops had these cool little fairy fossils. (Laughs) It would be so funny to see you put something like that in your office!
Me: Are you kidding? My boss bought me a Fairy Swatter, so I have all these static decal squashed fairies on the office window with the swatter hanging next to them.

He looks at me like I'm crazy. I'm not just "out" as a geek, I'm "out" to my boss. It was obvious he couldn't fathom such brazen behavior.

It's not the first time for this kind of conversation, either. At a conference just last year one of the other attendees noticed that I wear a dragon pendant. "It's just so awesome you can be open about it like that," she confided. "I love dragons. My favorite book ever is DragonLance. But I could never wear something like that." I nodded understanding and she continued wistfully. "I collect dragons and it's nice because my fiance puts up with that side of me..."

Is it really such a big deal to be a geek? There is obviously a strong seam of geekery running through our society. Look at the highest earning movies of all time. Look at the sales of speculative fiction. Look at the fact that gaming has it's own entire industry. It's time to come out of the game room, people.