Category: Nerdery

I already wrote about cars as appliances or objects, but I found this earlier germ of the idea in my drafts:

There’s an in-betweenish bracket where prestige, social signaling, or bells and whistles count a bit more. The Prius and Tesla are social signals. Some folks get a Lexus, Acura, Infiniti, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, etc. for the prestige more than the bells and whistles.

The weird thing about e.g. BMW, Porsche, or Ferrari is how much enthusiasts know about them. The history, the construction, the internal model numbers, the stories. I suspect you can tell a prestige BMW owner from an enthusiast BMW owner if they can tell you the internal model number of their car.

My first thought, when I came across this, was this is a pretty good bit of projection and rationalization on my part ;) But it’s not hard to look into the fandom of any of those ostensibly-prestige brands like BMW or Porsche and find communities that refer to BMWs not as 3- or 5-series but as E90s or E34s (mine is an F30) and Porsches as 986 or 996 instead of the 911 marketing number. So I’m at least a little right about this!

I will never experience driving the majority of cars out there. I may never know how an old BMW compares to a newer one or properly hear an old Ferrari V-12. I can partake of the enthusiasm about their history, engineering, and idiosyncrasies. That’s the big attraction for me: the stories.

Right after we finish ridding the world of “floppy-disk-to-save” icons, I propose we remove this bit of obtuse skeumorphism from the default view in word processors like Google Docs:

I vaguely remember using one of these to adjust margins and such on a real typewriter once. Its possible I used one to eek out an extra page in a school report during junior high. Since then? Wasted screen space!

Act like a modern device, word processors. Hide that stuff in a menu somewhere!

On screening Aliens for a slumber party of 11 year old boys:

“I like the way this looks,” one said. “It’s futuristic but it’s old school. It’s almost steampunk.” “This is like Team Fortress 2,” another remarked. “Dude, shut up, this was made like 20 years before Team Fortress 2,” said the kid next to him. “This is, like, every science fiction movie ever made,” another said, as Ripley operated the power loader for the first time.

I love works of culture that bisect their genre. There were symphonies before Beethoven, and symphonies after Beethoven. There were comedies before Animal House and comedies after Animal House. For action and sci-fi action movies, there were movies before Die Hard and Aliens, and there are movies after.

In all of these cases, the pieces after are a wholly better ballgame because the piece bisecting the genre changed it so completely.

Has SNL been getting worse? Viewer ratings say, nope. If anything, it’s becoming more consistent and slightly better. Previously: how to understand SNL. Always: nostalgia bias.

(BTW, know how yes/no question headlines are always answered no? But this one is yes? LOL.)

If you’re working from the Jean-Luc Picard book of management, a nice little Twitter account of Picard-esque tips on business and life, we can be friends. Consider:

Picard management tip: Be willing to reevaluate your own behavior.

And:

Picard diplomacy tip: Fighting about economic systems is just as nonsensical as fighting about religions.

But I’m not so sure about this one:

Picard management tip: Shave.

If you’re playing from home, the fictional characters that have most influenced my way of thinking are The Ghostbusters (all of them) and Jean-Luc Picard. I also learned everything I need to know about R&B from The Blues Brothers.

Richard Feynman, in the process of explaining rubber bands:

The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things, if you look at it right!

This simplification delights and amuses me. The great thing is its fractal truth: you can observe our lives at many levels and conclude that they are dynamic jiggling messes.