the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

Duck Soup clearly the best one, but the lack of a musical segment prevents it from being my absolute favorite. The "We're going to war" thing doesnt count, you gotta have Harpo playing a harp and Chico playing the piano in it SOMEWHERE dammit!

I wonder if there are "The Big Store" or "Night in Casablanca" apologists out there. I imagine a tedious Marx Bros. fan would be "it was all downhill once they started making movies!" and just focus on eyewitness reports of their stage show.

Yeah count me in too!

big store has my favorite moment in movies

chico and groucho are demonstrating a camera to a female lead

"just look at me and pretend to laugh"
"i've been doing that for thirty years"

I imagine a tedious Marx Bros. fan would be "it was all downhill once they started making movies!" and just focus on eyewitness reports of their stage show.

haha

i have read the scripts of the lost radio show 'flywheel, shyster, and flywheel'

Early-model electronic typewriters aren't considered cool yet, are they? I'm currently trying to break into that fandom...

― Frobisher the (Viceroy), Saturday, November 3, 2012 11:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have seen early model word processors with big signs on them saying SOLD AS DECOR in wannabe stores in london so er

i think the whole 'nerd culture IS the culture now' thing is misplaced or fails to articulate the actual change

like re: balls' thing upthread the difference is that now people know that there is a community of people, somewhere, with admiral ackbar masks (though this community would probably overestimate what proportion of the wider community knows about the existence of the community that owns admiral ackbar masks)

but i think the extent of the changes in consumption patterns and the cultural effect of same is regularly overstated -- of the community of people who are occasional or frequent watchers of the show 'two and a half men', the subset who are 'members of the two and a half men fandom'

is pretty small.

we prefer to be called twopointfiveans

big bang theory is now the most popular sitcom in america, even more than two and a half men. i don't know what that says about nerds or nerd culture though. urkel was bigger than jesus once..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mQD_Wd6Ajo

Biggest annoyance for me is the tendency to rate anything marketed to male children in the 80s as nerdy. It is nostalgic or retro, it is NOT nerdy. Ninjas are not nerdy, Chuck Norris is not nerdy, Ghostubsters is not nerdy, etc. Yes people can quote "Predator" but you know, that was a film popular with both the nerd that collected Star Wars figures and the jock that beat him up. Zombies are not nerdy, b-movies and grindhouse stuff was not the sole domain of horror film fans but also an entire generation of highly sociable dudes and dudettes that took their dates to an age-appropriate makeout place.

I think that's spot-on, the tricky thing is figuring out whether there is some blanket nerdiness associated with being in 2012 and deciding, of things to do with your present-day date/friends, to watch a zombie movie from the 80s as opposed to going out to see a movie that's currently a popular age-appropriate makeout place. IOW, is choosing retro seen as nerdy? But again this would be "nerdy" understood very differently than what it meant when we were growing up.

It seems difficult to separate out from the shift in what "hipster" means over the past, let's say 5-7 years, where it is now a fashion category, the signifiers of which are recognized by a pretty large segment of the population, but not really connected with lifestyle/music/bohemianism/starving-artist/liberal-arts/whatever. I saw a Craigslist ad the other day specifically looking for someone with "hipster style" but "not necessarily the lifestyle."

er and my point was, a lot of "nerd" stuff is bound up in these "hipster" things if that makes sense

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcu79w7AKY1rxufqpo1_500.jpg

to find this i had to page through fifty posts of miley cyrus guest spot .gifs, what does this say about america

what thread is this

yeah but who gives a shit about star wars

big bang theory being the most popular sitcom in america means the mainstream is aware of geek culture as some kind of Other embodied within the culture proper; it doesn't mean that geek culture is now the culture proper. but it indicates that there's a certain level of awareness of it.

there are geeks who adopt it, enjoy their portrayal. but there were probably vets who enjoyed M*A*S*H.

ninjas are nerdy

i probably just set myself up for a ninja assassination huh

imo geekdom is a mode of approaching the world (& more specifically cultural products). some of the objects of geek culture have become superficially integrated into mainstream culture but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the geek “attitude” or w/e has

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quLeQ-opSiA

Yeah Dr Casino otm hipster and nerd sort of blending in popular culture. The terms can be applied to anything regardless of context. There is a part of me that secretly wishes dressing like a stereotypical 80s nerd would be massively trendy, but maybe we are headed in that direction already and maybe if that happened it would just be groan-inducing like most other trends.

There's some massive layer of irony in all of it that i'm having trouble articulating. Maybe it's that i feel like the flipside of the 80s socially-awkward computer-hacking nerd was the 80s socially-skillful phone-obsessed valley girl. And now everyone is living out the ultimate dreams of both of those stereotypes simultaneously.

Chris Hardwick has mentioned that 80s nerd is pretty much just undiagnosed aspergers or somewhere on the autism spectrum, which I'd agree with and how so much of Big Bang Theory is an 80s sitcom, including its surface-level nerd characters

think there's some strong correlation between nerd culture as mainstream and general permanent adolescence ie before only nerds would/could possibly care about star trek, superheroes, whatever as an adult, now it''s the norm. roots of this probably w/ the normalization of rock/pop fandom (cf don draper's 'when did music become so important?')(and maybe to a lesser extent the concurrent mainstreaming of sci-fi? could be wrong here), ppl increasingly still caring at 23, 33 about the same culture they cared about at 13.

haha bear w/ me but perhaps it's a similar mechanism as what happened w/ domestication of the gray wolf -> increased comfort, delayed at worst exposure to harsh reality, sudden coddling = dogs, permanently adolescent wolves. similar phenomenon in 20th century but esp post-war america w/ prosperity, dr spock, and demographic quirk that leads to american industry and media pandering = permanently adolescent men (phenomenon not as marked w/ women it seems).

ya definitely something to do with mr spock

i think there are definitely feminine versions of the phenomenon but eh

yeah i agree but nothing i can point to as easily as 'everybody being ok w/ grown men playing video games'.

In terms of masculinity and the 'jocks playing video games,' rise of sports games/shooters has to be huge there, right? and the massive, massive success of the NES and following generations of hardware, meant a lot of people who were not nerds got accustomed to playing video games in a way that fit naturally alongside other mainstream pursuits.

yeah i think a big part of the technological advancements in recent decades is not just 'everyone's on the internet' but video games just became way more varied and inaccessible -- you could simulate just about any sport or hobby or style of battle etc. plus of course more people are gonna see sci-fi and superhero movies now than 40 years ago, shit looks way cool now! back when all you could really do was put a guy in a cape or an alien costume of course dialogue-driven movies about normal human beings still stood a chance of being blockbusters.

kids always played video games, atari was a mass phenom. there is an interesting divide where madden is this huge HUGE mainstream thing that gamers seem to generally ignore, maybe the only video game w/ a higher mainstream profile, and is treated as normal if still 'lol men' like fantasy football or whatever whereas non-sports gaming still has some reek of subculture, to the extent that it's been absorbed it's as a cliche of bachelorhood at best ie still not fully adult.

Yeah, with the atari 2600 and the NES, video games became normalized for an entire generation. Once you had madden/nhl on the genesis, you had these same kids a little older who were getting into organized sports still playing e.g. my brother and his teammates, who would have junior high sleepovers where they played season-long campaigns until dawn. In the PSX era, it kept going, to the point where my brother played Div-II college football in the late 90s and talked about at least one guy on his team who inexplicably got obsessed by FF7.

also, this is just for the west. In Japan, you have this entirely different history about this kinda stuff.

On a related note, the day job sends me everywhere, so I stop by casinos from time to time just to peek in. The popularity of certain kinds of video slots gives me the feeling that this is the socially acceptable way for older folks to get that hit that video games give. And there are _thousands_ of this slots at every casino in America, with every potential licensee than you can imagine.

yeah er the demographics of gaming i think is sort of four fifths to be explained with 'the generations that grew up with this stuff were less likely to stop playing them'

i think don draper's 'when did music become so important' is a half truth at best (otoh i've never seen that episode so)

i dont know i was about to try and embark on some kind of grand overarching theory of the cultural value of the aspie rube and then i just found myself stuck thinking 'what did a 19th century nerd look like'

people would avoid him at parties because he'd just spend a hell of a lot of time explaining exactly how irrigation ought to be done or explaining the misattributions in Child ballads

like okay the habit of responding to things with nerdish intensity and devotion is an outcome of the postwar industrialisation of leisure right? & i dont know if it is just that some things are capable of becoming nerd-plausible from a background in THE MONOCULTURE (music), while others are capable of reaching THE MONOCULTURE from a nerd-plausible background (videogames) , i mean, i don't know whether this is arbitrary or whether it's necessary to come up with an overarching thesis

or that the overarching thesis as usually articulated ('everyone uses computers now!! and jocks play call of duty!!') totally fails to articulate what the shift actually means -- you mean that now that computers are things that are easy to use and don't require the sort of mindset that enjoys learning about the schools of d&d magic to get the hang of, the set of people that use them displays a weaker correlation with the sort of people who build miniature planes than it used to? well yes

I wonder if there are "The Big Store" or "Night in Casablanca" apologists out there.

rollerskate chase setpiece in Big Store is p lol iirc, even if it's more wuxian than Marxian

(I saw it 19 years ago though so)

or that the overarching thesis as usually articulated ('everyone uses computers now!! and jocks play call of duty!!') totally fails to articulate what the shift actually means -- you mean that now that computers are things that are easy to use and don't require the sort of mindset that enjoys learning about the schools of d&d magic to get the hang of, the set of people that use them displays a weaker correlation with the sort of people who build miniature planes than it used to? well yes

― Yorkshire lass born and bred, that's me, said Katriona's hologram. (thomp), Sunday, November 4, 2012 6:14 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

http://i53.tinypic.com/fnxyqe.png

people would avoid him at parties because he'd just spend a hell of a lot of time explaining exactly how irrigation ought to be done or explaining the misattributions in Child ballads

new life goal here

Ease of use is definitely an issue. The first computers were programmed pretty much in assembly, the first PC's were all command-line DOS, then you go on to Windows, Windows 95, it gets simpler and simpler. The content and production of videogames and software likewise has followed an evolution from esoteric, experimental, and idiosyncratic programs written by one or several people to mass-marketed, focus group-tested, Hollywood-style interactive blockbusters by mega corporations. The industry has more or less sold out its capacity for uniqueness in favor of a broader audience, financial success, and cultural ubiquity.

i wonder if on halloween roberta williams would shave off ken williams' mustache while he was asleep and glue it to her face and then wake him up and go 'booooooo, I'm yooooooo'

Never. She'd have to conjure up some far more convoluted mustache transfer method; like one involving a spray bottle, a fence, scotch tape, and a cat*.

*yes I know that was Jane Jensen wot did that, but that detail ruins the joke.

I didn't know there was a Jane Jensen game designer, so i thought you were talking about the singer/troma actress, and was very confused

RIP big man etc. The video posted beneath the story is worth checking out for a bit of speculation on the future of Star Wars just prior to Return of the Jedi's release.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/producer-rick-mccallum-has-quietly-retired-from-lucasfilm-20121126?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed

I can see the meeting now:

IGER: "And what did you bring to Lucasfilm again?"

McCALLUM: "I supported George in all his decisions and never questioned him."

IGER: "Oh good god."

Rick McCallum, patriot saint of untalented, idiot yes-men everywhere.

About 7,390,000 results (0.47 seconds) for rick mccallum it's so dense