1529 Doki Doki Damnit.

One of the things young nerds sometimes never learn is that a lot of shit just doesn’t matter. There are arguments not worth the time, or breath, it takes to make them. It’s important to know your audience. Unfortunately that’s not always easy to do. At this point in his life I feel like Ed probably should know when his sister is just stating things and not inviting a discussion. Then again this may just be what they do as part of their normality. These seemingly tense exchanges are a complex mechanism for bonding with one another. He says things he doesn’t think she pays attention to, but she actually remembers them. In fact, there is a lot of evidence of her actually listening to her brother when it seem like she isn’t. Ed is pretty much as he is. He’s not the kind of person who creates a false self to present to the world, at least no more than regular people. His sister is much more about the false front. At least in so far as the cartoonish self she presents to the world is not indicative of her actual intelligence. She projects confidence as an offense is the best defense strategy. Keeping people off balance with her overt sexuality. She plays at being carefree while actually bonding much more strongly than she lets on. In some ways she dislikes this aspect of herself, as evidenced by her reaction to John. They are very similar characters. The key difference is that he’s okay with himself in a way that she is not.

Ed’s instinct is to pour out trivia when someone is talking about a thing he knows about. He thinks of himself as intelligent and does things to reinforce that notion to himself and others. He doesn’t ask Jess about her hobbies, assuming that collecting clothing is simply the acquisition of a thing that is pretty and nothing else. He assumes that his thing is important and deep and hers isn’t. That is a flaw he shares with a lot of people. It might well be nothing more than acquisition, but he shouldn’t assume it is, or that she doesn’t have a similar wealth of knowledge about the thing she enjoys.

I’ve never enjoyed sport. In my youth I acted like that made me better than people who did. Partially because those people were mean to me, and partially because I was an arrogant fuck. Liking sport had nothing to do with those people being assholes necessarily. I’ve certainly met people who liked sports who also liked things I do since then. One of my nerdiest friends loves American football and the ridiculous nonsense that is the WWE. He’s not a weedy little nerd either. He just has a range of interests broader than mine. I worked with a guy who loved baseball statistics. It was more interesting hearing him explain statistics in baseball than actually watching a game to me. At some point I realized that I didn’t need to be a dick about people liking things I don’t. It took so long that it kind of undercut the idea that I was somehow superior to them anyway. Now when people I know start flipping out about sport I’m glad to know they’re having fun and I just scroll on by, without making a passive aggressive post about people being excited for a thing I’m not excited about.

I think part of why we like openly hating things is because when people agree it satisfies a deep primal urge for tribalism. Humans love separating themselves into smaller and smaller tribes and fighting about shit. When we’re done fighting a common enemy we start gradating our own group and fighting each other. It has to be something so deeply ingrained in us that we barely even notice when we do it. We see it in others, but not in ourselves so much. Like a group of goths, sitting on the steps, declaring everyone not doing what they are conformists. We can’t exist without some level of conformity. Can you imagine how tedious someone would be who conformed to nothing at all? They’d be a feral monster, farting and fighting everything all the time.

53 Comments

I retain some distance from sports fans (not that many cross my path) because if anything, Australian society is worse than American in the undue emphasis placed on sporting prowess. If one doesn’t worship people who just happen to be good at kicking or throwing or hitting a ball, then one is seen as unAustralian. I am still perversely proud of the time a work colleague came back from the local mall to report excitedly that a particular footballer was signing autographs, and I was honestly able to say “Who is [name of footballer]?”.

Heh, no kidding. I personally find AFL to be quite an inane sport myself. Thankfully not all sports in Australia are as silly as AFL.

I personally enjoy (or rather enjoyed, I don’t actually play it any more) ice hockey, as strangely as it sounds for an Australian. I find that the sport is much more multi-faceted as it compromises of quite a few different things that one has to learn in order to even play the sport properly. There’s skating techniques, puck/stick handling techniques (inc. shooting techniques, passing techniques, dykes & keeping the puck away from your opponent) and working with your team. Since the sport is quite complicated, for me it is rather enjoyable to watch and learn. As an example of the multi-faceted nature of the sport, I went to a clinic for two-three years back in my teenage years for learning ice hockey. I found during this clinic that while I was horrible (or rather incapable) at shooting (and still never got the technique down for it), I still had a much better defense game thanks to my better skating skills compared to the other clinc-goers.

Even still, I don’t keep up with the sport. I’m not crazy over ice hockey games that happen in the U.S. and I’m not going to spend silly amounts of bucks on Foxtel just to watch the sport. If I get the chance to watch the sport, I’ll enjoy it. Otherwise I’m not going to go out of my way to do so.

So yes, you are thankfully not the only Australian to lack an overzealous interest in sports (especially AFL) :P.

I was reading your post, and was trying to figure out what lesbians had to do with playing hockey, then I finally realized that you meant “deke”, which took all the fun out of it. Unless, of course, you actually meant dykes, and if so, I am still trying to figure it out.

I am dubious that Australia could have a worse sports hero problem than my part of the US. Mostly because I don’t see how it is POSSIBLE to outdo Texas and football. The damn game is basically the state religion.
I have, consequently, mastered the art of pretending I actually know what the slag people are talking about. I still don’t know a lick of football, but I can apparently fake it well enough to pass.

Could it be a different football?

The irritating realisation that football means three different things depending on where you live (AFL in Australia, Soccer in England and Gridiron in America).

On a different note, @Jistuce, I would not say that Australia is worse than Texas. Definitely not. The amount of devotion to AFL in Australia does irk me a bit however, especially given my enjoyment of other (non-Australian) sports mentioned in my other comment.

I would rather consider Super Mario Bros. 2 as a true sequel than Lost Levels, which was basically Super Mario Bros. 1.5. At least SMB2 added a lot more to the series than Lost Levels did. SMB2 gave us Shy Guys, Bob-ombs, Ninjis, Pokeies, Snifits, and Birdo. What did Lost Levels give us; Poison Mushrooms, which have only ever been used in the Smash Bros. series after their debut.

They’ve been in a little more than just Smash Bros.. They cut your Dice Rolls in Mario Party, there were some in Luigi’s Mansion, and they did appear in a main series Mario Title as hazards in Super Mario 3D Land. And also as a items in a few of the RPGs.

And, yes, I read the above comic and choose to do this COMPLETELY unironically.

Mario was known as both Jump Man and Mr. Video on the original FamiCom. There are actually a ton of games he was in before being named Mario in the FamiCom era (it was the NES’s predecessor).

Franky, I don’t know what any of you are talking about. I haven’t played a Mario game since Mario Brothers I on the NES (BEFORE any Mario Worlds or Super Marios).

There’s also the obvious problem that Nintendo Japan insists Mario 2 IS a Mario game, so fans excommunicating it have a bigger problem.
(And the whole thing was originally a gross overreaction to the sudden knowledge that we didn’t get “the REAL Mario 2”. We were all happy until Mario All-Stars came out.).

Though most of the enemies in Mario 2 WERE shelved for many years. Probably because Mario 2 was a dream sequence, according to it’s own manual and ending.
I still remember the “WTF” moment when I saw that mini-ninji in Mario World Bowser’s Castle for the first time. Being an obessive little twit at the time, I think I went on a rant about how that shouldn’t be there because mini-ninji only existed in Subcon.

I just threw my hands up and surrendered when Yoshi’s Island came out and Shy Guys were EVERYWHERE. It is hardly as if Mario has a rich history and luscious backstory, so it is hard to be concerned about the continuity around a character that has none.

Hey, that was my attitude toward sports myself. I think a big part of maturity is seeing things that you loathed for petty reasons and saying “why was I acting that way?”. Anyways, it just something I ignore now rather than wishing the jocks die in a fire.

In the 1990s TV cartoon, “Doug”, Doug’s sister talks about conformity/copying people. It was something like this:
” Don’t worry if people copy others a little. If people didn’t copy each other AT ALL, we’d all be people who couldn’t talk, and we’d spend all day crawling around and grunting.”

Actually, I heard somewhere that the USA’s SMB2 may have been the SMB2 they had truly intended; that Miyamoto wanted to change things up for the sequel and make a game that focused less on left/right movement and more on up/down movement. Besides, it did bring Shy Guys and POW blocks to the Mario franchise. So perhaps considering SMB2 a true Mario game is still pretty understandable.

It’s Mario 2 fun? That’s all that matters.

Cheery atmosphere (most of the time), four characters to choose from at the start of each level, secret areas galore, and you can throw both vegetables and enemies at other enemies…or straight off a cliff. Not to mention that the boss–for 90% of the game–is pink, male, transvestite, egg (and occasionally fireball) spitting dinosaur named Birdo!

Personally, I’d recommend any of the ports – like the versions for the SNES and GBA. They give you the option to save your game (I like the GBA version a bit better, due to the voice acting and the giant robot Birdo boss they added).

Ed is obviously more intelligent than Scott Pilgrim, and less of a slacker type jerkass, but this scene immediately reminds me of the Pac-Man bit. “I’ll leave you alone forever now.”

I remember once saying that in order for someone to be a non-conformist nowadays, you’d need to dress up in a chicken suit and speak only in Swahili. Frankly you’d look more stupid then cool.

You could also either be a necrophile or someone who gets off on old people, and I mean old enough to be your grandparent. I know it’s wrong, but how many people truly fall under these fetish categories? Hell, you’d be making a new group to conform to, if anything.

Unless you were in a location in the world that speaks Swahili,…and then you’d only be- a half-non-conformist? Hm.

“…making a passive aggressive post about people being excited for a thing I’m not excited about.”

I think you just summed up High School in one sentence. MAN, being a teenager was hard. That’s one thing I’m surprised a lot of older folks forget. You’re still a child, but absolutely CERTAIN that you’re not. It’s a tough freakin’ time. Especially when it rolls into college, a little.

Every ten years or so I look back and realize what an ass I was. Kinda sucks, ’cause I guess that means I’m some sort of ass at ALL times, but at least I’m learning something. When I was ten I lamented about what a little child I was, when I was in my mid teens I lamented about the same thing, when I hit my twenties I lamented about what a teenager I had been (duh), and now, in my thirties, I understand how little that twenty-something actually knew and how his teenage years actually had bled into his twenties a bit.

I’m looking forward to being forty and finding out what kind of an asshole thirty year old I was.

Technically no longer a child, but definitely not an adult — a “subadult”.

True adulthood is reached when the prefrontal cortex fully develops between the ages of 18 & 21 for females and between the ages of 20 & 23 for males. There are (of course) some outliers for both in either direction.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. My advice to Jess, in a phrase with which she’s probably familiar.

I’ve never been a sports fan, unless you consider Bullseye Pistol or trick shooting sports. Since I was big, I was a designated tackle in High School gym. My family was not sports oriented, either. Dad bought and mounted a basketball hoop more out of a sense of duty than because he thought anyone would actually use it. Kind of hard to dribble a ball in a gravel driveway, anyhow.

Dad developed an odd interest in hockey back in the late ’60s, but I later learned the fascination wore off after he figured out the physics. He had been a darned good skater as a teenager, and even took us to the local rink once in a while, but for him the shine had worn off long before. In the ’80s, he took up the Rubik’s Cube, but its hold on his attention faded once he had solved it for good.

I’m not a gamer, which is funny because I got into computers because I liked Pac-Man. I did latch onto Sim City my second pass through college, a travesty I have catalogued in these pages before. Yes, I installed Angry Birds on my Net Book, but I never took it seriously.

I never had a poor relationship with the sports people (I was in marching band in high school, and we got along with the football team just fine) and despite people thinking I was weird for asking what was going on in the game because I couldn’t follow it at all, nobody really made fun of me for it.

For me music and pop culture was the big divide. Being a gamer type, I basically only listened to video game soundtracks, and throughout high school, college, and beyond, I’ve been mocked whenever I ask what songs an artist is known for (or even who an artist is, or what kind of music they write). Similarly for actors in movies. I never found trivia like this useful in any way, and it always annoyed me when others impressed upon me the importance of these facts.

My biggest sense of arrogance as a teenager was thinking that because I was an academic type, that I had greater knowledge of the world than those who weren’t. Besides pop culture trivia, which I still find kinda useless, I used to think that liberal arts education was the best (I remember telling someone that I would never apply to MIT because it wasn’t a liberal arts school, and that MIT was beneath me). Now that I’m older (and in an engineering program, as it were) I have a greater appreciation of the different kinds of knowledge different people have, and I realize that there is a wealth of knowledge that can be obtained outside of academia.

From another point of view Jo and Ed were nerding it up and Jessica is butting in and being kinda rude. Or a sister. Either works.

My nephew (one of many, in case they start to seem contradictory) and I were having a conversation at a friend of his’ place, and afterward she asked him if we always fought like that. Huh? It was a normal conversation for us.

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