“Life is wasted on the living.”¹

Sometimes GONY is my day job; sometimes it’s not. This week was one of the latter cases, so apologies for the posting schedule (or lack thereof). At the end of a long Wednesday, I shared a cab with a guy (named Guy!) who was going in the same direction. He said that he’d just finished with his Wednesday ritual: After work he heads to St. Mark’s Comics, purchases a bunch of new issues, and then retreats to the back of his favorite pub to have a few beers and enjoy his comics in peace. The rest of our conversation went about like this:

Guy: I know, it sounds really boring.
Me: No, it doesn’t. It sounds great!
Guy: Yeah, yeah, it’s boring.
[repeat ad infinitum]

Geekery is wasted on the geeks. For Chrissake, be proud of yourselves. Stop making excuses for enjoying a good comic book, obsessing over an old video game, loving an obscure movie. We’re not in middle school anymore; nobody’s stuffing you into your locker. Puff out your chest and declare that you are an utter poindexter. Geek ≠ meek.

Sermon over. Now here’s something to do when you’re not sneaking into a second showing of The Dark Knight.

Geek Out

Click. The ©MURAKAMI exhibit ended its run at the Brooklyn Museum last week, and the place still has plenty to offer. For the next few weeks, you can see “Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition,” a juried exhibition in which the “jury” was visitors to the Brooklyn Museum website. After an open call for photography submissions, the web audience selected their favorites. The top-ranked photos made it into the show. It’s curation by the Digg model. Are the crowds as wise as they think? You can find out until August 10.

Hope. The hacker conference The Last HOPE is at the Hotel Pennsylvania through Sunday. I previewed the event in June.

Geek In

Fantasize. I’ve mentioned before that I like to savor the classics to a fault. It took me a decade to make it all the way through Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and the pattern holds true for games, too: I still haven’t finished Final Fantasy XII. Odd, I know. My fear is that I’ll finish up the game too quickly and miss something. (I don’t use strategy guides or walkthroughs on the first playthrough, so I always end up missing a few things, anyway, but I strive for perfection nonetheless.) I did pick up FF12 again this week and got sucked in again. I might even go ahead and finish it now. Probably not, though.

Aside from drawing my playtime out to a ridiculous degree, the other part of my “savoring” compulsion is that once I do finally finish a Final Fantasy game, I put it away and let my memories fade. That way, I can come back to it “fresh” someday. For years I horded all my old consoles to this end, but then Square Enix realized they could make money off their library, so for much of the decade they’ve been re-releasing the “classic” (i.e., old) Final Fantasy games to new consoles. (The latest of these is Final Fantasy IV for the DS, which hits stores on Tuesday, but FF4 Advance for the Game Boy Advance is practically the same game and a cheaper buy.) You don’t need to dig out your dusty, glitchy NES console anymore to play the oldest FFs.

The re-releases are fine, but jeez, those random battles can be a long slog. If you’re short on time, I recommend Googling for a ROM and playing with an emulator. (That’s not terribly legal, of course, so I’m only “kidding.”) You can speed up the playback speed during those long stretches of grinding to make level-raising more practical and less soul-sucking. However you choose to play, maybe this is the weekend when your memory has faded enough to finally fantasize all over again.

P.S.: The obligatory favorites list: FF6, FF8, FF10, FF12.

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1. According to the perpetually quotable Douglas Adams. ↑