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If you’re anything like me (and I’m assuming that if you’re reading this site on a regular basis that you are) then you’re probably guilty of at least a few of the offenses on this amusing list brought to us by Geekdad. Go ahead and click through. I’ll wait for you.

I’m particularly guilty of the following:

#4: Dissecting Movies – My wife and brother insist that I can’t enjoy a movie because I’m constantly picking apart plot holes and getting pulled out by obvious cases of Didn’t Do the Research. I say that’s the best part of enjoying a movie though.

#5: Wearing Obscurely Geeky T-Shirts to “Normal” Places – I used to do this a lot in high school. When I stopped doing it I noticed a sharp increase in interest from the opposite sex. Now I still wear a geeky shirt on occasion, but it’s always a shirt that my lovely wife has bought for me.

#8: Looking Up Information While A Discussion/Argument Is Still In Progress – This is one that’s likely to never change. I’m a Librarian by education if not by profession thanks to the lousy job market, and looking up information to make sure that I have the right answer is just hard-coded into my brain. If someone gets in a discussion with me over politics, religion, or who was better between Kirk and Picard then you bet your ass I’m going to whip out the iPhone the instant I know they’ve brought up an inaccurate fact to support their bad argument.

#10: Geeky Projects That Take Over the House and Whole Weekends – I’ve had computers dissected and reassembled in our computer room. I’ve put together a screen-accurate Ghostbusters costume complete with props. I’ve wired a home entertainment system that seemed to have more components and wires than a nuclear sub. I’ve run a weekly D&D game that completely overran the dining room and kitchen every Sunday night.

Which geeky habits are you guilty of?

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I’ve never played either of the Mass Effect games, but I have been to my share of geeky conventions. Things like this are one of the perks.

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Go listen to this right away. You will not be disappointed.

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Everybody has to start somewhere, and those beginnings usually aren’t pretty. Something Awful has a feature up about some of the questionable artwork from the original version of D&D that you might find enjoyable if you’re into that geeky sort of thing. So basically if you’re reading this site then the article is going to at least get a chuckle.

Second Edition is the oldest version of the D&D books I’ve ever seen circulating in the wild. The art was passable in the same way that a picture of a chain mail bikini wearing warrior princess riding a dragon airbrushed on the side of a pizza delivery van gets the point across. I got my start in the game back in the far off year of 2001, and even then the artwork wasn’t really anything to get too excited about. The monster paintings looked good, but anything remotely humanoid in those books was usually from the wrong end of the uncanny valley.

So if you’re not one of the few who played D&D when it first came out back in the ’70s then this feature is definitely worth a look just for the ability to see where the game was coming from without shelling out hundreds of dollars to an overweight dealer with a scraggly beard and questionable personal hygiene at Gencon.

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I was in Gamestop over the weekend browsing to pass the time while my wife and mother were off on a shopping expedition when I noticed something curious on the tiny three foot section of shelving they’d relegated all the PC games to. A printed and bound World of Warcraft strategy guide. Sitting there in book form.

I couldn’t resist having a look at this strange creature. It looked like it came out around the same time as Wrath of the Lich, so it at least had a small advantage over the last Warcraft strategy guide that I saw in Gamestop a few years before that covered information from the original Warcraft launch when Burning Crusade had been on the shelves for a few months. But anyone who has played Warcraft for any amount of time could tell you that this guide was going to be next to worthless for anyone who was looking to get into the game in a Patch 3.3.3 world.

I really have to applaud the huge balls that it takes for the publisher to put out such a blatant cash grab. And I sit in stunned and horrified admiration of Gamestop, a company that will truly stop at nothing to squeeze any penny out of its customers no matter how far they have to bend said customer over their counter to make that sale.

I can just imagine some gamer’s grandmother or significant other going into Gamestop to try and get something that their gamer SO would like, and don’t they spend a lot of time playing that Warcraft thingy on the computer? Or a new gamer who wants to try out this World of Warcraft thing that they’ve heard all of their friends talking about. They walk in, see this guide, and think that their prayers have been answered, only to be disappointed when it turns out that they’ve bought the gaming equivalent of a phonebook.

So please, don’t let your friends buy these books. Here’s a list of sites that you should go to that provide information in real time about the game that is far more comprehensive than any strategy guide author could ever hope to be.

1. WoW Head
2. Thottbot
3. WoWWiki
4. WoW Insider

Remember, friends don’t let friends buy useless strategy guides.

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I got interested in Star Trek at a young age and unknowingly prolonging my virginity at a time when I still thought girls were cootie carriers. My dad, wisely at the time, decided that he would start me out on Trek by showing me Space Seed and Wrath of Khan as a representative sample of what Trek had to offer.

That was probably a good choice, because if he’d shown me Star Trek: The Motion Picture first then I probably would have sworn off the series forever. When we eventually got around to watching the first Trek movie I remember falling asleep about halfway through out of sheer boredom. The movie is an onerous cinematic slog that owes more to 2001 – A Space Odyssey than it does to Star Wars, except without Stanley Kubrick directing it to make the slow pace interesting.

But what I didn’t know at the time was that there had been a long road to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The movie was actually a heavily padded rewrite of the pilot episode of a scrapped Star Trek tv series simply called Star Trek: Phase II and featuring the original cast on a new five year mission. For an interesting take on everything that went into the first Trek movie then I’d suggest picking up a copy of William Shatner’s second Trek memoir: Star Trek Movie Memories.

Oh, and here is some old test footage from The Motion Picture that I stumbled across on Youtube. It’s definitely more interesting than the movie:

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Below is a list, in no particular order, of things that Wordpress theme designers should consider before they release their precious little CSS and Photoshop fueled butterfly onto the Wordpress theme database:

1. Don’t put the categories in a menu bar across the top of the theme. A lot of us have a lot of categories, and even the more code-savvy amongst us are likely to junk your theme out of hand.
2. I am more than happy to have an unobtrusive link to your site in my footer. I am not more than happy to have that footer loaded with spam links to your ad affiliates that break the theme when I remove them.
3. Please make sure that the little things like properly centered images and italics and bold text work in your theme.
4. An editable .PSD file with the theme’s header will likely save both of us a lot of time.
5. Stick to the basics. If you get clever with your theme and it requires sifting through fifty-billion lines of PHP to figure out how you did what you did then there’s a good chance the theme is going to break in some future Wordpress update.
6. I would gladly pay a reasonable amount of money for your theme if it was pure awesome and addressed these irritating issues.

Do you write or develop using Wordpress? I know you can’t complain that much when it comes to getting something for free, but there are some basic mistakes that people seem to make over and over. What are some common annoyances you’ve noticed?

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’80s teen superstar Corey Haim died earlier today of an apparent drug overdose. Normally I’m not one to talk about celebrity gossip, but this one hits close enough to all of our geeky hearts that I thought it was worth a mention.

A lot of people are talking about his role in The Lost Boys, but I’ll always remember him for his role as the wheelchair bound werewolf slaying Marty Coslaw from the 1985 movie Silver Bullet, which was an adaptation of the Stephen King novella Cycle of the Werewolf. That movie terrified me as a little kid and left me scarred for years thinking that a werewolf would jump through my bedroom window at night and kill me at any moment.

Years later my younger brother rented the movie again and told me that I had to watch it with him. We both had a good laugh when we realized that the monster that had terrified us for so many years looked more like a constipated Chewbacca than a terrifying monster.

I had a chance to meet Haim at Horrorhound Weekend in Indianapolis last year. He seemed like a nice enough guy, though a lot of people there seemed to think that he was douchebaggery incarnate. I’m not sure how much of that had to do with his behavior at the convention and how much of it was just people projecting on the guy, but there was definitely some ambivalence between Haim and his fans in recent years. I felt sorry for him when he thanked everybody over the loudspeaker and announced that he was leaving. A cheer erupted throughout the dealer hall. Harsh.

Either way, he was nice and polite when my friends and I talked with him. So maybe pop in The Lost Boys or Silver Bullet tonight as a tribute to one of the staples of ’80s youth culture.

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I know that all of you probably already read XKCD. And there’s a good chance that the audience for this blog also has at least a passing familiarity with The Lord of the Rings. Just in case you fall into the latter but not the former, check out today’s XKCD.

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I just finished Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter last night. To say that the book is a nonstop tour de force of horror asskicking would be an understatement, but that’s the only way I can think to describe it. And by far one of the best things about the consistently awesome Abe is the way it has brought the vampire back into true monster territory.

Let’s face it, vampires haven’t been threatening for awhile now. They were scary in the first half of the 20th century in films like Nosferatu and the original Dracula, but since then the vampire has been in a steady decline. Part of the vampire’s horror has always been a reflection of the time: unease with old Europe during the decade-long breather between two world wars that centered on disputes born in Dracula’s backyard, fear of female sexuality and predators, etc. Chances wereif you had a vampire in your neighborhood up until the end of the ’70s then it was treated as a very bad thing.

But since the ’80s the vampire just hasn’t been scary. Movies that were ostensibly horror offerings such as Fright Night and The Lost Boys might have been unsettling, but the underlying comedy made their vampires seem somehow more tame than their cinematic predecessors. For some reason Kiefer Sutherland, Alex Winter, and the dad from Richie Rich just aren’t all that threatening as monsters. There were brief attempts to reclaim the vampire as a horror icon such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but by then the long and slow declineto Twilight had already started.

Horrifying for all the wrong reasons.

Not so with Abe Lincoln. The vampires on display here are, for the most part, strictly old world horrors who see humans as cattle and treat them as such with extreme prejudice whenever and wherever they can. These are vampires who are far more interested in ripping out your throat and drinking your blood than helping you with your biology homework and taking you on whirlwind vacations through Central America.

But at the same time the vampires in Lincoln show a level of sophistication that one would expect from immortal creatures who have centuries of free time to absorb culture. And in many ways it’s that dichotomy between cultured gentility and unrestrained brutality that makes the novel work so well as Grahame-Smith draws parallels between vampirism and the curious institution of slavery. The vampires are made more believable and plausible when they’re surrounded by the most brutal and inhumane episode in human history.

So I welcome this new old fashioned interpretation of the vampire. It’s about time that this monster returned to its roots and started shaking off some of the genre malaise that’s been brought on by the Twilight series.

My only regret is that Tim Burton has reportedly been tapped to helm the movie adaptation. I have a feeling that if that goes forward then all of the delicate subtext between vampirism, brutality, and slavery will disappear in favor of an emo vampire amalgamation that owes more to Twilight and would be more suitable for a Hot Topic poster or t-shirt. And that will be a real shame.

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