Confessions of the Slickest Man You Will Ever Know

So I am sure that everyone who has read my entries to this blog are thinking “hey, that there Johnny Slick is so awesome, I want to be exactly like him and therefore like and/or dislike everything he likes and/or dislikes”. Well, here is where I reveal the dangerous dark side of doing so. For you see, I have my soft underbelly as well. And that soft underbelly is a soft underbelly, which itself probably adds to my geek cred. But aside from that obvious soft underbelly, there is another more figurative soft underbelly.

If you know what this is, you are beyond hope.

5. Dungeons and Dragons. This is really probably number one, but I felt I had to mention it now because it will explain an upcoming number in here a little bit. I am a big huge fan of Dungeons and Dragons. You’d think that a game that requires all that math and is essentially a social activity wouldn’t be so shunned by the geek community, right? Well, you are WRONG mister. And any website you can find that implies that geeks like DnD is WRONG as well.

It’s all about the interplay between the geek and the nerd. What do I mean by this? Geeks never want to be associated with nerds, no matter how much nerds would like you to think that they are both nerds and geeks. Geeks are into weird, esoteric things that make you understand how aWesomely smart and cool they are. Nerds have Asperger’s syndrome and read train schedules for entertainment. This is not a slight against cool people who have Asperger’s syndrome. All people who have Asperger’s are not nerds, but all nerds have Asperger’s, or at least that version described on Wikipedia that basically translates into “any person who is socially inept”. DnD for some reason became a nerd endeavor. I’m not sure how, I just know it did. Actually playing a game of DnD is very geeky, don’t get me wrong, but arguing over whether 4E or 3E is better (answer: 4th!!!!) (extra exclamation points) is as nerdy as a nerd sandwich made with nerd bread, and which of those two things do you think most people see?

With the money this guy spent, he could have taken a trip to France.

4. Toys. Don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of gadgets. I work for what is in essence a gadget company. I have a smart phone that acts as my MP3 player, phone, organizer, bus schedule master, Twitter keeper tracker over, and so on. No, here I am talking about dolls action figures that seem to be so popular among the geek crowd, to the point that many of you all will go to see a completely crap movie just because it features dolls action figures you used to collect when you were a child.

I just don’t get it. Now, I will admit that I do like to buy miniatures for DnD, which my brother then paints in a manner frighteningly similar to Steven Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin. But that is not the same thing! Miniatures are made to be able to represent your character, not sit there on a shelf to be shown to people 3 times a year and otherwise exist as girlfriend scarecrows. I do admit that I have a tendency to say “BOOP BOOP BOOP” when I move my miniature around the map, but I am doing that for ironic reasons, not because I am playing with my own doll action figure.

Ba doh dey yo ba doh ba dubba dah, dot deh do. Babadey yodot.

3. Vocal Jazz. This is probably the one that makes you all run away screaming. I do not have so much of this anymore, but I when I originally got out of high school, I spent a few years singing in a vocal jazz ensemble. Those of you on the East Coast and otherwise not trying to fool yourself would probably refer to this as a “glee club”. Like other incredibly stupid ideas that people get themselves into, we would go into vocal jazz ensemble contests where we would compete against other vocal jazz ensembles and occasionally defeat other vocal jazz ensembles by singing our glee club music better than they could. I remember spending hours – literally HOURS – singing in a circle with a bunch of other folks trying to get that major seven chord just right because without the proper level of dissonance other vocal jazz ensembles would just laugh at us and call us names. Nobody would be able to understand their insults because they would sound like “squee ba doo ba doo bop bow” but that does not mean we would not feel the sting.

Eventually I did get out of that and into the rock and roll music the kids talk so much about these days, but I have to admit… every now and then I pop in a New York Voices CD, a group who once wrote a song with the following lyrics:

Skin
It’s the package you’re in
The cloth of God to hold the insides in

Did I mention that these lyrics were rapped? I would add “by white people” but I think that is pretty obvious. But yes, this is stuff I used to listen to and enjoyed and occasionally still do listen to and enjoy. In certain circles I have pretended to have been a fan of Alanis Morrisette in the past in the hopes that this mildly embarrassing but ultimately false revelation would throw people off from the MASSIVELY embarrassing revelation that I am a fan of vocal jazz.

Don't get me wrong, Sarah Michelle Gellar is an attractive woman.

2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could never get myself into this series even as it is geek canon. I’m told there is an episode where they sing like it is musical theatre, which I am sure I would enjoy due to its similarity to vocal jazz music, but I could never get anywhere near that. I just don’t know why either. The existence of a guy named “Xander” is probably part of it. But otherwise I loved the movie, and not just because Paul Reubens was in it. It was a neat idea not completely spoiled by the presence of that dude from Beverly Hills 90210 and was about hot chix killing undead (see admission #5). The television show should have been more of the same.

Well, I don’t know what happened there but I could just never get into it. I even bought the first season on DVD at someone’s suggestion. I watched 3 episodes, said “meh”, and plugged in Deadwood instead. In fact, despite the fact that I feel like I lose geek cred every time I fail to enjoy something of his, the only Joss Whedon show I could ever get into was Firefly.

1. Text-Based Sports Simulations. Well, I know at lease ONE other person here who will be tarnished by this confession. I actually know Dale because we both post on a message board that is devoted to the playing of a text-based baseball simulation known as Out of the Park Baseball. This game is so full-on nerdcore that there is a part in there that allows you to adjust the number of wild pitches that occur during a season. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of hours of work has been put into making the pretend players in the game behave just like real life players do in terms of aging, getting hurt, learning new pitches, and so on. Now, it does all this with as little human interaction as possible – one of the most influential beta testers once threatened to quit if the guy who writes the program put in code that would make the players play better if they were happy – but that is to be expected in this world, right?

I don’t think that it’s this alone that makes this such a shocking tell-all. I am sure that at this point there are some of you who are thinking “okay, I can see the geek coolness of a majorly exact sports sim. That’s not so far off from, I don’t know, Dwarf Fortress.” Well. Closer than you might think. What sets me apart from people like Dale, who merely purchase OOTP and enjoy it, is that I have created the following leagues:

Has problems against left-handed pitching.

a. A league called “The League of Nations”, which started in 1919 and was based on the premise that as part of the Treaty of Versailles, the nations of the world decided to play baseball against each other. I spent a great deal of time explaining how Tesla invented a teleportation device that would allow the players to go from one city to – you know, I am going to stop right now because it is making me feel sad about myself.

b. A boxing league (the same company produces a boxing game called Title Bout) based in England circa 1066 called The Domesday Division.

c. A baseball league based on Star Wars. Yes, there was a Wookiee team. And an Ewok team. And a Jedi team. And a Sith – look, just shut up, okay?

Every time I sit down and think to myself, “you know, I am just as cool as person X”, I open up one of the above leagues and realize that I am, officially, the least cool person in the world. Then I give myself a swirlie and cry myself to sleep. A Star Wars baseball league? Really, John? God damn it.

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