Who’s the real fake nerd now

Fake geek girl not so  fake aksually

So the whole idea of the fake geek girl, that there are women who pretend to be geekish but are only doing it to be popular (!?), is one of the more moronic inventions of contemporary fandom. It’s the snobbishness of the smallminded, those who think life is an endless high school struggle between the cool kids and the chess club and are now recoiling in horror as the mundanes invade their domains. Hence you get all these sort of tests, almost exclusively aimed at women, to prove that somebody isn’t a real geek, for not knowning such essential things as who the first captain of the Enterprise was in some hideous real life version of the Eltingville comic-book-science-fiction-fantasy-horror and role playing club trivia-off.

And sometimes these feckers get it wrong, like here, when the “steampunk gender swapped Joker in a Willy Wonka hat” actually turns out to be another DC character all together and our trufan hero turns out not to know as much as he thinks he does…

Thomas the Propaganda Engine



My eldest nephew is crazy about Thomas the Tank Engine. He can spent hours watching Thomas videos on Youtube, but best not to let him watch this one. Meanwhile, Drew Magary explains what makes it an awful, awful tv show:

Thomas and his friends live on Sodor and spend their days toiling endlessly, “shunting trucks and hauling freight.” (Shunting, by the way, sounds like a great Urban Dictionary term for silent fucking—”We shunted while his parents slept next door!”) The engines are only happy when they are being “Really Useful,” which suggests to me that they have been brainwashed by fearsome tuxedoed railway overlord Sir Topham Hatt to accept the bonds of slavery without question. These poor engines have never known freedom, and so the very idea of it is alien to them. The whole story could have served as an allegory for life under the Russian czars before the rise of the Bolsheviks. But I bet the Rev wasn’t that subtle. I bet he was just a man who thought trains were bitches.

On the whole though the show has an useful message for all kids: shut up, you’re not special, do as you are told. If you don’t we’ll brick you up in an abandoned railway tunnel:



Thomas the Tank Engine: propaganda to get kids used to the awful conditions of the UK railways, or just to get them used to being happy cogs in the capitalist machine?