May 28, 2012
International Charter of Troll Rollers

International Society of Troll Rollers, open to interested parties, inquire within on OG thug or tr00 kvlt metal biznez.

Troll Roller’s Charter

We are the men who know few women,
The women who know few men,
The humans who know few humans
So we tinker in our dens,
Some of us are pirates,
Some of us are scum,
In life we weren’t accepted,
So let us all have fun.
Troll Rollers one and all,
The warriors in our caves
We lent our last shred of dignity
To our primary school chum Dave
Though we may be quiet,
Thug, cradle to the grave
We may or may not riot,
But we shall not behave
Society may spit on us
For our lack of upper class
We occupied old Wall Street
To kick the fat cat’s arse

Know this oh noble rollers,
Troll rollers kvlt and tr00
Street wise Original Gangsters
The world belongs to you!

- Signed ‘ere by Jacob Patrick Martin, Esquire and Shut In at Large.

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Filed under: manifesto charter societies founding documents 
May 28, 2012
Just Post It

So if you have an idea you think is “re-inventing” how people think about something, or you’ve made something that you think is bold and fresh, I think the best caution to approach it with is to just post it and see what happens with the audience you intended it for, or sometimes, audiences you didn’t know you had.

I know you feel excited about your idea, I get really excited about fresh ideas after I’ve chugged two 600ml bottles of Double Expresso ice coffee too on a Monday or Wednesday afternoon.

But remember, hyping up the idea too much may disappoint your audience you don’t need to hype up to begin with, especially if your idea or blog post or YouTube mashup comes right the fuck out of nowhere. Some of my greatest successes came from unleashing an artwork on an unsuspecting public. I once made a performance artwork called Robert Van Winkle where I death metal growled Vanilla Ice’s stage name into a night vision camcorder for twenty minutes. Some of you guys may be baffled that this artwork exists. You may be shuddering in disbelief that it was even created by a human into reality you can see and touch.

Not many people know it exists but it’s certainly there on my Vimeo page. There’s a certain philosophy that you should aim to make something viral as soon as it hits the web, but if you have a backlog of completed artworks that a potential employer can look at as evidence of your credentials, your work will speak for itself and you don’t need to make everything social media viral as soon as your idea becomes real.

Your idea should be like a ninja that hides in the shadows and strikes your audience right the fuck outta nowhere. With your audience having no expectations of what they’re about to see, more honest and realistic reactions to your work can be had, and without overhyping your work has the freedom to exist on its own terms.

I’ve been reading a biography of Charles Bronson lately, and the tale of how such a media shy man became so successful is both informative and surprising. The tale of how I came across it despite it appearing seemingly out of nowhere is just as interesting, since at the precise moment that I thought to myself “What if there’s a Charles Bronson biography I haven’t heard about yet and what if it’s on Kindle?”. As it happened it turned out to not only be available, but for a price I could afford, so I ended up buying it and I have barely been able to put it down ever since.

If there’s a vacuum in a market that needs to be filled, the sort of thing people are looking for just might be the idea you’re selling them. Which is a bit like Charles Bronson himself, really, so I have read from this epic tome.

Charles Bronson worked in a coal mine for so long that his physical fitness made his military service a breeze and a holiday to him, his skills well earned and never boasted about much. He kept to himself and hated interviews, but his reclusive attitude allowed his true, sensitive offscreen personality to survive when most people only knew him as that guy in the Death Wish movies.

He didn’t see his acting as art, just a means out of poverty, and his shyness of the media allowed him to thrive as a parent to his kids and a painter in his private life. Bronson is a testament to how even in a media soaked marketplace, somebody can be themselves while being somebody completely different at work when needed.

Bronson didn’t sacrifice his true personality, and even in these social media soaked times neither should we. If an idea or product or artwork is to be loved by the public, allowing the public to make up their own minds about what they love about your work is useful to finding out what sells versus what you deliberately try to market as a hot item. If you have a big backlog of artworks and blog posts, suddenly posting an idea online will attract an audience who’s looking to buy what idea you ‘re selling, even if the idea is a free to access blog post like this one about a given topic.

Tell people about your idea if you notice somebody looking for the kind of ideas you’re posting and they’ll tell others without you forcing the idea down the wrong alley.

There’s a fine line between not promoting your ideas at all and going all out trying to make everything a viral meme, and I’ll admit I added a bunch of hashtags to promote the kind of post this is. What I’m talking about is if you’ve got a post that really means something, you let it sit there for a few weeks and don’t try and force it, if you pimp it at all, just look around for people asking for advice on Facebook or Twitter or internet forums about similar topics you’re talking about.

It’s a question of when to tell people about an idea you’ve already made, versus trying to pimp it as soon as it’s out of the gate. I don’t know how to make something an international sensation just yet, but I do know how to make things work for the intended audience it was originally made for, and after that I’ll share it around if I can or if people ask me about stuff I’ve worked on.

No approach works for everyone, but if Charles Bronson is any indication, the mysterious loner who suddenly emerges with some kind of idea has value still even if people think pimping the hell out of your idea straight away is the only way to succeed. I’m still learning how to grapple with the realities my generation was handed with social media as it is, but if you show the right people who regularly like the kind of ideas you post about your ideas that you like making, it can make a world of difference even if you share the ideas you thought were rubbish and people end up liking them.

Charles Bronson’s film career ended up a bit like that too. Make of that what you will.

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Filed under: Charles Bronson Hollywood artwork backlog biography blogging employers ideas internet invention market marketing mashup media social media viral word of mouth networking sharing crowdsourcing imagination creativity Facebook Twitter Vanilla Ice performance art video Kindle Amazon.com 
May 27, 2012
My Plastic Posse (Taken with instagram)

My Plastic Posse (Taken with instagram)

2:59am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZljRPyMDZZtG
May 24, 2012
Academic Sourcing Of DVDs PSA

So you’re a successful DVD/media company mogul in whatever world region who’s beloved by art house film fans and anime nerds alike…

But that’s not the only reason why people watch and buy your DVDs. They sometimes have special features that suddenly reveal that a noted filmmaker of his generation said something as groundbreaking as his films were, that may not be widespread public knowledge or even known to academic circles like art school students trying to source it properly in their essays due very soon.

Sometimes they borrowed your DVD from the library, or maybe they loved it so much they bought it even though it’s now out of print and the information on the DVD’s publication copyright is no longer there on the website listed on the DVD cover.

In a frenzied search for answers, maybe a student finds what he or she is looking for not on the box cover, but on the DVD itself. In tiny white font. On a grey background. That you need a magnifying glass to see.

Students studying film or video art or whatever don’t want to be accused of plagiarism when they did all they could to attribute the correct sources. They want to give as much recognition to long lost bold statements from great minds as much as you did, when you bothered to put special features so good on the DVD that they felt their professors had to know about it.

Talk to some university students about appropriate font sizes and database information on your distributed DVDs. Because college students want great, wise words from genius innovators to be attributed to the right people too, so that the world may know they said those things at all.

*The More You Know*

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Filed under: academia college university assignments DVDs film studies essays film distribution special features research 
May 23, 2012
Learning through Television

The more I watch further episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the more I notice that it’s a much more effective learning tool to finally convince straight white males like myself that maybe we have it better than we think we do without outright shaming them from the get go.

Hear me out on this, I’m not saying anger never has its place if used well in education but I’m saying that the real reason why people learn better from narrative storytelling rather than yelling is because if the story is good enough and audiences of all stripes can actually see what’s going on in terms of a touchy issue, rather than being yelled at for having no experience with it, you’re going to get a lot of straight, white male people thinking “Gosh, that’s horrible that Carlton got pulled over by the police for being black, I’d hate it if somebody I knew went through discrimination like that…” who’d normally have no concept of what racial profiling is before this.

I see a lot of complaints about how minorities are depicted on TV and why there’s no black people on TV like there was in the 90s, and I think the power of narrative storytelling TV offers is the biggest reason why minorities should be urging producers to create such content, not just for them, but for periphery audiences who may not belong to that minority but after a season or two of Game Of Thrones I’ve certainly seen a great increase of little people getting respect from regular folks if you get my drift.

This may be why The Boondocks is IMPORTANT versus just being a funny cartoon. On a Google+ thread I replied to some African Americans getting excited about the new season with “The Boondocks: the classic black cartoon so good even the white kids are excited”. This was met with a +2 on my comment. Clearly I am not the only one who acknowledges The Boondocks isn’t for one demographic audience alone.

Because when it comes down to it, in an Internet era when people will watch anything if it exists, no TV show or film no matter how obscure escapes being seen by the masses eventually.

There are anime shows that ten years ago would have been considered too culturally niche to license overseas but somehow Japan gets baffled time and time again about why it is exactly people who aren’t Japanese wanted to see a show where a Roman guy goes into the future to a Japanese bath house and takes the innovations he saw back with him to the past. This is a real show called Thermae Romae and it somehow was seen fit for Australian English Speaking Region consumption.

You’d be surprised what people would watch if they knew it existed. You’d also be surprised what people are able to learn if you give them a narrative story with characters who deal with real issues which allows outsiders a window into problems that affect people but shouldn’t if there’s justice in this world.

That’s why The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, The Boondocks and… anime like Welcome To The NHK are important. Because they trick people into learning in a way that doesn’t make the viewers hate you for it.

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May 22, 2012
Watching me some comedies

I watched both a great deal of Nichijou and Fresh Prince of Bel Air this week and I realised something about televised comedy from different cultures that translate well to whatever audience who might watch it.

Fresh Prince is a 90s sitcom and Nichijou is a slice of life anime, but both deliver in comedy on their own terms due to the writers focusing on situations people worldwide would find relatable and hilarious, subtitles or no. Fresh Prince is in English and theoretically reaches a larger audience but I’d have to say out of all subtitled slice of life anime comedies Nichijou is one of the most translatably funny shows in terms of focusing on universal human flaws in everyday social relations than pop culture references that only Japanese audiences would understand like Lucky Star had problems with.

Fresh Prince of Bel Air is assumed by many to be accessible because it’s in English but if you’re watching it in a European or Oceanic country far away from the America it originated from, the only African American people you see on TV are on shows like Fresh Prince, on the other hand Nichijou due to Australia’s geographical closeness to Asia, especially Japan and China, means you’re more likely to encounter Asian-Australians here than African Americans here.

Anime’s no universal cultural passport to understanding Japan to be sure, but as far as anime comedy goes, there’s more universal funny to be found in common between cultures than not here. It’s far less fan servicey than some other anime and I’d dare say if this was your first contact with anime comedy this wouldn’t scare you off.

Fresh Prince likewise isn’t just about Will Smith being streetwise and hip, but the complexities of African American life that are present even when financial success and good reputation is achieved. Hence as a comedy it keeps you thinking and watching even as you’re laughing.

Nichijou might not seem like one’s cup of tea, but I think its vision of high school social relationships as a Kafkaesque labyrinth of secrets and lies is just as compelling as Fresh Prince though the subtitles require you to pay attention to the plot more, and therein lies the reward.

3:21am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZljRPyLwlmeS
May 19, 2012
Let’s talk about digital media preservation, baby

So you guys are probably sick of me talking about political stuff I’m over my head with, so here’s a post about a subject I’m deeply familiar with.

Digital media preservation! Nothing controversial about that… The only way one could conceivably be offended over this issue is if you have either strong views for or against copyright, which makes it a lot easier for me as a straight white male to talk about since this issue only goes into feminist territory when it comes to preserving Bettie Page footage digitally for example. Whatever your views on Burlesque being sexist or not, I think we can all agree a world without copies of Bettie Page footage available to the public in future would be a poorer one.

Recently one of my favourite DVDs broke, noticing it was out of print I hunted down the one store that stocked it in a brick and mortar shop and I bought it as soon as I saw this rare opportunity.

I back up most of my DVDs that I own for good reason, because DVDs break down at some point. I know this, Star Wars fans know this, archivists know this. I dream of a day when Hollywood understands customers want copies of films they can keep forever, but until proper DRM free digital distribution and HDD drives that don’t break every five years get invented, we’re stuck with ripping our optical media to our computers because since torrent sites got taken down we have to copy movies offline in hope to preserve films not yet back from out of print yet.

Men love watching movies and TV, women love it too, our cats and dogs love watching it while sitting on our laps though the plot may not matter to our furry friends. The idea of preserving pop cultural heritage has great appeal beyond gender and species.

There is hope for some newer shows and movies to be preserved and easily distributed via digital distribution, I was watching a legal screening of some recent anime on Madman Entertainment’s website and as long as the stream quality isn’t worse than That Guy With The Glasses Internet comedy I can hardly complain. In this regard once digital distribution is the norm, permanent access is the greater issue ahead.

As long as the works of great TV and film creators aren’t destroyed or neglected in a vault somewhere and are digitally backed up as often as needed, I am hopeful for legitimate, non pirated media to remain valued by fans of the popular arts. I hope that one day my grandchildren grow to love the films and TV shows of Osamu Tezuka as much as I did growing up with the hand of a master craftsman guiding me to be creative myself.

My generation will undoubtably find ways to preserve the visual culture of our own era, but the great 20th Century works need preserving too. I hope that both Spongebob Squarepants and Astro Boy are restored to clarity with equal weight and gravitas if postmodernism’s promise of every media being important is true.

Preserving culture whether high or low I feel is important. At least it is to me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

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May 17, 2012
Different protocol from last week’s charter

So after thinking hard about this post, I had some more complex thoughts on why I was so floored by it than my initial concept of why the concept of privilege baffled me so much. I’ve recently thought it over, and the only real problem, if you could call it a problem at all, was that my brain was being bombarded with articles just like this one in the space of a week.

What was my real issue with it? The problem wasn’t that I disagreed with the article’s fair assessment that white straight males are privileged more than other demographics, but that for most of my life I was under the impression that disabled white men were not the default whitey model, similar to what I thought was a common link to how white gay men were perceived by straight white men around them. I wasn’t aware at the time that the core message that was being trumpeted loud and clear on the interwebs was such a radical shift of ideology in the space of a week that my problems of routine common to high functioning autism gave me problems assessing the changes at hand.

It’s like people who’ve been following one set of road traffic rules try to drive safely all their lives, and suddenly the rules change for Learner License Drivers where no alcohol is permitted while on a learner’s license. Those affected by these changes might legitimately cry “I don’t know what happened, the rules were different last week!”.

One of my firm beliefs and hopes in humanity is, even if somebody’s an ignorant fool to be pitied about an issue, normally nobody stays a pitied fool forever as they learn more about the complex nature of ideas and sensitive topics. This ignorance over particular subjects I don’t think is permanent unless somebody’s stubborn or unwilling to learn because they don’t care about other people’s feelings. I care, people think autistic people are unempathetic robots sometimes, but really we’re not, since if anything we have too much empathy. So when the rules change in a matter of days on us, we’re not really looking to deny people the right to speak about issues that affect them, we’re nervous about not offending people, or whether people think our voices don’t matter at all now the rules changed so fast that nobody’s thinking about how the rules might affect us next week, or six months from now when online forum etiquette changes yet again and everybody’s scrambling to figure out where they stand in another changing world yet again.

Issues like:

  • If the social manners of online discussions changed so fast, how do I adjust my behaviour quickly enough to return to being friendly with other people and their ideas?
  • If the rules changed this quickly, how are the new social rules different from last weeks’ charter of Internet Etiquette I got from last week’s Town Crier’s “Hear ye, hear ye” report of the state of the forums?
  • How is my identity seen differently or the same as opposed to last week, and if the rules have changed, is anyone’s opinion of any stripe seen as old hat or devalued? I hope not, because I’ve always tried to be friendly online to people even if I screw up sometimes and feel bad about it and hide in my bedroom from my own computer for a day or two…

That’s the real crux of why I was objecting to this radical new shift, I was reading an article that dared suggest that straight white males, even disabled/autistic ones like myself, were more privileged than they were seen last week compared to say, a disabled black gay woman in a wheelchair.

The idea that’s being shared was never the problem at all, the whiplash curveball of so much discussion shooting around at once is very confusing to autistic people who are used to routine and things staying the same if they can help it.

Do I think women need more avenues to discuss their ideas without unwitting fools who may be well meaning or sometimes not treading on their toes when there’s this huge debate going on right now about the biggest shift of internet forum power since the Fall of Myspace? Of course I want women, LGBT people and persons of colour to be able to share ideas they may have had worries about expressing before.

My problem wasn’t with that, but with the autistic tendency for Robocop like needs for Directives about what we’re allowed to do and not allowed to do in a situation. It’s not always as simple as Robocop Directives since we’re not really robots, but Robocop’s not all robot either, he is also a cop, that is to say he used to be a human cop.

Without a doubt my pasty white Anglo Saxon heritage gives me privileges in my society that even though I’m disabled via high functioning autism, would not be afforded to the underprivileged who aren’t straight white males. I’m just looking for useful guidelines about what to do when there’s huge ideological shifts in online discussions like this so I know when to step away or where I’m allowed to step in, or whether I’m not allowed to discuss an issue at all.

I hope this is a helpful guide to why people with autism who may be straight or white have questions about this brave new internet world of discussions about privilege and related issues like LGBT rights, women’s rights, civil rights for POCs and other political minorities like you’d find in China for example, it’s an ideological minefield to adjust to and my intention isn’t really to derail people’s meaningful discussions of any issue that seems interesting to me at the time, I certainly want to help out where I can but when there’s issues that I’m just not experienced in I need people to help out the high functioning straight white male autistics out there to butt out when a private meeting of minds over a sensitive topic’s being had.

Nobody likes being left out of the discourse, no matter who they are. If the rules change, there needs to be a clear guideline set for everybody to know where they can help and how to avoid hindering people. The best part about people learning there’s guidelines is that it avoids people yelling at each other over misunderstandings that people posting might not even realise are misquoted accidentally rather than actual trolling, which happens but there’s distinctions to be made and forum moderator justice to be delivered with a fair and merciful hand.

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Filed under: john scalzi privilege robocop directives guidelines online discussions forums message boards protocol ideological shifts new wave ideas being shared ideacake autism minorities LGBT women's issues helpful hints netiquette comment posting change routine 
May 15, 2012
A Test Of Character

So I just got linked to this article about Firefly, and since I haven’t seen the show I can only start to piece together why this show is so divisive. Me, I never grew up with Whedon, I grew up with Osamu Tezuka manga reprints and whatever Discworld books Angus and Robertson had when it was still open. Make of that what you will:

http://allecto.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/objects-in-space-black-masculinity-through-the-paradigm-of-whitemale-lust/

In all the discussions I see online about how mainstream media depicts gender, race, sexual orientation, whatever… because so many commenters are focused on defending themselves for being white males or females or non white or non straight… the goal of achieving discussions of real change everybody involved can take away and apply to their lives and works is somewhat lost in an argument over who is even allowed to discuss these ideas at all. When you discount a human of any stripe of providing what may be a well articulated point about something due to their minority or majority status, something’s really lost here. So when we see characters in media, why are we so focused, as a human species about who is feminist, who is sexist and who is allowed to write narrative fiction at all… instead of wondering what it is about the writing of characters who are characters rather than politically charged insults to whatever demographic the character supposedly depicts or doesn’t depict? I spent about two years trying to read posts online and Internet reviewer videos trying to discern how to write effective characters of all genders, and I noticed that the commentators who didn’t yell at their audiences for the crime of being one gender or race or not their gender or race or whatever… made me think far more about how I wrote characters than the bloggers who made worthy points but seemed really hostile to anybody who wasn’t already familiar with the idea being presented.

I’m so glad that female Internet critics like Lindsay Ellis and Sofie Liv can get their ideas out there about what makes effective characters that appeal to everybody to wide demographics beyond a boy or girl core audience.

A common misunderstanding about men watching these kinds of women based media review programs is that they’re “male feminists” who are trying to co-opt the small areas of discussion women have to discuss real problems and “silence” women, when really a lot of the time when I watch these programs, both me and other fans of these female Internet reviewers start to think less of these women as just pretty faces and start to pay attention to genuinely interesting ideas presented by women that give everybody involved to watch their show and take ideas seriously even while they laugh at satirical snark at nostalgic material.

That’s what makes me sad about discussions of media online. The feminism was never the problem with men listening to these arguments, the problem may have been as simple as “Hey, I like listening to these ideas but I’d like it if I didn’t feel as if I’m being yelled at for having a penis even though I’ve never even kissed a girl yet let alone contemplated raping anyone”.

Characters in fiction should really start from trying to create a character versus a strawman or woman to exposit some kind of political filibuster. To explain my point in how vast this problem in figuring out how to depict Africans in your narrative, it’s true that Morgan Freeman and the hero of Hotel Rwanda are great examples of black heroes, you still have to deal with the fact that Idi Amin from The Last King Of Scotland really existed, however loosely adapted from reality he was in that.

For every noble Bruce Lee there’s a heinous Mao Zedong, for every Machete who’s fighting for Mexico there’s still drug cartels that aren’t really representative of what the Mexican character is capable of in terms of achievements. These are historical, rather than outright blanket facts. Also note that in Mao Zedong’s example there is only one of Mao Zedong and millions of other Chinese who share his cultural race but not his supposed genetic evil you see in a lot of Godwin’s Law style arguments.

You can see why there’s a bit of a divide between history’s greatest monsters and people like Morgan Freeman and Bruce Lee. It’s often not that simple either. Often you get people who are just people. And I think regarding your characters as people with specific upbringings and backgrounds, genders… that’s a better approach to writing your characters than just blanket portraying all of them as insane maniacs hell bent on raping everything. See the movie City Of Life And Death for an example of modern Chinese cinema’s most recent great achievements, a Chinese director managed to give humanity back to what many Chinese would normally see as a two dimensional political enemy. And that’s the kind of storytelling that heals old wounds rather than re-opening them. It also has the honour of having a not-white guy save everybody instead of having a white guy in there by default so white people will watch it.

That’s not to say not everyone in the movie has to be not white. Especially when you’re dealing with that one German Nazi guy who considered in his witnessing the Rape of Nanjing that maybe Auschwitz was watered down compared to what he was in the middle of. That’s what’s great about historical adaptations done right.

If there wasn’t a Nazi guy turned rogue who tried to save Chinese people there in real history, it would be Quentin Tarantino level hack job storytelling. But history has this weird way of outdoing Tarantino every now and then in terms of absurdity.

What I’m essentially saying is this: great white hope movies like Driving Miss Daisy are kind of annoying to persons of colour because it involves the idea that the white guy saves everyone. But what if you have a situation where instead of Morgan Freeman driving around this rich old white lady, he is tasked to drive around this white, yet disabled in a wheelchair dude who is rejected by the other rich white guys as weak and useless even if his company’s inventions are helping him survive? What if Morgan Freeman and Guy With Wheelchair suddenly join forces against an ogliarchy driven capitalist system that hates them both, especially in the time a film like Driving Miss Daisy is set? Now your originally great white hope movie becomes a “two guys disadvantaged in different ways stand up to a system that is a dick to both of them for completely different reasons” movie. And I’d watch the shit outta that.

The most perfect example of a movie that features a white guy desperately trying to get the other white guys who are being a dick to an indigenous culture movie I can think of is Cannibal Holocaust. I’m not even kidding. Robert Kerman’s anthropology professor character not only works as the greatest advertisement for ethical social science I’ve ever seen, but he’s an entertaining character who doesn’t have to stand up against a vaguely orthodox system like in a cheap arse Robin Williams cliche movie. Nope.

In Cannibal Holocaust, the white professor dude is respected by the natives not because he’s white, but because he’s the only one in the jungle with his skin colour who remotely tried to empathise with trading and respecting these Amazon tribesmen after these racist fucktard film students raped and pillaged everything they held dear before poor Robert Kerman realises what a shitstorm he’s been drafted into trying to find what’s left of those imperialist shockumentary makers. He has to earn the respect of the villagers every step of the way, and we see this process of cultural exchange visually through the whole movie. This film is infamous for its animal cruelty but I’m sad to admit I love this movie for how it’s the first real portrayal of a white guy professor in the jungle movie that doesn’t end up feeling forced or not true to how people would really react. It is also the gold standard of inspirational teacher trying to reach “these kids” films in my personal regard.

It also shows you an example of how even if you do the whole “white guy first contact with outside tribespeople” plot, you don’t have to fuck it up and make it Pocahontas. You don’t even have to make it within the structure the MPAA typically allows either. You just have to make a good movie, with good characters, no matter what colour or gender they are.

4:47am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZljRPyLWd7aw
Filed under: writing characters film characters media narrative politics media representation TV literature history debates women minorities majorities 
May 10, 2012
Nerd Words

I always prefer to use the word nerd to describe “nerdy” subjects because I’ve noticed lately that only Americans on the Internet (and off) that I’ve encountered in real life or however use the word geek to describe these things. Part of this is geography but I would argue that the word nerd just sounds nicer in the Australian accent than the word geek does, but if you were to ask me which word I personally prefer I think nerd is a much nicer sounding word in general. That and John Green won me over to Nerd ever since Nerdfighters.

But there was one nerd word that emerged that’s so far only between me and that one friend I have from high school who grew up with rap and metal in this bizarre fusion of nerd-man… is troll-roller.

What is a troll-roller? The answer is more bizarre than you think. Essentially how this word happened was I was watching this guy play Talisman with his friends on YouTube and the guy running the game told the guy playing the Troll character in this board game “roll with the troll”.

This phrase blew my mind at the time, like Tolkien trying to describe what an Orc looked like based on Old English or something. I pieced together the idea of a creature that wasn’t really an Internet troll, because he’s too passionate and not cynical enough for that, but he’s troll like in that he would tinker with hobby materials and collectables in his cavernous bedroom filled with nerd stuff like Aladdin’s Cave.

To me and my metal head/white guy who loves rap friend, a troll roller was a linguistic answer to find a link between Internet trolls and more peaceful, devoted hobbyists. It was less of an insult as much as an acknowledgement that there existed some kind of man-thing that wasn’t really a manchild but a God amongst nerds who had built a palace for his kingdom with no mention of a Queen to rule it.

And then it hit me. My own best mate who helped me find this word was one himself, since I discovered that a troll roller was the kind of nerdy man thing that didn’t disrespect women deliberately, but rather treated his empire of hobbyist tinkering as his true bride. Not the Reddit kind of masculine entity whose life was devoid of women due to personality, but a bachelor who’d probably get to keep his empire of tinkering if he ever married due to his choosing to let a wife into his castle.

It was the first time I found a balance between bachelors who have disdain for women out of immaturity and the men who seem manchild like at first but reveal themselves as true Kings like a fairy tale monarch once a worthy Queen chooses to rule at his side rather than being ruled by him instead.

4:55am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZljRPyLDJg3d
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