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Dr. Who + Benny Hill + Eminem. No more need be said.

Bonus points for an extra-large helping of John Pertwee.

…just…wow. This is exactly the way the world is supposed to work.

Watching this week’s Eureka, where they exposited that a group of ten scientists had been in cryogenic sleep for eleven years (or eleven for ten years, TV usually doesn’t get my full attention). Hearing that, I thought, “Yup, get ready for some time-displaced culture-clash hijinks. These folks will have to get caught up on a whole eleven years of missed cultural history, having been shut away since way back in…”

And then I did the math.

“…1997!?!?!”

That’s, that’s, why that’s practically just yesterday, 1997 is! How could they have time-displacement wackiness with such a recent date?

But, yeah, ten years. The fact that it seems too soon for culture clash speaks less of the actual number of years passed and more of the fact that I’m kind of stuck back there myself.

This isn’t a new revelation. I realized last fall that Underworld’s “Pearl’s Girl” still sounds hot and fresh and contemporary to me, and that’s even older. If I had a lawn, I suspect I’d be about ready to start telling kids to get off it.

So here’s the thing that makes it really hard to relate to (even relatively) neurotypical people, as well as with people who’ve enjoyed relative success in their chosen fields, or in their interpersonal relationships, or in their something.

Nothing actually bad happened last week. In fact, some good things happened. In even more fact, a couple of extremely good, if small and fleeting, things happened. And nothing actually bad happened at all, really. There were some frustrating things, and a couple of disappointing things, but nothing registering strongly enough to stand out in memory.

And yet still, it was a bad week.

That’s the thing about neurochem disorders: You get the experience of feeling like your dog just died even though you never owned a dog. Pour that on top of various situational factors–about which more later, probably password protected–and you got yourself a Seven Layer Dip of Fugly.

So that’s why my recent habit of actually posting to the blog faltered over the last week. Will try to pick it up. In the meantime, read Fred Clark on the Republican attempt to brand Obama as the literal Antichrist.

On the few occasions I’ve mentioned Nice Guys here, there seems to have been a bit of confusion over exactly what’s meant by the term. In the comments to a post at Pandagon[1], I found a link to a comment on an article at US News & World Report in which a man’s complaint not only reveals him to be a Nice Guy but also serves as a convenient definition by example:

They have an off-the-chart sense of entitlement that makes them think they’re too good for most guys. The majority of available women are gunning for the 20 percent of men at the top, thinking they deserve no less. This leaves around 80 percent of men without choices, forced to be either alone or settle for someone (fat, ugly, plain) that isn’t their top pick.

Restated, the least desirable 80%[2] of men are forced to choose from among the least desirable 80% of women. To the Nice Guy, this is somehow construed as a tragedy and as evidence that all wimmenz is uppity bitches.

(Well, to draw out the obvious implication, the top 20% of wimmenz is uppity bitches. The other 80% are beneath consideration even as humans, apparently.)

The quote really is beautiful in its utter wrongness. It demonstrates the Nice Guy’s sense of entitlement, which is an obvious characteristic of Nice Guys, but it also shows his less obvious refusal to acknowledge women’s agency. Check it: the author is basically coming out and saying that of course men want women they find attractive, that’s just the natural order of things, but that women who want the same are heartless bitches.

Now, one thing I should make clear is that the quote above doesn’t represent a guy self-describing as a Nice Guy but instead the guy who self-describes as “I Used To Be A Nice Guy But”. The Nice Guy is the maggot, the author above is the fly. Nice Guys have the same attitude, which is why I think the quote can be used as representative, but its somewhat hidden by their most obvious characteristic, the “I pretended to be her bestest friend, and she won’t even have sex with me!” whine.

So that’s the thing to keep in mind about Nice Guys: they are not nice guys at all. They are the set of frothing misogynists who like to think of themselves as hopeless romantics.

[1] The internet is really one huge rabbit hole, yeah?

[2] For the Nice Guy, a concept like “the least desirable 80%” does seem to make sense.

Last fall, the wireless card in the laptop stopped working. I poked around in the HP forums and discovered that it was a known issue, a problem with the mobo, and that all warranties had been extended to cover that particular problem. I had a wireless adapter lying around, though, so I decided against sending my laptop away for 7-10 days (which I’d read often turned into 4-6 weeks).

This evening, once I finally got my laptop to boot, I decided to see if there were any possible fixes accessible through the HP Customer Care application that came preinstalled. I loaded it, and in the process of updating itself it told me that my warranty would be expiring soon.

!!!

I don’t know why, maybe HP decided to do a blanket extension on all of this model instead of waiting for people to step forward with the particular wireless card problem. I clicked through and discovered that there are many, many more known problems now, starting with the wireless problem and extending through a loss of video and a plain old failure to boot.

Yay, I guess?

Anyway, after 45 minutes on the phone with a nice Indian fellow, HP is sending me a mailer. Within a few weeks (I hope) I should have a nicely refurbished, relatively reliable laptop. Hurrah!

Looks like I’ll have to drag out the clunky old CRT monitor and hook up my desktop for the interim.

So early this month I started having a serious laptop problem.

When trying to turn on the laptop, the little lights on the front come on but there’s no BIOS (or, as I should apparently call it, POST) screen, just a blank monitor. The panel lights also stay frozen in their “we’re on, but we’re waiting for orders before we do anything” configuration.

I’ve found that waiting it out does no good. I have to press down the power button and force a shutdown (even though it was never actually up), then try again. And again. And again and again and again. Usually on the third or fifth try something inside will catch, the POST screen will come up, and everything will load and operate normally.

Any ideas what might be the problem here?

Seriously, does anybody actually appreciate designers incorporating Snap-type content previews into their webpages? You know, that annoying code that forces a pop-up window with a tiny-to-the-point-of-illegibility preview of the webpage that will load if you click through the link?

I hate it. Loathe it. Revile it. In attempting to provide context, it literally obliterates context by hiding the text surrounding the link. The “information” it does provide is worthless, as it gives nothing but a blurred and tiny snapshot communicating nothing more interesting than the layout and general design of the target page. Why the fuck would I care what the page I’m clicking through to might look like? Especially when this “preview” mangles the design of the page I’m currently on?

It doesn’t help that I’m an active reader, moving my cursor through the text while scanning and highlighting bits that might be worth reading more deeply. Snap and its ilk ruin my reading experience, puking up a worthless distraction every time I hover over an infected link.

Are there people who appreciate this? If so, what do they appreciate about it? And how can they be stopped?

(I find it telling that, at least among the sites I read, it’s found almost exclusively among the “Web 2.0″ cheerleaders.)