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I’m going to go ahead and make an assumption. It’s an unpleasant one, but I’m comfortable doing it because, well, I’m one of you. So here goes.

You need to get off the couch. Or get out of your computer chair. Whatever.

You need to go to the gym. You need to ingest something other than can after can of whatever soda it is that is your primary sustenance. You need to shave whatever it is that needs to be shaved, groom, whatever needs to be groomed – this, of course varies depending on your gender. You need to read a magazine about fitness for once in addition to the latest issue of Wizard or Nintendo Power. Notice, I’m not saying “instead of,” I’m saying “in addition to.” I’m not saying you should give up who you are, because nobody should do that.

Why, you might ask, am I saying such terrible, hurtful things? Because they’re not terrible or hurtful. They’re probably facts. And they’re productive. And let’s face it. You’ve got more going on than members of the opposite sex seem to realize. Right? Right. You know it and I know it, you just don’t know how to make them know it. So here’s the thing. I’m trying to help you. I swear. Why am I trying to help you? Because we all need some help.

Here’s the thing. Think about the people you think are cool. Do you think that the characters on Battlestar Galactica got to look the way they do because they sat on their couch watching the old BSG? Hell no. They got to look that way because they were badass and self-disciplined. Batman? Same thing. Sawyer and Kate on Lost? Please. What’s more important to being a con artist than looking damn good and being confident? Nothing. Sam and Dean on Supernatural? You have to train to be a demon-killing machine.

What it comes down to is this. As nerds, we have to realize that all of the fictional characters we think are completely awesome put a lot of effort into that awesomeness. Nobody’s going to swoon over your knowledge of Star Trek trivia or your awesome new WoW armor. They’re going to swoon over your sweet abs.

Wouldn’t you love to know that you could actually pull off a Doc Manhattan Halloween costume that consisted of you painting yourself glow-in-the-dark-blue and wearing nothing but black briefs? I sure as hell would. That’s why I started going to the gym. It’s not about conforming to society’s expectations, it’s not about the image that Hollywood expects us to shackle ourselves with. It’s about doing what’s best for us. It’s about natural selection. It’s about survival of the fittest. This isn’t social Darwinism, this is straight up Darwinism. Be the best you can be in every way possible. We, nerds, are our own so-called subculture, one that idolizes something that is as essential to human nature as anything: we idolize the idea of the hero, the warrior, but a certain kind. We like the genius-warrior. It’s safe to say that the fact that you’re reading this means there’s a good chance you have at least a fairly solid intelligence level, so why should it be that we don’t strive to hold ourselves all to the standards of our heroes? Why can’t we throw some muscle over those brains? What is the difference between you wanting to be as awesome as Bruce Wayne and the frat bro down the hall wanting to be as awesome as Eli Manning? Nothing. Except you have more imagination and probably a higher SAT score. But try going to a bar and smooth-talking someone into realizing that when you don’t put enough effort into your outfit, hygiene, grooming, health, or workout, to look better than a Gamorrean Guard. It will not work. It just won’t.

I’m not saying this to be mean. I’m saying this because I know and YOU know that you should be walking into that bar feeling like Han Solo. Or Number Six, if you’re a chick. It’s not just about looking good. It’s about confidence. Real confidence. The kind of confidence that doesn’t come from knowing that you get better grades than the good-looking people or from knowing that they can’t even comprehend the kind of equations you can solve or that they can’t speak Klingon or Elvish. That’s not real confidence. That’s the kind of confidence that we delude ourselves with. Real confidence is knowing that you’ve got all those things but you can still function as a normal human being and handle basic social interactions with people who might or might not care about any of those things I just mentioned. People for whom those might even, astonishingly, be a hurdle to overcome. So get off your ass, drink a glass of skim milk, eat some vegetables and chicken or whatever, wash your face, and go to the gym.

PS. Some of you probably still feel like whining. You’re thinking, But Brent! Why should I bother doing this when I know I want to end up with a nerd girl/guy who is just as lazy and useless as I am? There are a bunch of reasons, and I say all of this with the utmost respect for everyone involved, despite having just called you lazy and useless. Ok. So.

a) You’re being narrow-minded. What makes you think that you’re going to end up with somebody who is nerdy in the same way you are? Maybe someone who happens to be really good looking could also have a personality that would match well with yours, if only they weren’t so out of your league. Maybe you should do something about that. Something like getting yourself to their league.

b) Why should we, nerds, collectively accept the state of general greasy schlubbiness that characterizes our current state? Nerd girls! If you try harder, you’ll be able to get guys who AREN’T nerds. This is a good thing no matter what. How? Well, even if you do want to be with a nerdy guy, this will make them step up their game. They’ll have to realize that they have competition and, maybe for the first time in their lives, they’ll have to accept that they’re on the same plane as other males and interact with them as such. The point is that we shouldn’t accept the stereotypes that have been assigned to us and we shouldn’t contribute to their perpetuation.

c) This is not just shallowness. The world eats horribly, most of the population is out of shape, there is absolutely no question that obesity is an epidemic. All sorts of diseases associated with obesity are rampant.

d) Could you win a fist fight with a moderately strong alien or outrun a moderately fast-moving zombie? No. Not a chance. Anything even remotely dangerous would giggle at your punches. And y’know what that means? You would fail at surviving the end of the world. No matter how many fictional accounts of the end of the world you have read or watched, and I’m sure it’s plenty, you would not survive it in real life because of a lack of physical preparedness. So nerd up. Get your game face on.

Note: Most of this constructive input is also applicable to hippies and smug intellectuals. At least hippies probably eat a fair amount of vegetables to save the animals and the environment. Good for you; are you getting enough protein and vitamin B12? As for the smug intellectuals, you smoke too many cigarettes and quoting Sartre won’t make you any better looking.

A few weeks ago, I was in Borders and decided to do something I do every so often and had been meaning to do for quite some time. I picked up the first volume of a few comics that I’d heard good things about – 100 Bullets, Scalped, and DMZ. I knew very little about 100 Bullets and Scalped and, as for DMZ, I only knew that it was written by Brian Wood and that I liked Northlanders, which he’d written and that it seemed like a pretty cool concept.

I’ll start off by quickly saying that Bullets and Scalped are good. I didn’t dislike either of them and they certainly kept me entertained. But when I went back to the bookstore after finishing the first volume of each, it was DMZ that I picked up more of. As of this morning, I’ve finished every TPB available for it and plan on trying to catch up on as much as possible by finding myself some back issues for what’s currently going on.

Without a doubt, it’s the best comic I’ve read in quite some time – probably since I first found Fables. It’s an incredible premise – in the wake of our wars overseas, a civil war sprang up right here in the US and Manhattan became the DMZ – demilitarized zone – property of neither the United States nor the Free States (ie. the guys who rose up against the US).

The main character is Matty Roth, a rookie photojournalist thrown into the middle of the DMZ and forced to adapt. As interesting as the way the DMZ changes is the way it changes Roth.

The commentary on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the way we view the civilians in those areas, on the choices that everybody is forced to make in a time of war, on the ignorance of anyone looking from afar, on the layers of grey area in between the stark black and white perspectives on these situations; all of these are (literally) brought home by Wood in DMZ.

From the introduction of Volume 4, Friendly Fire, by Sgt. John G. Ford, US Army:

When I first picked up an issue of DMZ I was mesmerized. I was thinking, “Finally, someone out there gets it. At last, someone had the stones to put something on the market that resonated with me and the other grunts, something real and hard and ugly.” DMZ is Black Hawk Down meets Black Flag, and nothing is sugar coated. This is war and all bets are off…

Now comes damage control. Those in charge have “careers” to think about, promotions to deserve, asses to cover. Coming forward and admitting the system is broken or that the military is hurting is not an option. There’s too much at stake for those in charge. This is timeless, this is historic, and it could happen to anybody, military or not.

So check it out. It’s very worth it.

Comic books. I love them. I don’t love them the way people arbitrarily say they love things that, in fact, they just really, really like. That’s fine, that’s a kind of love. But I love comic books. I love comic books the way I love Christmas.

Why? Because of Archie’s “Sonic the Hedgehog.” I started reading Sonic when I was in elementary school. I don’t remember specifically whether I was seven or eight or what, all I remember is that I was in a store with my mom buying pogs (oh the 90s) and they had a few comic books so my mom bought me an issue of Sonic (issue 26, if memory serves) and an issue of a Mortal Kombat comic. Game over. That night, not only did I subscribe to the Sonic comic and order the Knuckles miniseries, but I wrote my first comic. It was probably two pages long, all I remember is that Sonic was up against Nack the Weasel (aka Fang the Sniper in some of the games). Thus, the foundations of the nerd that I have evolved into today.

Sonic was a staple in my life for years thereafter. That and the Tails and Princess Sally miniseries (what’s the plural for miniseries?) and the Knuckles spinoff were the only comics I consistently read at that time. I wouldn’t have known where to start with other comics, and still didn’t know for quite some time thereafter. The comic itself was magnificent, but it wasn’t just that. It was that there were other people – a lot of them – who were just as weirdly obsessed with the Sonic comic as I was. They congregated online at websites like The Sonic Foundation (or TSF) and TeamArtail – websites that are still up, but seemingly abandoned and essentially defunct. And all of us had our own stories. Many of the people on the sites were artists – some successfully transitioned into actually working on the comic, like J. Axer, but most were just enormous fans. We created our own characters, our own bands of Freedom Fighters, our own continuities, and, in a lot of cases, our own comics. The late 90s were a boom time for Sonic fans with hyperactive imaginations and it was incredible and it was exactly the kind of thing I needed. Sonic was the type of story that allowed that kind of involvement too. It was fun, it was clearly not the most serious thing in the world, but it took itself seriously, although not too seriously. Sometimes it didn’t take itself seriously enough, sometimes it pandered to Sega (understandably), sometimes it just wasn’t well done. But every comic has occasional pitfalls.

Sonic was a world that was everything nerdy rolled into one and made accessible for everybody and especially perfect for an elementary-school-aged me. It had a despotic, enslaving, dictator of a villain. The heroes were the Freedom Fighters. There was royal intrigue, there were spies, there were ninjas, there were lots and lots of robots, there was teenage angst and an orphaned protagonist, there were wizards and mad scientists and characters who blurred the lines between the two, there were race riots, there was a multiverse, there were secret societies, there were prophecies, there were weird ancient mystics, there were bounty hunters, there were double-agents, there was betrayal, there was love, there was everything.

Anyway, at some point, my reading of the Sonic comics dwindled, eventually trickling to a stop and it was a long time before I could read any other comic. I held Sonic in too high esteem for anything else. Eventually, thanks to my wanting to read everything Neil Gaiman had ever written when I was in my Sophomore year of college, I got back into comics. With a reintroduction like “Sandman,” it’s no surprise that I fell back into them with some force. But that’s another story for another time.

Every single comic I’ve ever read since Sonic, I’ve imagined what I would do if I was writing it. Not what I’d change, but where I’d take it. Same with every TV show. There’s something about the continuous forms of comics and TV that allows for that kind of perspective. As a kid, I would print out black-and-white pictures of Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat and draw all over them and color them all different colors and come up with stories for these different ninjas. I would buy guides to video games that I didn’t even own just to read the storylines and the character bios. I was a weird freakin’ kid but I will proudly say that Sonic the Hedgehog is what allowed me to do something with that pent-up creativity. Just like with the MK characters, all I had to do was color a hedgehog orange or make an echidna turquoise or whatever and I could spend hours, days, weeks (I’m not even exaggerating) wondering who they were and what they did and what their life was like. Sonic is the reason I want to be a writer at all, let alone a comics writer.

Every nerd has their reasons that they dove into the things they did. Everybody needs escapism at some point or other, kids especially. That’s why we end up the way we do and that’s why we can’t let go of the stories; that’s why, instead of ambivalently, nostalgically acknowledging a childhood interest of mine, I plan on buying the entire Sonic back catalog (which got tragically lost in a move at some point) and getting caught up on what I’ve missed in the last decade and reading it and rereading it like I did so many times on the floor of my bedroom. Because they matter. Because they’re our past and our selves and our hopes and dreams and our friends. Because they, to an extent large or small, made us into the people we are today.

I understand why people want to defend Belichick’s horrendous decision to go for it on the fourth down at the end of the Patriots’ game tonight against the Indianapolis Colts. Like here and here. Belichick has always seemed a bit hard to understand, a bit crazy, a bit out of control. But he only ever seemed that way. Belichick is a strategist and a tactician and he knows what he’s doing. And that’s why, retrospectively, this play makes less and less sense to me the more I think about it.

Liking the play was justifiable in some misguided, idealistic way. I’ll admit that I was kind of excited when I saw that they were going for it. Because it was unexpected and roguish and kind of fun. But once you got past that, it was just downright stupid. There’s supposed to be a method to Belichick’s madness, but this was just ridiculous.

The articles I linked cite the fact that plays like that (4th and 2 conversion) have a 60% rate of success. They use that statistic as the basis for justifying Belichick’s decision to go for it, but statistics are never enough to justify something as insane as this. The Patriots were winning, let’s not forget. I’m not going to lament the fact that Belichick wasted those last two timeouts because hindsight is 20/20, but he should have taken that into account when he made his decision.

Sure there was a 60% success rate for similar plays, but the remaining 40% had no safety net. Let’s look at the numbers other than those percentages. There were two minutes left and the Pats were at their own 29 yard line. Brian Burke from the New York Times’ NFL Blog (the first link I gave), had this to offer:

With 2:00 left and the Colts with only one timeout, a successful conversion wins the game for all practical purposes. A 4th-and-2 conversion would be successful 60% of the time. Historically, in a situation with 2:00 left and needing a TD to either win or tie, teams get the TD 53% of the time from that field position. The total win probability for the 4th-down conversion attempt would therefore be:

(0.60 * 1) + (0.40 * (1-0.53)) = 0.79 WP (WP stands for win probability)

A punt from the 28 typically nets 38 yards, starting the Colts at their 34. Teams historically get the TD 30% of the time in that situation. So the punt gives the Pats about a 0.70 WP.

But look at the end of that first paragraph where I italicized. He’s talking about this situation historically and statistically but in the context of needing the TD to win or tie. The Pats didn’t need it for either of these things. The situations that Burke is talking about are ones in which such a play is essentially the only option. This was not one of those situations, not by a long shot. It’s an entirely different situation, a different context, a different mentality; because of all these factors, it can’t really be said that the play was statistically the best option. These elements change the value of the figures.

Anyway, the Patriots had no timeouts left and, thus, no challenges (one of which would have been particularly useful on the play in question and just might have resulted in Kevin Faulk getting that first down). It wasn’t just a matter of the success or failure in one play. It was 60% you get the first down and maintain possession, 40% you turn it over and guarantee that you will lose. Do we still want to go with the statistics? What about punting the damn ball and having a 100% chance of being able to play defense, do your best to hold on to the lead for two minutes, have a hell of a lot more of the field to play defense on? Did I mention holding onto the lead? Did I mention that this play was completely unnecessary and pointless and a horrible idea in every possible way? Did I mention that the statistics offered in favor of the play are utterly irrelevant to the situation? I did? Good.

I’m Brent. I’m 1/2 of this blog. This isn’t just a nerd blog, but it’s also certainly not a non-nerd blog. We’re our own brand of nerds. We’ll talk about video games and comic books and technology and movies and TV and music and books and news and politics and sports and whatever else we feel like. We’ll probably talk a bit about life, but we’ll try not to make it boring (accomplished by trying to not have boring lives). If we talk about our lives we’ll make sure it’s worth it and that we’re not just deluding ourselves into thinking that anybody wants to read about the stupid boring parts of our lives. You’ve all got your own stupid, boring lives to deal with (no offense).

We’ll also probably post a fair amount of YouTube videos, but not just for the hell of it.

We will very reliably blog on “Sons of Anarchy.” We’ll probably be blogging a lot about TV in general. And movies.

I personally plan on blogging a fair amount about comic books, books, TV/movies, and news-type stuff. Maybe World of Warcraft, if I’m feeling particularly like throwing my life away at any given time. I’ll probably also do a fair amount of blogging about whatever the hell I want, bwahahahahaha.

The diabolical laugh was unnecessary. All I’m saying is I’ll do my best to keep it real for you, the reader.

Enjoy.