I’m a sell out. I think. But I’m not the only one. I think we all are. I think geek culture is dying and I think it’s our fault.

Maybe I should start from the beginning. I’m a 26 year old comic book reading, Josh Whedon adoring, podcast listening, Twitter addicted, iPhone carrying, computer building, photography nerd. These last couple years have been fantastic, the golden age of geekdom if you will. Comic book movies have ruled Hollywood, Dr. Horrible was a huge success, podcasts have risen from weekend projects to full content producing Internet tv channels (ie Rev3), photography has exploded in popularity, and Twitter has connected people in ways not previously possible. In the mainstream media shows like Numb3rs, Chuck, Bones, The Big Bang Theory, and The OC have all highlighted geek as cool. Even in fashion, big plastic rimmed glasses, nerdy t-shirts, jeans, and the messenger bag have become the uniform de jure of the nerdy and hip. It’s been fantastic to see the general public turn from jokes about computer nerds to accepting an understanding of file systems and operating systems as valuable knowledge to be sought out. I think the high water mark of geekdom was when Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose of Diggnation went on the Jimmy Fallon show to drink beer and talk Twitter. We’ve gone from the margins of the lunch room to the cool kids table. And it feels fantastic.

But this all came at a price, and I don’t think we realized it.

When Ashton Kutcher became the first person with one million followers on Twitter and then Oprah joined and gained hundreds of thousands of followers without even tweeting anything, Twitter went from being about connecting people to being a high school popularity contest all over again. Geek culture, like all sub-cultures, used to be about “cred.” Could you prove you belonged. The “real” world was full of people who didn’t get it or didn’t understand. People who didn’t realize what they were missing out on when we played Lego Star Wars and quoted every missing line in proper voice without subtitles. Didn’t understand why WarGames is one of the greatest movies of all time. People who didn’t stay up until 2am playing text based RPG’s over a modem connection to a local BBS. People who don’t know what a BBS is. It was this cool niche that was small but it was ours. Then one day a couple of the cool kids got kinda interested in what we were up to and instead of playing it close to our chest, we threw open the floodgates and let out a torrent of years of pent up longing to be cool. Spiderman and X-Men made reading comic books cool. We got to wear those things as badges of honor. We were here first and finally someone cared about it.

But then we lost control of it.

Money in Hollywood dictated that shows like Firefly didn’t have high enough ratings and were canceled. Ashton Kutcher turned Twitter into his own personal ego boost. Internet communities which used to be about connecting with like minded people have become replaced with people pushing their personal brand. Everyone wants followers, page views, click-throughs. With page views comes money. With followers comes power. Just look at the explosion of SEO and social media experts, not just on Twitter, on the Internet. They are everywhere! People offering to sell you their sure-fire secret for how to drive traffic to your page so you can make money on Google Ad-Sense. It’s not about us anymore, it’s about money. Our little private beach paradise had become the over crowded tourist spot.

But it’s not all bad.

There has been some good come out of this all. I’ve definitely met really cool people through Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook that I never would have met otherwise. I’m addicted being connected 24/7. I love that I can put a photo on Flickr and almost instantly get feedback on the quality of my work. I love that I can also share those photos with friends and family who live thousands of miles away. And I will continue using many of these sites and technologies in the future. I’m just a little sad that @aplusk drove a bulldozer through the wall of our private garden sanctuary and invited a million frat guys over for a kegger.

Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon’s latest project, is up for viewing in full online through Hulu for a limited time.  Follow the link below for comic-superhero-musical awesomeness.  There is a few crude jokes but nothing too bad.

www.drhorrible.com

Seriously Fox, bring back Firefly. . . right now.

I wanted to update my progress with the EEE PC since yesterday.  Bad news first, I can’t get my jerry rigged external DVD drive to be recognized by the EEE so I haven’t yet gotten XP installed on it.  I’ve got a few leads for how I might be able to do it with a USB flash drive, but I’d rather get a working dvd drive figured out.  Another similar option would be to try EEEKubuntu, a build of the KDE version of Ubuntu designed for the EEE.  Again though, I’d rather get a working dvd drive to install XP from.

Anyway, on to some good news.  I was planning on waiting until I got my Amex rebate at Costco to get a new portable USB powered external hdd to pair with the EEE since it only has 8gigs of internal storage (4 on the ssd and 4 on the sdhc card).  I stopped at Circuit City, to see if I could find a cheap solution to my external DVD drive issues, and found a 160gig western digital pocket drive on sale for $110, cheaper than at Costco.  So I went ahead and bought that too since I was planning on getting it anyway.  The best part is when I got home I discovered that the EEE does in fact put out enough juice through it’s USB ports to power the drive.  I was afraid (after reading somewhere) that it didn’t put out the full 5v needed for powered USB devices but everything seemed to be working so I’m not going to complain!  I also went ahead and used the photos from our VFC photo walk today as a trial for how long it would take to transfer images from my CF card to the external hdd.  I transfered 660mb of data and it took about 10 minutes.  Not going to set any speed records but nothing to be embarrassed about.  It’s also worth noting that this was with my slower Ultra II CF card, my 4gig main card is almost twice as fast, definitely fast enough to serve that purpose.  It would be nice if I can find a codec for linux that lets me view the .cr2 files so that I can at least get some idea of what I’ve got.  Unless I’m able to get XP on this thing I don’t think I’m going to be doing much if anything as far as image editing but as someone mentioned earlier today in a piece I was reading, it would be nice to at least get a jump start on my workflow before getting back.  If I can at least get Gimp on here that will let me play with the pics I take on my Sony since those are in JPG.  Anyway, I think that’s about it for now, I’m going to do some more reading about the EEE and see if there are any other tweeks I can do if I can’t get XP figured out.  Off to Geekland!