I love Douglas Coupland. While I haven’t been crazy about his latest novels, Girlfriend in a Coma still remains one of my favourite book. Mark, on the other hand, fiercely hates him. I recently discovered that Coupland wrote a blog for the New York Times* - always late to the party, aren’t I- and I think it’s brilliant. More surprinsingly, Mark agrees. We came to the conlusion that Coupland may be a better blogger than a novelist, because the medium suits his pop-life affirmations better than paper pages can.

Which is bizzarre… Douglas Coupland, blogger extraordinaire before blogs were even born.

* As always, it’s qualified as “opinion” or “column” on google searches. Because real writers don’t blog, you see, they merely have ideas they put in writing instead.

On Radiohead’s new cd:

mark: all the bloggers are going mad because it’s 160kbps and are calling it a marketing scam

me: yeah i read about that
wankers

mark: bloggers go mad about everything

me: thats a good thing

mark: if thom york was going to cycle round to your house and deliver the album for free on release day, they’d complain he was adding to traffic congestion

me: that’s funny, im gonna blog that

———

With a co-worker, about Second life;

Me: I was reading the other day about how Second life’s public is either made of hardcore gamers, or people who visit for a bit, get confused and then leave.

Coworker: … Like I did. It’s really frustrating when you’re not a geek. Do you remember that time we met with Cory Ondrejka, and I asked about what will happen when there’s a shortage of geeks?

me: Yeah

Coworker: It’s like, it’s not good enough that people just show up and give you wings and stuff, and then go.

In light of my recent post about Yoshi’s island, Mark pointed me to this piece of news about gaming:

Mark: bet you can’t wait for this game

me: brilliant, and so spot on, after all I knit and bake bread already (1)

Mark: you’re a housewife superstar?

me: well I do have all the qualities don’t i?

A game for girls who want to become Housewives superstars? I suppose the game’s challenge is to bake perfectly little round cakes, clean the kids’ underwear and knit pretty scarves with ribbons intertwined. (I suppose that if there were working-full time housewives characters in this game they would say, hey, “I am enjoying spending an average of 10 hours more than you doing chores even if we both have a full time job and i’m still hitting the glass ceiling. Why’s that, honey?”).

Not that it’s out of the way… From what I gathered learning about games with Mark, Nintendo opened the gaming market to girls by making it accessible (and sadly, by releasing pink Nintendo DS). It also means they release games such as Bratz, which I can only describe as the gaming equivalent of reading Seventeen; Paris Hilton splattered all over the pages and oh don’t-you-wish-you-were-her.

Simple consideration: if there are “games 4 girls” and “games 4 boys”, it makes little doubt that girls are also enjoying playing boy’s games as well. After all, I really enjoy killing my pixelized enemies. And yes, I also understand that some games will be more popular with one sex than the other. But here’s the one million dollar question- why don’t I picture any little boy furiously hitting the start button of his “housewife superstar” game? Damn it, I want to see the “stay at home dad superstar” game out, and soon. Because as long as it’s not about assigning roles to gender but respecting lifestyle choices, there’s nothing wrong with liking housework, or wanting to raise your own children. But Madeleine already explained it better than I could.

(1) Mark and I did it together and to be honest, he knew way more about it than I did. That’s one of the reasons why I love the boy.

I will have to file this under “things I would have never thought to be possible a few months ago”.

I’ve always had a bit of a struggle with wanting to be a tech/blog grrl vs. the mandatory use of video games.

See, I began blogging in 2001. So that makes me “cool” by the blogosphere standards. But I didn’t know the first single thing about HTML until a couple of weeks ago. Which makes me uncool. I know a respectable amount about social networking, and wrote my dissertation about Blogs and the Generation Y. Cool. But my blog never had more than an average of 80 visitors a day. Not cool. I think that more and more I’d like to fancy myself as some kind of geek girl, but never really come around knowing a lot about it. It would probably involve knowing a lot of Php, sQL and Java, which is not going to happen anytime soon (unless someone volunteers to give me lessons?).

Now, knowing my bias and crushes for technology savvy female figures (I am a big fan of GenderIT), you’d think that I would be the kind of person to enjoy playing both online and video games. Truth is I always secretly despised game players, and frankly never made any fierce attempt to understand the appeal of the gaming culture. Too many of game enthusiasts seemed to be glued to their screens 24-7, eating flat Kraft dinners passed through their bedroom doors my worried parents anxious that their son or daughter might die from malnutrition (Microserfs, anyone?).

That was until a cold day of December which found Mark and I walking along an E2 road in East London. Passing by a shop selling video games, he mentioned wanting the Nintendo DS game Yoshi’s planet.

‘Yoshi’s planet?’, I shrugged. ‘Never heard of it’.

I was not really interested.But a couple of weeks later (struck by winter season’s gifts-inspiration related anxiety), I decided to purchase the game for Christmas.

I’ve been hooked ever since. Mind you, nothing like Mark, who recently purchased this legal device which enables you to download every DS games in the world in one chip card (don’t ask). But in “Jessica standards”, I fell quite hard considering my absolute lack of gaming-infatuation pre-Yoshi.

Oh sure, we look like some kind of extreme nerds when playing a wireless Golf match in the underground, but this is really fun. Well, apart from when I start attacking him violently because he’s way better than I am (a decade of game-playing helps, one would suppose) and well, you know me:

I.cannot.stand.losing.

A couple of weeks ago Newsweek decided to perpetuate the cliche of the bad, bad youth too easily impressed by decadent rck stars by featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears on their front page. Followed an agonizingly ignorant, condescending and conservative-minded article seemingly written by a mother worried sick about her daughter’s admiration for teen-idol Lindsay Lohan.  Ugh.

After all, 2007 is the first year ever we hear about pop and rock stars’ substance abuse issues, isn’t it?

I can imagine Newsweek’s editorial meeting pretty clearly; in fact I picture it to be like those Orange advertisements featuring the infamous “Orange Film Funding board” - the ones the audience always sees in European theaters before any movie starts:

Marketing chief to Newsweek staff: We’re not doing so well these days. We need something to boost our sales, and can’t have G.W.Bush on our cover anymore.

Editorial staff: We can’t really beat the TIME’s “person of the year” idea though, they were too good on this one. Flattering one’s ego by making one believe he’s important, what a strike of genius!

Intern: Maybe we can scare our readers instead? They love to be frightenned: terrorism threats, pandemics, wars!

Editor in chief: That’s brilliant! We’ll assure every American family that their beloved children are about to become -gasp- sexually active adults! What’s more menacing than that! Putting to female teen idols on the cover will make this issue’s our best seller - young men can have sexual relationships if they want to, but women…

You get the idea.

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