I am the worst kind of nerd there is - the self-loathing nerd.  I love all sorts of incredibly, INCREDIBLY nerdy shit, but I hate myself for liking it.  I don't believe this is uncommon, but I feel like we are a very under-represented demographic these days.

However, I don't believe we are a nonexistent breed.  I feel that there are many more people like me out there who just don't want to come forward and admit it, probably for the afore-mentioned reason that they hate themselves for it.  Unfortunately, even as self-hating nerds we must find a way of furthering our habits.  You see, every nerd worth his d20 knows that he must purchase things to facilitate his craft.  While many people don't see a problem with this, we self-loathing types generally as a rule not only despise our love of the nerdy shit, but we pretty much despise everyone else who likes that shit as well.  What to do?  How do you reconcile going to a store filled with things you like and people you hate?  Well honestly, I'm not sure.  It is our cross to bear, I guess.  This week however, I feel as though I should share our plight with the world, and tell everyone out there what it's like to live on the fringe of society, in a realm that exists somewhere between Earth and Middle Earth.

Video Game Retailers

Considering how much I love to waste endless hours staring at a computer screen hammering my mouse's left-click button in an effort to manipulate fictional imaginary characters into fulfilling their fictional imaginary destinies, I tremendously despise going to video game retail locations such as EB Games or GameStop.  Sure, my EB Edge Card and seemingly lifetime subscription to Game Informer magazine might beg to differ, but rest assured that before I set foot into one of those dens of pixelated horror a wash of icy terror shudders through every vein in my body.  I know that where I am about to go will try my patience and my determination.  Only through sheer willpower and my indomitable lust for electronic entertainment am I able to persevere through such a forest of idiocy and irritation to complete my quest for cheap as hell pre-owned Playstation games.

Perhaps I overdramatize.  I generally don't mind going to the game store at like 11AM on a Tuesday in October when there are no customers to be found anywhere.  I can handle this.  Sure, the guys behind the counter can occasionally be a little bit tiresome if they deem that I am worthy enough for them to try to talk to me about something other than whether I am going to use my card for debit or credit, but on the whole it can be almost enjoyable in a way to sift through the crappy bargain bin in hopes of finding a critically-acclaimed game for under ten dollars.  No, the real trouble with game retailers lies in the people who frequent such locales.

Your typical GameStop customer generally falls into one of two categories:  People who wouldn't know the difference between Mario and Link if you cracked them in the face with a giant wooden mallet that read "MARIO IS THE ONE WITH THE MOUSTACHE", and people who can spend three hours giving you the entire convoluted back-story to one of the minor supporting characters in Quest of the Forgotten Hero Kings IV:  Untold Legends of the Shining Dragon Sword, despite the fact that the guy only appears for about forty-five seconds of the sixty hour long game and his dialogue was never translated to English from it's original Japanese.  Both of these people are equally annoying, but for very different reasons.

The functionally retarded individuals tend to be either very old or very young.  Sometimes it is a run-down soccer mom exhausted from a long day of running over pedestrians with her SUV who is looking for something/anything that will shut her five screaming asshole children up so she can actually sit down for ten minutes and consume sleeping pills and red wine until she passes out.  Sometimes it's some eleven year old querulous ballbag who has eight thousand questions for the guy behind the counter, ranging from "what's better the DS or the Game Boy or the PSP or the Playstation 2 or the Playstation 1 or the Xbox 360" to "can I use your phone to call my mom and have her pick me and my friend up because we're bored and I think I ate a bug off the carpet".  Either way, these folks cause me problems in one of two ways - either they piss me off with their incessant dumbass questions or they stand in the middle of the fucking aisle making it impossible for anybody to get past.  I can be a patient guy, but if you have no fucking idea what the hell you're looking at then get the fuck out of the way so I can see what's there.  These stupid shitty mall game stores aren't that big.  You can take three steps back from the wall of used Xbox games and still be able to stare glassy-eyed at the rows and rows of meaningless titles and pretty pictures.

With the hardcore gamers, it's all about the incessant jibber-jabber.  I know I should just suck it up and deal with it since they usually aren't even talking to me, but god damn it can get irritating.  As I said, these aren't large stores, and these folks generally want to make sure everybody within a ten mile radius understands how smart they are, so they tend to border on yelling when they talk to the guy behind the counter about how Magus Odyssey XII: Expedition to the Sacred Hills for the SEGA Saturn was better than the more "mainstream" Playstation sequel because the Turn-Active Time Situational Battle System ruined the franchise.  Who gives a shit?  The guy you're talking to is just smiling and nodding because he's afraid that if he contradicts you then you will keep talking to him.  Nobody around you even has any goddamned clue what you're talking about either.  Just shut the fuck up.  It is especially bothersome when these jerks talk to the cashiers and comment on whatever game you end up buying:  "Oh, Prince of Persia?  It's Ok... I GUESS.  A little too overrated for my tastes.  If you like that though you should try a game called Super Otagi Running Jump Person.  It' s lot better.  It's harder to find though because there are only like ten copies of it in existence and you have to buy it imported from Japan."  OK.  Thanks for the tip, you fucking loser.

Hobby and Card Stores

Any store that sells Dungeons and Dragons manuals, comic books, Magic cards and graphic novels is like a monolithic sausage party you wish you were never invited to.  This shit isn't for the weak of heart.  It's not the sort of place you walk into without having some idea what the fuck it is you're looking for.  It is no place for the uninitiated.  Those individuals ignorant of the difference between a Player's Handbook and a Dungeon Master's Guide and unconcerned with the difference between a High Elf and a Dark Elf quickly find themselves failing their saving throw versus Fear and fleeing in terror at full speed for 1d4 rounds.  While the swords-and-sorcery kielbasa fiesta can be intimidating, if you are able to get up the courage to walk into one of these places (the chief fear being that someone you know will actually see you walking into a card store) the good news is that the lame question element I mentioned above is often-times less prevalent in your typical hobby shop.  No, in the typical hobby shop there are three kinds of people:  The Hardcore, the Very Hardcore, and the Posers.

The Hardcore are the "regular" folks who frequent these types of places.  They realize they belong to the highest possible order of losers, and they can accept this as long as nobody calls attention to it.  To them, a hobby store should be like a porn shop;  Nobody talks, everybody does their thing, picks out whatever they're looking for, quietly pays, goes home and speaks of it to no one.  This I can appreciate.  This is me.  The hobby shop is a place where you indulge your dirty little secrets, and the less you have to deal with actual human beings, the better.

The Very Hardcore are what you have to look out for as a Nerdy Consumer.  They are the epitome of everything that normal people think of when they hear the phrase "Dungeons & Dragons", dragging all of our collective names through the Orc-infested mud.  These are the guys who not only fail to harbor any sense of shame in respect to the fact that they play pen-and-paper role-playing games, but they will actually bring shit from home into the store and play games in the middle of the store.  I can imagine no greater ignominy!  However there these folks are, day after day, talking smack about how their hand-painted 1000 point Chaos Space Marine model army can take on anything the Imperial Guard has to offer, discussing the prerelease of the upcoming new Magic card set, arguing over which robot babe is "hotter" in some obscure Anime DVD and bragging out all the "sweet gear" they just got for their cyberzombie ninja pirate babe Shadowrun character.  These are the folks that go to "Cons" dressed up as their World of Warcraft characters, who have the unenviable ability to talk for fifteen minutes without saying anything that even remotely resembles a real actual dictionary-defined human word, and who basically give nerds everywhere a bad name.  These folks can be problematic when their Vampire:  The Masquerade debates become overly-heated, and are pretty good at pissing me off with their general Xtreme form of nerdery, but are more or less harmless as long as they've got their heads buried over a table full of tapped mana cards.

The Posers are probably the worst of the patrons however.  These are the folks who desperately try to look "cool" despite the fact that they're thumbing through a stack of hardcover books that describe in great detail the intricate differences between a Dwarven Soldier and a Dwarven Berserker.  They don't accept their nerdiness in the way that the Hardcore do - they seem to be determined to convince everyone that they AREN'T huge losers.  Often times they try to accomplish this through their wardrobe, dressing in all black with chains and stuff and pretending they're musicians so they can be all like "whatever man I'm in a band so fuck all of you", or by talking loudly about rock music, movies, "how dorky this place is", and "how nerdy my friends are" while simultaneously hoping nobody will see them buying a stack of ten-sided dice.  These people are frustrating purely from the standpoint that they're complete hypocrites.

It should also be noted that there are an abundance of hideously unattractive people in these types of places.  I'm sorry, but it has to be said.  It's not like I go around checking out dudes or whatever, but I swear that hobby shops have a disproportionately large percentage of ugly people trolling the Elf-laden aisles doing their best impression of sweaty, greasy Hobbits who just rolled out of bed in the morning after a night of binge drinking and shoveling potato chips into their faces with a forklift.  In the *incredibly* rare chance you actually see a woman brave enough to set foot into one of these citadels of ultimate geekdom, the odds that she is actually hot are about as good as the odds of scoring a critical hit on a Venerable Red Dragon with a broken butter knife.  Not that it matters of course.  As long as she has boobs she will be getting hit furiously by any guy within her line-of-sight, which can actually be pretty amusing in the same sort of way that watching a guy smash himself in the balls with a baseball bat is amusing.

Guitar and Music Stores

Yes, yes, I know you're all saying that guitar and music stores aren't bastions of nerd-dom, because bands and musicians get all kinds of babes and the other folks get like Elf Porn or something, but I lump all three of these monstrosities together in my head since they are all places where I am interested in the products for sale, yet I can't stand physically being inside the store.  (Oh, and by the way, I'd be willing to bet that this page ends up getting hit about eight thousand times by secluded nerds Googling "Elf Porn").

I know that I covered a lot of ground on this particular subject in a previous update, but I feel like it bears repeating that there is nothing in the world worse than going into a guitar store and looking at instruments.  Think of it this way - musicians generally have such monstrous egos that they can't be contained in most average-sized human heads.  The typical musician, no matter how bad he actually sucks, thinks he rocks harder than Jimmy Page smoking crack rocks at a rock quarry in Rockport, Maine and expects everybody to cater to his gargantuan delusions of self-importance.  One musician, especially one who gets paying gigs and has been complimented on his musical ability by a woman at least once in his entire lifetime, can be insufferable.  An entire store full of like-minded musicians is the sort of disastrous situation that has the potential to cause a rift in the fabric of the universe.

The first thing you'll notice in any music store is the constant half-assed guitar wankering vomiting forth from several amps strategically located throughout the store.  Everybody in these fucking places thinks they're the next goddamned Stevie Ray Vaughan, and as such they all like to sit on the stupid stools these places have, fuck around on expensive guitars, and pretend they're not thirty-five year old bartenders with no job prospects and no lives.  In the off-chance that someone doesn't have a stupid fucking Bill and Ted-style three-second flaming off-key guitar solo to play, these stores also like to pump rock music through the in-store speakers as well.  Generally this just forms a music bed of background noise for these wannabe musicians to "solo" over and further contribute to the dissonant cacophony that assaults your ears at every inch of the store.  You will often find that as soon as you walk into the shop the combined discordant noise is generally enough to explode your head.

Even more contemptible than these jerks however are the sales associates.  It's quite possible that cashiers at guitar stores are the only people on the planet with larger egos than F-Listed rock stars, despite the fact that they have even less going for them.  These cocksmokers get a real charge out of ignoring customers and bullshitting with each other about humbuckers, pickups, bridges, and all other types of guitar-related words that nobody has any clue what they do.  "Oh yeah man, you put a '67 Gibson humbucker in that baby, solder some new pickups to the next and this thing will sound like Eddie Van Halen's guitar!".  Fuck you.  Just ring up my ten dollar auto-tuner because I want to get the fuck out of this store without grabbing a rack of cymbal stands and bludgeoning the entire staff to death with them and you are making this very difficult for me to resist.  How these dudes can power-trip so hard is beyond me.  Maybe they're overly proud of their well-honed ability to look like they don't give a shit about anything and treat everyone who talks to them with the sort of contempt I generally reserve for this website.  Whatever the case may be, it gets old fast.  God damn I hate guitar store employees.