Photographic Nerdery

Presented for your approval (and that of the midnight society), the nerdiest parts of the last few months of my life. The horrors below are not presented in order to garner sympathy, but merely as a warning to those of you who may consider spending more time on the computer. I stand before you a result of too many hours, too many megabytes and too many mouseclicks. Part of me is broken.

EXHIBIT A:

Here we see the statistics screen for Windows XP’s “Spider Solitaire.” It’s one of the default games included with the OS. I first start playing it in the car on the drive to Halifax over a year and a half ago. Since then, it’s become something of an obsession.

Recently it has taken on the role of my procrastination game. I’ll start playing and say “Once I win a game, I’ll start working.” Thankfully I really suck at the game (as my winning percentage indicates!) so this often takes me a long long time. It’s a tried and tested method of slacking off.

Please avoid it, if you know what’s good for you. It will slaughter you.

EXHIBIT B:

This is the stats screen from a program called “DU Meter” that I installed in February of last year, worried that the university would start cracking down on my massive downloading. Thankfully, that never happened, and I’ve continued to download absolutely inane amounts of material. To put this into perspective, I only have 160GB of hard drive space available to me — so the majority of what I download is deleted or burned to CD (and then not labelled and lost, of course). Breaking the 1 terrabyte (1000 GB) level will be an achievement to celebrate! I pray every day that the Dal Network people won’t shut me down for this.

Compulsive downloading is a disease. I download things I’ll never watch, just because I worry that I’ll never get a chance to download them again. Some of the things I’ve downloaded just over the past few months:

• A complete set of Season Two of Fraggle Rock
• Nearly every one of those “Part of our Heritage” Moments that the Canadian government produced
• FOX’s excellent special MAN VS. BEAST which featured a bear vs. a japanese man in a hotdog eating contest.
• Season 1 + 2 of The Wonder Years
• The excellent Nintendo-funded film The Wizard starring Fred Savage and an autistic child

This would all be absurdly regrettable if I didn’t love it so much.

This is just a quick update as I am bored on a Monday afternoon. I should be at class, but due to my medical situation (Which I have henceforth decided to claim is the result of a KNIFE FIGHT), I’m stuck at home for another week. Oh well. Hopefully I’ll spend it writing things.

Enjoy this New Year everybody. And avoid this nerdy abyss I live in. It is inescapable, all-encompassing and, worst of all, bizarrely enjoyable.

Matt