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I was two blocks away when I remembered I had to pay rent today. I scampered back to the house, dropped a sloppily-written check outside my housemate's room and bolted to STALIN class. In all the hullabaloo I left my keys on the dresser, an unfortunate fact that I did not realize until much later in the day. Since my estimable housemate wasn't at home to let me in, I decided to hang out at a friend's suite on-campus.
I snapped this photo while I was there:
Confession: I have been complicit in the theft of signs from across campus. My bad. I feel like the University doesn't suffer all that much for want of a few signs outside elevators or bathrooms and people have fun skulking around at all hours. It's a victimless crime.
It isn't nearly as bad as, say, setting a dumpster on fire or stealing a baby. I would wager that it's even more innocent than ZOMG SMELLS.
Why,mistersandman , what in the fuck is ZOMG SMELLS? I asked myself the same thing when I saw this advertisement on my favorite webcomic:
"Fine nerdy perfumes for fine nerdy people." I'm just repeating for emphasis.
For me, two questions immediately came to mind. 1) What could a nerdy perfume possibly smell like? Images of Mountain Dew (or MTN DEW, if you prefer) and unbrushed teeth bombard my brain, scorching my fragile occipital lobe and leaving only a husk of those reptilian olfactory regions that can't be bothered to look up the name of.
What separates a fine nerdy perfume from the trashy nerdy perfume your significant other hastily grabbed off the bargain rack in preparation for some forgotten anniversary? Your guess, friends, is as good as mine. Perhaps the perfume breathes through its mouth more. Perhaps it breathes through its mouth less! Perhaps it has more Weird Al songs memorized or has a higher concentration of long cathairs.
Or, as the astute reader will suppose, it is simply more expensive, which brings me to 2) How in hell did they afford to fork over twenty-eight dollars (and twenty cents!) for an advertisement on a site that sees some pretty heavy bidding?
Both of these questions were answered when I looked up ZOMG SMELLS on Google. ZOMG SMELLS offers a variety of concoctions I'm hesitant to refer to as scent enhancers with names that range from Baby Unicorn Birthday Party to Large Hadron Collider, to inevitably, Tesla. At twelve dollars a pop, you can get your hands (and eventually your wrists and neck I guess) on a 5 ml thimble of this bullshit. Since I was raised in America, where the Godless metrics have no place, I had to look up a conversion. 5 ml is about 0.169 fluid ounces or what is known in culinary circles as a teaspoon. If you particularly hate money or just don't know what you could possibly do with a whole teaspoon of Tesla odor, you can purchase a single milliliter of ZOMG SMELL for only $2.50. These "samples" are affectionately referred to on the website as "squees."
If you've been reading all of this and you somehow think that ZOMG SMELLS are not a blight upon our culture or might even be a thing worthy of purchase I only have this to say to you:
You are better than this.
If you buy this sort of crap, you are telling callous marketers everywhere that you will indeed buy anything related to Tesla or anything that "squees." You do this because you think you are reclaiming the word geek or nerd or dork or dweeb from the elementary school playground. You are not. Just as you were exploited for mad ups by the kids who couldn't name all the pokemon then, you are being exploited for your money today. Next to hipsters, there is no identity so shamelessly manufactured as the nerd.
Where will this futile search for dweeb identity and its excreta, conspicuous geek consumerism, take society? What will it say about America as a society the day some rich dorky geezer affords to erect a marble bust of Admiral Ackbar in his mansion?
I don't really want to find out.
I snapped this photo while I was there:
Confession: I have been complicit in the theft of signs from across campus. My bad. I feel like the University doesn't suffer all that much for want of a few signs outside elevators or bathrooms and people have fun skulking around at all hours. It's a victimless crime.
It isn't nearly as bad as, say, setting a dumpster on fire or stealing a baby. I would wager that it's even more innocent than ZOMG SMELLS.
Why,
"Fine nerdy perfumes for fine nerdy people." I'm just repeating for emphasis.
For me, two questions immediately came to mind. 1) What could a nerdy perfume possibly smell like? Images of Mountain Dew (or MTN DEW, if you prefer) and unbrushed teeth bombard my brain, scorching my fragile occipital lobe and leaving only a husk of those reptilian olfactory regions that can't be bothered to look up the name of.
What separates a fine nerdy perfume from the trashy nerdy perfume your significant other hastily grabbed off the bargain rack in preparation for some forgotten anniversary? Your guess, friends, is as good as mine. Perhaps the perfume breathes through its mouth more. Perhaps it breathes through its mouth less! Perhaps it has more Weird Al songs memorized or has a higher concentration of long cathairs.
Or, as the astute reader will suppose, it is simply more expensive, which brings me to 2) How in hell did they afford to fork over twenty-eight dollars (and twenty cents!) for an advertisement on a site that sees some pretty heavy bidding?
Both of these questions were answered when I looked up ZOMG SMELLS on Google. ZOMG SMELLS offers a variety of concoctions I'm hesitant to refer to as scent enhancers with names that range from Baby Unicorn Birthday Party to Large Hadron Collider, to inevitably, Tesla. At twelve dollars a pop, you can get your hands (and eventually your wrists and neck I guess) on a 5 ml thimble of this bullshit. Since I was raised in America, where the Godless metrics have no place, I had to look up a conversion. 5 ml is about 0.169 fluid ounces or what is known in culinary circles as a teaspoon. If you particularly hate money or just don't know what you could possibly do with a whole teaspoon of Tesla odor, you can purchase a single milliliter of ZOMG SMELL for only $2.50. These "samples" are affectionately referred to on the website as "squees."
If you've been reading all of this and you somehow think that ZOMG SMELLS are not a blight upon our culture or might even be a thing worthy of purchase I only have this to say to you:
You are better than this.
If you buy this sort of crap, you are telling callous marketers everywhere that you will indeed buy anything related to Tesla or anything that "squees." You do this because you think you are reclaiming the word geek or nerd or dork or dweeb from the elementary school playground. You are not. Just as you were exploited for mad ups by the kids who couldn't name all the pokemon then, you are being exploited for your money today. Next to hipsters, there is no identity so shamelessly manufactured as the nerd.
Where will this futile search for dweeb identity and its excreta, conspicuous geek consumerism, take society? What will it say about America as a society the day some rich dorky geezer affords to erect a marble bust of Admiral Ackbar in his mansion?
I don't really want to find out.
