ulo.tricho.us

Hello, I'm Eli Neiburger, This is a blog vaguely focused on Libraries, Videogames, Videogames in Libraries, Libraries in Videogames, Videogame Libraries, and Library Videogames. And futuring. And futura. And Futurama. And Information Technology. And other geekery. And kids too, probably a little, let's be honest.

I'm Eli Neiburger, and this is my blog, and the views and opinions expressed here are those of Eli Neiburger, not acting in any sort of an official capacity, or anything, and are in no way endorsed by any my employers, its heirs, or successors.

Capisce? 

At last year’s AADL-GT Grand Championships, when the final battle got down to two players, one of them (Duck) intentionally drove into a fake item block, losing his last balloon, throwing the match, and guaranteeing that he would win not the Grand Prize, engraved iPod, but the then-only-weeks-old Nintendo DS. Given the iPod’s formidable cache (and higher dollar value), this was a surprise.

This season, instead of having set prizes, I decided to have the final place determing the order the winners would choose a prize from the prize pool, to avoid a situation where someone would throw the final match. Given that this year’s final surprise game was Pong, watching someone throw a match would have been utterly anticlimactic. Duck was victorious this year, taking first prize, and choosing the PSP (interestingly enough, Duck has since announced that he plans to trade in his PSP for more DS games).

The second prize winner was Jerry, a wildcard, and he barely stared at the table holding a brand-new 30gb iPod (with video) for half a second before snatching the Nintendo DS Kart bundle. Now, admittedly, these guys are gamers, but he could have sold the shrink-wrapped iPod on ebay and gotten a DS and 5 games for it. However, for the second year in a row, the appeal of the DS is apparently irresistable, even when it’s right next to Apple’s glistening cash cow.

Note: I do not hate books. I like books. I doubt that even the high school kid I saw on the bus wearing an ‘I Hate Books’ tshirt really hates books, even though he was listening to an iPod and texting at the same time, which probably doesn’t put him on the Reader’s Digest mailing list. However, there he was, the face of the future, and he thought that a good way to express himself, and possibly attract the attention of his preferred sex, would be to wear a t-shirt that declares his intense dislike of hard copy.

The real question about this guy is, where is he on the curve? If he’s an outlier, libraries should be ok for a while, yet. If he represents the mainstream, things could get ugly fast.

I wanted to see if this shirt was available online anywhere, in hopes of seeing what other shirts were being sold alongside it. For example, finding a shirt that reads “Does it look like I care” would confirm the ‘outlier’ theory, while finding it alongside a shirt that reads “Proust is a Yenta” could be one dead canary of a discovery.

I didn’t find the shirt (although I did find a cell phone wallpaper), but I did find 14,000 hits for “I hate books”. To put this in context, I searched for “I hate tuna” and “I hate pickles”, two phrases which ought to spill out of Google’s index like so many grain-fattened tribbles, and found, to my dismay, that books are hated an order of magnitude more than tuna or pickles.