Christmas With The Service Outage

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Remember Christmases when the outages of Netflix or Steam wouldn’t have been factors?  It was only a few years ago when it wouldn’t have been as noticed or even regarded.

Of course now we can add large-scale technical glitches to other holiday annoyances like non-working Christmas lights, traffic, closed businesses, and crowded airports.  I wonder how used we’ll get to them.

I imagine not very.  We expect instant service from our technology, even if we usually accept much less.  However I imagine Netflix and Valve know this and will work to correct things for next year.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

For Us, Easy Bake is Easy To Take

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Well, it’s happened.  Hasbro, after criticism, is going gender neutral on it’s Easy Bake Oven.  As a guy who likes to cook, let me say “bravo”, and may I suggest a line of gender-neutral kid’s cookbooks and cooking utensils.  No I’m serious, have you seen how kids are eating?

It appears there’s awareness of gender issues and toy sales, even if attempts are a bit offbeat.  Of course geeks like us know that there’s plenty of cases of gender-bent preferences.

  • Hasbro, of course, has My Little Pony, which makes the easy-bake over issue look like nothing.  If they released a Pinkie Pie Microwave, grown men would buy it.
  • There’s “The Transformers,” whose fandom taught me that if your last name is “Prime” there’s no small amount of women who, when younger, thought you were the sexiest thing on two legs or four wheels.  Peter Cullen, and that large cast of Rodimi, do you know what you did?
  • Huge amounts of anime targeted at men with casts of buff guys punching stuff and bonding attract huge female audiences because it’s buff guys punching stuff and bonding.  Yaoi is a kind of cultural alkaheist.

Nothing here really surprises us.  The issues of gender-target expectations being off doesn’t surprise us.

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Business Idea: Geek Navitiy Scenes

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After seeing this geek polyglot nativity scene, I had a business idea: custom geek nativity scenes.

Imagine taking action figures, customs, etc. and creating – and selling – geek themed nativity scenes.  Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonball Z, Sherlock (though you’d probably need 3 Sherlocks as the 3 wise asses), etc.  That’d definitely sell on eBay, Etsy, and maybe just as a commission.

Merely a thought.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.