Now I Know What an Etui Looks Like

Geek Out New York on the 2008 American Crossword Tournament:

http://geekoutnewyork.com/2008/03/crossword.php

This is a great article, well-written and funny, but I'm just as impressed by what the author, John Teti, has done: left his computer desk and produced an original piece of reportage. The "are bloggers the new journalists?" argument rages on, despite the fact that most bloggers AREN'T doing any real journalism...mostly they're just riffing lamely on the work of real journalists. Bloggers are journalists the same way tour guides are architects.

So it's nice and even a little inspiring to see someone create original work for his blog.

Elsewhere on his site is this neat tribute to Teti's Friendly Local Game Store:

http://geekoutnewyork.com/2008/02/strategist.php

That picture of game shelves stretching back to the vanishing point seriously made my heart hurt. Christ, I wish this town had a FLGS. Oh, don't get me wrong, we have a game store, and it even has a decent selection, it's just run by humorless socially awkward dicks who consider selling board games to be a necessary evil so their Warhammer store can stay open.

I mosty just run in, pick up my special order*, and run out. How nice it would feel to be part of a gaming community that wasn't comprised of, as my favorite writer puts it, guys with their "creepy dusters and that classic militaristic fervor of a guy who would NEVER survive in the military."

I run into these guys every time I go to buy board games, and lately I've been thinking about how they are TOTALLY the modern-day equivalent of Don Quixote.

Think about it: they're so addled by their consumption of media that their waking life has become a sort of dreamworld where they star as the ultimate badass, during which they pontificate at length about the particulars of their delusions, and all attempts to dissuade them from this certainty gets absorbed into their self-mythos or just ignored.

(Also: frequently accompanied by fat guys.)

I'd love to see someone make a modern-day Man Of La Mancha about a sad sack military fetishist's increasingly pitiful adventures with his adoring chubby sidekick.

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*The way they do special orders is so annoying, too...you're not ordering it for YOU, you're ordering it for the store. When it comes in, they just put on the shelf and yu better hope you get there and buy it before anyone else does.