The Great Geek Manual

Resolution: I will spend less time online and more time in the real world.
Reality: Burning Crusade hits shelves January 16, and every time someone else hits 70 before you, you die a little inside.

Resolution: I will only blame Bill Gates for things that are actually his fault.
Reality: Microsoft promises new Vistas of frustration in the coming year and “Damn you, Steve Ballmer!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Resolution: I will be more magnanimous with my family tech support.
Reality: Ubuntu would seriously kick ass on Grandma’s computer!

Resolution: I will only make insightful, relevant posts in forums.
Reality: With foolish speculation sparked by the latest Harry Potter title flying thick and fast and Vista hitting the shelves, there is no emoticon to express the rage that I’m feeling!

Resolution: I will not make expensive hardware upgrades for minor increases in performance.
Reality: That’s easy for you to say now, with your nice new Christmas computer, but you’ll be Googling until you have blisters to ensure that your hardware takes advantage of every new Vista feature.

Resolution: I will get out and do things with some real world friends.
Reality: After a quick survey of your WoW guild and IM Buddies, you realize the only people in a five state radius who you speak to in person are you family and co-workers. You revise your resolution to, “I will strike up a conversation with other cos-play enthusiasts while waiting in line at the local premiere of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” Sadly, this resolution will fall through as well once you realize that the others don’t share your intense commitment to your role.

Resolution: I will meet a new guy/girl and ask him/her out on date.
Reality: You spot Mr./Miss Right at the grocery store while on a ramen run. You follow him/her around until they actually begin to glance over at you curiously. In a panic, you snatch up a box of tampax and pretend to be reading the instructions of the upside down box. When he/she leave the isle, you dejectedly slink out of the store with your quart of Chunky Monkey to spend the night wondering what MMORPG adventures you might have shared with him/her.

Resolution: I will find romance, no matter what it takes!
Reality: No one responded last year to my your Craigslist post, “Swm with above average gaming skillz seeks wickedly sweet geekette, soft-palate lisp and glasses preferred. Must love Firefox.” No one will respond this year. For yet another year, the only woman in your life will be your mother.

Resolution: I will spend less of my paycheck on comics.
Reality: Buhahahaha … Sure. You can quit anytime you want. You can try weening yourself from comics using dcp comic releases on bittorrent, but let’s face it: the tangy sweet odor of geek sweat permeating the comic book store, the dagger-sharp riposte of the comic guy, the crisp newness of the comic’s pages, the hours of packaging and organizing your collection … it’s half three-quarters of the fun of the comic experience. Two Wednesdays in, you revise your resolution to, “I will spend less of my paycheck on mainstream comics.”

Resolution: I will read a real, mainstream novel this year that’s neither sci-fi nor fantasy.
Reality: Having just finished “Knife of Dreams,” the eleventh installment in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, over the holidays, it’s time to re-read the first ten books in the series in order to understand what the heck just happened. That keeps you occupied right to the point where JK Rowlings finally admits the July 7th 2007 release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows,” the last book in the Harry Potter series, at which point you will begin to re-read the entire Harry Potter series in preparation for the release … again. The winter will herald the release of the eleventh (and possibly last) installment in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. In between? Welcome to the year of the blog. You try and try to find time to read something meaningful, but Slash Dot and Boing Boing occupy more and more of your free time. When you finally do get to the neighborhood mega-bookstore, you buy coffee, browse the magazine isle, head towards the fiction, get distracted by newest O’Reilly technical reference manual (the one with the cute Tasmanian lemur on the cover), and finally get usher out at the stroke of eleven by a harried store clerk.

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“A Geeky New Year: Resolutions & Realities” was written by Pipedreamergrey and originally posted to The Great Geek Manual. It may be reposted so long as this notice remains intact. Copyright 2006 Pipedreamergrey.