Ode to Geocities

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Geocities, can it be? Thou hast been slain.
O fandom, my fandom, where wouldst thou be
Without the sites emerging from that fine piece of junk?

Blinkies, broken links, animated gifs, marquees galore.
These are only few of treasures thou hast shared
through your Sailor Moon tributes and Buffy whatfore.
Many a college-aged nerd looks back and sighs
at the first shameful, yet classy, love they bared.

O Geocities, long-dead husk of a bygone era,
My Lord of the Rings fanfic lays embalmed in your servers.
Let it rest in peace where no one, not anyone in err,
not future employers, potential spouses, nor parents alike
will gaze upon its grammatically questionable fare.

RIP Geocities. We knew thee too well.

(Yo, Keats, thanks for the first two lines, dawg. If you weren't down with the tuberculosis, I was going to suggest we go out for coffee or something sometime.)

Welcome to Spock Blocked

Here's the deal: We're nerds. It wasn't some adolescent phase, and we aren't trying to pass ourselves off as ironic hipsters. We have a fucking cardboard Spock in our living room. And this is our story.

One day in the mid-90s, in a shitty apartment somewhere in the Midwest, Brittany's father brought home a barely functioning Nintendo Entertainment System. After putting in Super Mario Brothers/Duck Hunt and beating on the top of the NES for 30 minutes, a nerd was born. Meanwhile, in a somewhat less shitty suburban house in a slightly more southern part of the Midwest, young Jessica was probably running around in her front yard in a training bra and undies, playing Wonder Woman and trying to catch the dogs with her Lasso of Truth. In the years that followed, they began to notice something different about themselves. Their peers weren't squandering their allowance on Frying-Pan Action Samwise Gamgee action figures. They were the only girls elbowing their way through the crowd of smelly boys grubbing for the new Pokemon cards at the local Vintage Stock. Even their friends who liked Harry Potter were getting tired of hearing their latest theories and sentence-by-sentence deconstructions of the books. They were forced to pursue their fandoms through Al Gore's most famous invention, the Internet.

But then, something surprising happened. They ended up at the same yuppie East Coast institution of higher learning. In a failed attempt to bond with their floormates, they went to movie night in the common room. To their chagrin, all the other girls on the floor wanted to watch some lame-ass romantic comedy with a certain unnamed surfer bum, who is apparently supposed to be attractive. Brittany declared that she was going back to her room to watch 300 instead. She asked (futilely, she thought) if any other brave souls wanted to join her. "Sure! I'd enjoy watching some Spandex-clan Spartan warriors," Jessica replied. (Okay, so maybe that wasn't exactly how it went down, but you know it's what I was thinking. -J)

And now they're co-writing a blog while a cardboard Spock looks on.