#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

 Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. 

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

Kevin’s Personal Fall Guide to Geekery

This forced hiatus from fretting, brooding, and fussing is the only reason I have the time to do this right now; yes, I could feasibly do it tomorrow after the test, but like I strongly hinted at last week, I plan to induce a three day coma the second I’m back in my room.

Still, after alluding to my piles of time wasting treasures in the last post, more than a few people inquired as to exactly what said piles consisted of. And by “more than a few” I mean “I think one real person and a bunch of others I imagined after trying to freebase bath salts.”

Regardless, it’s a veritable treasure trove of geekdom, and while the involuntary respite from studying has given me free reign over my time today, my actual brainz remain...uh...fettered, SO, I’m resorting to the cop out among cop outs that amounts to little more than me listing items I am physically surrounded by, hoping that the common theme(s) are enough to qualify this post as “relevant.” Relevant to what, I have no idea, but you’re about to get a fucking face full of sweet shit, as I am no doubt the paragon of fine literary/gamer/cinematic/televisionary taste - so here we go - a concise list of geeky shit to last approximately 2 months, for anyone who is interested or needs a cheat sheet to fake geekery for whatever reason:

Kevin’s Inventory of Sweet Shit (That Makes Him So Phresh):

TV Shows:
I treasure the Fall TV lineups, even if Californication never seems to decide whether it’ll crop up in Fall, Winter, or Spring until the last minute. I should also say up front that I’m bad at watching TV - I only started “following my stories” a few years ago and there’s a lot of really good TV that goes under my radar, usually shows that people expect me to watch and I have not seen a single episode of. Still, this is - at least right now, and in no way exhaustively - what I’m excited about:

- Dexter (Season 6) - Oct. 2nd - Righteous serial killer, dark humor, and a totally unexplained ever mastery of advanced martial arts. If you don’t have premium cable, steal it from your neighbor or watch online or something.

- House (Season 8) - Oct. 3rd - If you don’t know who/what House is by now, shame on you.

- Homeland (Series Premiere) - Oct. 2nd - Cat and mouse game between bipolar CIA operative and an 8-year POW’d Marine potentially turned by Al Qaeda. Generating quite a bit of positive buzz already.

- Modern Family (Season 3) - ...already going - Hilarious.

- The Walking Dead (Season 2) - Oct. 16th - It’ll be interesting to see how it evolves with a slashed budget. Still, anything based on the OG graphic novel in my now much larger collection must be watched with gusto.

- Castle (Season 4) - already started - I’ve only seen an episode or two, but I love police/law procedurals, love Nathan Fillion (protip for fake geeks: geeks love Nathan Fillion, he is a good idol to pretend to have), and think Stana Katic is kind of really adorable. Gonna have to netflix some DVD’s, looks like. Speaking of DVD’s...

- Justified (Seasons 1-2 DVD, 3 on TV) - I’ve heard nothing but amazing things, and I’m a big Timothy Olyphant fan. Furthermore, it’s based on some Elmore Leonard novels (w00t) and it just sounds generally sweet as hell.

- Chuck (Season 5) - Oct. 21 - I lost interest towards the beginning of season 4/was having trouble reconciling it with the rest of my crammed Tivo, so I stopped watching it. Still, I feel like at least riding it out for this last season, so I’ll give it another go.

Video Games:
I’ve been amassing both actual games and pre-orders scheduled to release with the perfect sized intervals of time between them - more than books, tv, or anything else really, nothing distracts me from actual priorities more effectively than video games, so this pattern of just accruing them while taking care of biznass for a month or so and then playing all of them in a video game binge immediately following the completion of said biznass is nothing new.

- Portal 2
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
- Dead Island
- Ace Combat: Horizon Assault (pre-order arriving 10/11/11)
- Battlefield 3 (pre-order arriving 10/25/11)
- Modern Warfare 3 (pre-order arriving 11/8/11...AHHHHH!!!!!)

I’m thinking it might be high time I got an Xbox 360...I started developing an affinity for indie games about a year ago and XBLA seems to generally have better pickings in that department than PSN (BASSSTTTIIIOOOONNNNN!!!!!)

Graphic Novels:

- Crossed (Vol. 1) - Garth Ennis - Plague induced psychopathy vs. uninfected people with guns. Kind of like “The Crazies,” except presumably much longer. Also, Garth Ennis is a god.

- Holy Terror - Frank Miller - Originally slated to be a “Batman vs. Al Qaeda” story. If that does not sound fucking sweet as hell or at least intriguingly novel to you, get out. Gotham was retooled as “Empire City” and Batman turned into “The Fixer” but the lone dude fucking up zealots on the verge of attempting the greatest crime against humanity story remains.

- Daybreak - Brian Ralph - A fresh take on the tired zombie genre told from the protagonist’s first person perspective, rife with black humor and a jarringly cartoony style for such heavy matter as the ever present threat of the undead and violent sociopaths the apocalypse always seems to spawn. Really excited about this one, it’s been getting a lot of excellent buzz.

- Feynman - Jim Ottaviani, Leland Myrick - A graphic novelization of the biograph of Richard Feynman. Yes. If you don’t know who Richard Feynman is...just...just think quantum mechanics, bongos, and strip clubs.

- Crossed (Vol. 2) - not arriving until December, and done by David Lapham.

- The Boys (Vol. 9) - Garth Ennis - I fucking love “The Boys”. Between a timid-ish Scottish protagonist based heavily on Simon Pegg and witnessing the massive hilarious shortcomings of countless superheroes in their private lives, it’s just amazing. Oh right, and Garth Ennis again. Unfortunately also not arriving until December :(.

Books (of the non-graphic variety):
This is kind of misleading, as I actually finished the last of my summer reading last night and don’t have another book in the chamber just this moment. But in my experience, people are always looking for book recommendations (assuming they’re “down with the reading”) so...yeah. The tactic I use for piling/binging with video games applies to books too - moreso, because they’re a shit ton cheaper - my summer reading books were almost nearly all bought in one giant batch that I’ve been working through since I graduated in early June, up through...uh...well, last night. I’m not going to go in any particular order, but I will note when I really dug the book, or perhaps even just really disliked it:

- John Dies at the End - David Wong - A novel by Cracked.com’s senior editor, I fucking loved this book. Managed to keep me in an unsettling equilibrium between terror and hilarity the entire time. Exactly the kind of think you’d expect from a Cracked writer - it’s hilarious, well-written, is poignant when appropriate, and has its fair share of dick jokes.

- Fuzzy Nation - John Scalzi - Not Scalzi’s best, in my opinion, but it’s still Scalzi. That means it’s great.

- Feed (Book 1) + Deadline (Book 2) - Mara Grant - A group of blogger/journalists uncovering some insane conspiracy in a world that is the aftermath of a decades-prior zombie uprising that’s been long contained yet still poses a significant threat to humanity.

- The Hunger Games trilogy - Suzanne Collins - Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, back in high school, was the first lengthy novel I read in one sitting because I was totally unable to put it down/put pants on and go outside. The Hunger Games, from what I understood, was basically a young adult rendering of it - which turned out to be more or less true. Kind of pales next to Battle Royale, but it’s still an entertaining, if not stylistically a bit simple, very quick read.

- Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody - Robert Brockway - A non-fiction book by my favorite Cracked columnist. It rules. If you have any interest in sharp wit, science, the apocalypse, more dick jokes, and learning, this is a must read. So good.

- Bioshock: Rapture - John Shirley - A novel depicting the events leading up to the point that Rapture (ala the video game Bioshock) goes batshit insane. It was kind of really disappointing. I realize there’s a difficulty for even excellent authors inherent in being told to write something according to what some other entity says happens, and do so in the universe that they have independently created, but in this case I was particularly bummed out. The universe of Bioshock is one of the most stylized, gripping, fresh, and rich ones created in recent video games, and while the novel gets details right, it does so without actually capturing the ‘feel’ of the world.

- Ghost Story - Jim Butcher - Book #13 in the Dresden Files. I love the Dresden Files and Jim Butcher, and it was, as expected, a fun read.

- Ready Player One - Ernest Cline - A critically acclaimed book surrounding pop culture and video games primarily from the 80’s, I saw it rated really high on two separate book reviews from entities whom I respect so I was like yeah, okay, that sounds amazing. It was good, but I’m more a child of the 90’s, so my ability to identify as nostalgically with it was limited.

- City of Saints and Madmen + Finch - Jeff VanderMeer - The former is a collection of short stories set in the steampunk city of Ambergris, while the latter is a full novel set in the same city. The short stories were alright, but the novel was fucking great.

- The City & The City - China Miéville - It had won awards up the wazoo and was dark, mysterious, and awesome. Can’t really quite explain it. At least not quickly.

- Them + The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson - Two great examples of badass, hilarious literary journalism from the dude that brought you The Men Who Stare at Goats (the book...not the movie).

- Blindsight - Peter Watts - A really trippy, award-winning, dark, excellent piece of sci-fi.

- Gun, With Occasional Music - Jonathan Lethem - Stylized pulp noir set in a steampunk universe where a lone private eye has to deal with drugs, talking animals (they actually talk, the drugs are not related), and his “karma balance”. Very cool book. Dark humor and a twisty plot.

- A Matter of Time - Glen Cook - I’m a fan of Glen Cook, although normally for his style more than the content. That switched this time around with a more simplistic writing style favored to tell a way more engaging than normal story. Klein bottles, time travel, murder mysteries, Vietnam, etc. It’s good shit.

And I think that about does it. I only have two books coming in the mail soon (Zone One by Colson Whitehead and The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins) which I’ll probably talk about at some point after I’ve read them.

Okay, time to lie down and try not to think of anything not involving the letters A, B, C, D, or E.

#nerdsunite

Click here to follow Kevin on Twitter!

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

I’m sitting for the LSAT on October 1st, and this means a number of things for both my social and physical health. Actually, it’s less a “number of things” and more just “general rapid deterioration with a side of cosmic fuck you.”

When it’s deemed crunch time, I turn into a single-minded mass of sparsely clothed flesh that is incapable of making any kind of real decision about anything because that would require diverting cognitive resources I (have at least deluded myself into believing) can’t do without for the task at hand. I subscribe to the Robocop School of Achievement, wherein one simply keeps walking through explosions and walls of gunfire until a task is complete because fuck it, I’ll tend to my numerous hundred injuries (read: SWEET BATTLE DAMAGE!) afterwards.

That said, usually the stars align in my favor and limit the amount of damage I sustain/have to deal with later, but this time around - and with the stakes arguably much, much higher - the stars seem to have formed an astrological dick on my forehead, or at the very least the asshole Gemini twins teabagging an astral projection of me.

Basically, up until about two weeks ago I was just sort of rocking a fairly healthy “dicking around” and “studying” equilibrium - then I took a practice test on which I didn’t do as well as I’d have liked and with only two weeks left ‘til d-day, my brain declared a state of emergency and locked down into stress mode. Since then, I’ve been laid out with the cold and some unspecified bacterial overlay/fever for a few days (the aftermath of which I’m still fighting/coughing unceremoniously into the toilet), have developed an ulcer, have abruptly found myself unqualifiedly and very single (which did manage to slightly breach my emotional embargo), discovered that one of the uber-cool chicks I was taken with on OKCupid (before I lost my shit and killed my account without a word of explanation) is now a budding pornstar who is in at least superficial contact with Misti Dawn no less (this definitely doesn’t count as a “bad thing” per se so much as something that normally would at least cause me to do a lecherous double take and lose my stride momentarily), have generally neglected my social life I’m sure to its minor irritation that it’ll no doubt make me pay for once I come bouncing back pretending like nothing happened, and am generally dreaming in multiple choice now. That could just be residual fever talking, though.

It’s actually not so bad. It could be much worse. And I still wouldn’t really notice, such is the nature of my mental stress-override. Would Robocop let an ulcer stop his dispensation of 9mm justice? No! Because he’s dead inside like me. Either way, be it an ulcer or missing limb, it’s basically all the same until the lockdown lifts and I’m forced to actually deal with it come 2pm, October 1st.

The thing that sucks, though, is that the same mechanism numbing me to any unpleasantries also precludes me from appreciating anything good/awesome - both present and future. My parents are going on vacation for a spell, something that rarely happens and when it does normally calls for some sort of hurrah/major decompression/relaxation, because my parents’ house is amazing and being its sole occupant is the kind of thing that intoxicates with (imagined) power - as it stands, I am fresh out of fucks to give. It changes nothing, at least until the moment I leave the testing room (at which point - HAYYYYYYY LADIES. HAYYYYYYYY. OH HAYYYYYY!). A number of threads leading to potentially fruitful, excellent friendships and indeed, entirely new social circles have dangled about - all they require is a little coaxing and attention on my part, which until this test is over I’m frustratingly unwilling or unable to give - and I’m just kind of idly hoping in the back of my head that said threads patiently bear with my shit and stick around a little over a week.

But just because I’ve been buckling down doesn’t mean I haven’t prepared at all for the instant my pencil hits the desk and I start evacuating all knowledge LSAT from my sore brain. My delicious Fall TV lineup kicks off the day after (Dexter, Homeland, House, etc.), a tiny pile of video games jiggling their proverbial digi-boobs and promising countless hours of fun has been accumulating (studiously ignored until the floodgates lift - I am the rotund king of delayed gratification), and an even bigger pile of graphic/non-graphic novels has likewise been waiting for test’s end to fight over my soon-to-be vacant psyche with the rest of the mindless-ish entertainment.

But I don’t care. Or more accurately can’t care. I’ve tried. I’ve hovered over the aforementioned piles - sometimes in the nude - and waited for something resembling a spark of excitement, and nothing. My mind invariably snaps its fingers and says something stupid like “hey, instead of standing nude in a dark room over inert plastic cases, you should probably work on your reading comp or logic games. And put some clothes on.” People keep asking me about plans post-test and I can verbally express what I want or intend to do, but I can’t actually imagine any of it happening, nor render any decisions regarding them - as far as my mind’s concerned, time stops when the test does. This October 2nd you speak of? Haven’t heard of it. Isn’t real. And for the same reason, all the TV, video games, and other cool shit isn’t exciting so much as a single electron in m’body because I can’t mentally grasp actually using any of it right now.

Fuck, I actually was asked to give a really brief talk at my alma mater on Monday morning about a psych paper I wrote (that I think I mentioned many posts back) and haven’t yet brought myself to figure out what I’m even going to say. Poops.

Oh...oh dear. I’ve said too much and been away from t3h books too long. They’ll come looking. They’ll hit me! Either way, yeah - Robocop. That’s the moral. Or something.

Oh. Right. Parfaits. I’ve realized I fucking love parfaits. They are the omega-shit. They are my torch in the present darkness, providing light, warmth, and...something to watch since I’ve forsaken TV at the moment.

Okay, that settles it - back to studying - but first, I need a little yogurt, granola, honey, and strawberry up inzzzz. Ta.

PS - Mr. Kellett, the house-sitting I talked about actually conclusively kills any indecision I had about going to Vegas the night of the 1st. Which really sucks, because in lieu of recent circumstances, there’s nothing I’d rather do more. Sorrrrrry brooo!

#nerdsunite

Click here to follow Kevin on Twitter!

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

As the LSAT lurks just around the corner like a hairy multiple-choice rapist, my otherwise scattered (and arguably retarded) attention is slowly coalescing - uniting itself if only for the briefest of moments to face a far deadlier threat from without - and as such, I’m marshaling any spare cognitive fuel from...like...everywhere else for a while. I’m becoming selectively very, very lazy.

If you told me that you actually read my column consistently, I would react a) in disbelief, for the very simple reason that I don’t believe you and am saddled with trust issues or b) still in disbelief because...well...why? I’ve read this shit, and frankly I don’t see the appeal. Each to his own, I suppose.

In any case - yeah, if you still insist that you're a mysterious repeat customer, I blame the reasons outlined in paragraph #1 for any drop in length or quality (questionable as either may already be) that you may notice, as well as pre-emptively apologize for the temporary dip in the utter bullshit you’ve come to expect from me.

Along similar lines - I haven’t really had time to peruse through the ol’ notebooks and hoarded PowerPoint lectures from the college days of yore to find another relationship psych morsel for thee to nom on, mainly because the weekend was kind of an aberration from my usual behavior...in that, like...I actually left the house, was thus busy, and neglected doing research to inspect this “life” thing I keep hearing about from the family I keep bound in my closet.

I don’t get out much. Typically, one may find me brooding in my e’er shades-drawn room-cave. I’m like Batman, if Batman did absolutely nothing useful and only had powers stemming mysteriously from a prodigious lack of hygiene. Admittedly I’ve tried to be more social than in the past - I try to do trivia night at a local tavern with friends from high school when I can, and if scheduling allows, I’ll trek over to Irvine for an over-nighter to say ‘ello to those people.

I went to school in Washington, DC for a bit, but that particular cross-section of my life isn’t as socially prominent in my current one - I only really have one friend from DC who lives anywhere close by, and if one takes into account that “close by” is Santa Monica and that I go into an infantile rage when I have to go anywhere even within Pasadena, I don’t see him very often.

As it stood - this particular weekend, one of my other boize from my little DC quartet was visiting/staying with the dude in Santa Monica. He was visiting from India and I mean shit, I hadn’t seen the dude in probably 3 years -- if ever I needed a little kick in the ass to finally turn the keys and roll to Santa Monica, this was it. After all - these are the guys I invented this drink with.

I arrived at my friend’s apartment (to avoid confusion, his name is Alex) for the first time and got the tour where I met his excellent roommates and eventually ran into his girlfriend (and the vomit stain she’d left on his floor from the night before). Upon receiving a typical bear hug from my unusually tall visiting Indian, excited well-wishing took place briefly before immediately devolving into the pseudo-comatose lethargy that characterized our social lives even back then. It was glorious.

After regrettably watching ‘Little Monsters,’ the plan was finally imparted to me. Go to Alex’s girlfriend’s place in Hollywood, pass da libations around (yo), and ultimately strut our shit on Sunset until...some unspecified goal was met. (It turned out to be 2am dinner at IHOP)

We arrived at the girlfriend’s place without incident, our offerings tabled, and caps and corks alike were discarded. Eventually I got talking with one of Alex’s roommates, both of whom had come along.

He asked what I did. I responded, grimacing, that I was pretty much just focusing on the impending LSAT, but that in my spare time I wrote for a blog.

“...which blog?” he asked, something more than idle curiosity hanging over the words.

I’m not sure when I stopped speaking and he started, but between the two of us, the phrase “TALK NERDY TO ME, LOVER!” was vocalized, followed by the appropriate “holy shit!”s and “small world, eh?”s.

For you see - those of you long time readers of this blog - I was shooting the shit and preparing to go bar hopping with none other than Sam Kellet (aka Poetic Peppering of Parfleche), who was rather drunk, rather hilarious, and rather awesome. Between Sam and the other roommate, their collective love of womankind and good alcohol rivaled that of every British superspy and playboy billionaire nominal-aristocrat from a country no one really cares about combined.

If Alex and I are the (endearingly?) awkward guys who only happen on romance and/or a woman’s touch by unwittingly stumbling into it - Sam and the other roomie were like a horny thermonuclear bomb shat from orbit towards Planet Women, their express purpose to love the shit out of it and forever irradiate it with sweet affection. And they carried this purpose out with a single mindedness that knew not forethought or pain - no amount of rejection or ambiguity would stop this bomb from hurtling forward and performing its task. No hesitation, no planning - just instinct and fluid motion. And despite what my social anxiety and intravertedness told me should be the disastrous consequences such behavior would lead to, it actually worked. I was actually quite awestruck. And then realized that it worked because they had their priorities straight.

Sam told me at the very beginning of the night: “Dude. Women. They are awesome. We’re going to hit on all of them. We are very likely going to make total asses of ourselves. Actually, not ‘likely’ - we just are. But it doesn’t matter. Because tonight is about having fun. And if you have fun, everything else just falls into place.”

And he was right. I know he got several digitz and also triggered a congo line I was unwillingly sucked into, but at the end of the night - he definitely had fun. He clearly enjoyed the shit out of himself, and that - I’m sure he’d agree - is really all that matters.

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

The Social Network (Is Usually Right)

A few weeks ago I was performing my morning routine of scouring the latest on Cracked.com while drinking coffee and joylessly scanning terabytes of streaming porn in the hopes that something might actually pique my progressively deviant and macabre cravings (there are never enough animals) when one of the columnists (on Cracked, not on FarmFrenzyXXX.com) dropped this pithy little nugget: “A bad relationship is like a really good night’s sleep --- you can’t appreciate it until you wake up.”

I laughed, as I am wont to do at regular intervals while anywhere on that website, but this time it was more of a knowing chuckle - the kind that would seem really patronizing and annoying had anyone else been around to hear it. A hearty dad chuckle, if you will.

I did so because shit, it’s depressingly true and reminded me of two major studies around the turn of the millennium and a slew of subsequent studies plus meta-analyses expanding on their findings - studies that basically compared couples’ ratings of their happiness and predictions about how long they’d keep trucking with the happiness ratings/longevity predictions of their relationship by their social network - namely their friends and family.

The members of the couple were always staggeringly more optimistic about how durable a fortress of blissful romance they were compared to what their friends/family thought, which was odd because the latter’s assessment and predictions regarding their relationships were way, way more accurate. Family was consistently more pessimistic and cynical than friends were - but only by a negligible amount compared to how delusionally far off in the other direction the couples were. The ironic thing is that the couples were by far the most confident in their ratings and predictions because “hey, we would know, right?” while the friends and family were much lower in their confidence, presumably because they weren’t around the couples every waking hour and conceded a substantial margin of error as a result.

So the accuracy deal does seem counter-intuitive, seeing as how the couples do in fact have a fucking wealth of data to draw their conclusions from and should know better than anyone, but oh sheeeeeit - yeah, it makes perfect sense.

Getting romantically involved is effectively entering into a binding contract to indefinitely forfeit your ability to be rational and objective in matters pertaining to your significant other. One of the studies even kicks off with a quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Truth, reason, and love keep little company together.” Sadly, from a cognitive perspective, when in a relationship, the terms “being happy” and “not being unhappy” can often become interchangeable. For any couple in dire-ish straits, the two processes can seem like the same thing.

People have what almost qualifies as a biological imperative to protect their self-esteem. As such, barring the ability to in good conscience actively say “I am happy and in a great/good relationship,” their defense mechanisms will kick in, kind of haze over most of the bad shit, and allow them to at least believe that they’re not voluntarily participating in their own draining emotional rape - aka “not unhappy”. People foster positive illusions in relationships - they emphasize the shit out of the good, and normally this is actually fine and great, but if there’s not really any good to emphasize, the mind will settle for straight up repressing the really bad. This is why the epiphany about how terrible things objectively were never hits until after you’ve terminated the aforementioned contract. Or “woken up” from the aforementioned good sleep, if you will.

So really, really long story short - if you’re in a relationship, it doesn’t matter how much interaction data you’ve got at your disposal, because your mind’s not on the clock and ‘a balanced assessment’ is strictly 9-5 shit. But that still doesn’t explain how the parents, who have had a total of maybe 4 or 5 dinners and a collective 8 or 9 hours with the couple could have read the romantic climate that much better.

Except that it does. That’s really all the sample an observer who knows at least one member of the party well would need. Humans are decent at fooling company and putting on a good face when they’re a solo act, but with duets the relationship dynamic tends to bleed through unexpectedly, whether the couple notices or not.

But while the entire concept is great and all, it’s so much more bizarre to see in practice. In my experience, telling a friend their relationship is kind of shit usually yields two reactions: unbridled anger and irritation, or totally hollow, empty acknowledgement (“...yeaaaah...I gueeesss...”). The third, the one you wanted originally - the big “I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO” payoff - comes only after the relationship has painfully gone down in flames and the smoke has cleared, when the friend is suddenly granted unrestricted access to the full gamut of their memories, turns to you, and with this look of total amazement goes “Wow, that was fucking awful, huh?”

It makes you want to scream. It was so goddamn obvious you can’t fathom how they couldn’t see it even when you pointed it out to them.

And it’s a true testament to the power of the phenomenon, not to mention exponentially more ironic, when you were tut-tutting their relationship and scolding their blindness while obliviously seated in your own fetid romantic bog swamp of tears and anxiety.

In another finding from the aforementioned studies that should surprise absolutely no one, the women’s female friends were the best at gauging both the relationship’s state of well being and its approximate lifespan. Go figure.

There’s really no take home message or advice; we’re wired to put our bad memories in a Gimp suit and keep them in the basement, and it’s just not guaranteed that even well-founded prodding from our friends - even though they’re apparently right a lot of the time - will make us see things any differently. It’s not something we’re good at spotting, even if we consciously try to be as objective as possible --- and really, would you even want to be?

What fun is a relationship in which you’ve dedicated yourself to locating the bad, in the name of objectivity or otherwise? Unless your friends are convinced you’re dating Cthulu incarnate, and if you do actually think you’re happy - not just “not miserable” - then hey, fuck it.

Actually I guess there is a bit of advice in all this: Don’t actively search for problems, but when in doubt, just ask. Your friends (assuming they’re not just trying to make a play for your sweetie) are often right, and you can trust their judgment. More than your own, anyway :). 

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.

#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

Playing Hard To Get/Easy To Lose: Science Isn't A Fan (Part 2 - MONOGAMIZED!)

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

[Part 1]

Once you’ve selected a main squeeze and changed your Facebook relationship status, ‘playing hard to get’ can do naught but shake its tiny fist and scurry off. When you’re actually in a committed relationship, it’s sort of by definition impossible to ‘play hard to get,’ but that doesn’t mean that the same principles can’t be applied.

‘Easy to Lose’ is the mustachioed, monogamous big brother of ‘Hard to Get.’ It’s the same basic strategy of stoking someone’s hots for you by implying the obstacle of real or imagined competition in your partner’s mind, except this iteration is retooled for those already in a relationship, giving not the impression that they need to work harder to earn your affection, but that they need to work harder to keep it; less emphasis on the concept of posing a challenge and more on just making them jealous as shit, but same overall idea.

And ironically, it suffers from the exact same gender-disparate pitfalls as playing hard to get. This is especially problematic as the strategy not only has a lot more riding on its success - the survival of an established relationship, not just a budding one - but also because it sees far more action in the field than its little brother.

As with ‘playing hard to get,’ guys have the luxury of a fairly proven success rate when it comes to levying jealousy as a weapon. Sure, both guys and girls will get a touch pissed once the game is afoot, but that’s where the sex-based response similarities end.

According to plenty o’ research, women have evolutionarily placed a premium on their interpersonal relationships - back in the good ol’ cave days, both their survival and emotional well-being more or less depended on it; these days it’s mostly the latter, but it’s no less important. This relationship-oriented mentality promotes the vigilant maintenance of one’s ties with friends, family, and one’s romantic partner; it’s also why women tend to notice and actively dwell on problems in a relationship whereas men take home the Olympic gold for ignoring the fuck out of them (subsequently expressing shock and surprise when they get dumped, despite the preponderance of problems that to everyone else had obviously been plaguing the relationship for a while).

As such, when a dude makes a girl jealous by flirting around, data suggests that she will (yes, get a bit peeved, but then) instinctively assume that the current state of the relationship is the problem and constructively work to improve it, thereby removing the guy’s reason for straying and protecting the relationship itself from further peril. Whether he’d hinted at more sex or more doting being on his wish list, there’s a decent chance his manipulative ass will get just that.

And once again, women’s adoption of the tactic, according to experiments and surveys, seems to rest on the implicit and incredibly generous assumption that men are just as relationship-oriented and constructive as they are. Ha! That’s what you GET for giving us way too much credit!

Evolutionarily, if it can be said that women treat the underlying problem in the face of jealousy, men seem to specifically just target the symptoms; boring relationship and ill treatment of your partner be damned - that asshole at the bar she’s flirting with is the real problem and you will crush him. Outside threats trump structural integrity on the “to do” list.

As such, when women deliberately try to make their men jealous by ramping up the harmless flirting, one of three things tend to happen, absolutely none of which resemble a ‘desirable outcome’:

1) Guy just either isn’t the jealous type, trusts you too much, or is totally oblivious and just doesn’t notice. This is more or less the opposite of what was supposed to happen, and common side effects include increased frustration, bruised self-esteem, and worst case - going from pretend flirting to real fucking around.

2) Guy notices. He notices so hard. He notices so hard that he...uh, grows sullen, retreats to the couch to watch TV, and broods by himself because he now feels shitty and just wants to be alone. Again, fail.

3) Guy definitely notices. He walks over with a vase filled with flowers and you think “Aha! It totally worked! He’s so hot and bothered over me!” right until he smashes the vase into the face of the guy you were flirting with and puts him in the hospital, thinking to himself that that’s the end of that. The worst part is that this does actually happen, and way more often than you’d hope. And in the worst cases, the asshole puts the girl in the hospital too.

Wrapping it up - yeah, the costs vs. benefits are not exactly the same for girls and guys.

The good news? It’s a shitty idea for anyone to play the jealousy card. Even though guys do come out on top in this round, any advantage conferred is incredibly short-term at best. The tactic does nothing to protect against, and really, just adds fuel to the inevitable long-term buildup of resentment a girl will feel after being manipulated in this fashion however many times. And hell hath no fury like a woman’s long-term buildup of resentment.

So, yes: It’s a lose-lose for everybody. If there’s a grotesque elephant in the room, don’t try to covertly assassinate it and hope no one notices - call attention to it and calmly discuss. Don’t play Cold War with your love life. Hash that shit out directly, constructively, and without criticism. The staggering amount of literature and lay-wisdom dedicated to offering every way but the direct way of dealing with relationship problems speaks volumes to how massively uncomfortable we are with simple, straightforward communication that may have consequences - but there’s also literature out there that can help you do that, do it well, and be happy.

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.