Baud Attitude

I’ve been employed in the tech industry for the better part of the last three decades, so you might imagine that I work with a whole lotta nerds – and, to be fair, I do.

Some of them are kind of on the diet nerd end of the scale, the sorts of folks who fly their nerd flag with their Wal-Mart Captain America T-Shirt, but there are definitely a few alpha nerds around here, and a couple of them know me well enough to know that my boring office drone act is 100% tatamae and 0% honne.  I swear, when I decide to finally call it quits with my current employer, I am going to deck my cube out in ponies and maids and watch heads explode.  This will presumably be followed by my boss bringing a box over for me.

Anyway, so I was browsing Lifehacker and in a state of temporary toy lust for this thing, just because the notion of a tube amplifier is so delightfully geeky, and I showed it to one of these alphas, whose dismissive response was a half-sneered “It won’t make your Girls’ Generation sound any better.”

I think I rather managed to shock him when I showed him what I actually had on my phone.

At any rate, he wandered off muttering something about it being impossible to troll me.  I think that’s one in the W column for me.

(And, no, I didn’t wind up buying a new desktop amplifier.)

Note: This post needs a ton of editing, but I’m going to throw it up so I can look at it later, cringe, and turn it into proper English.  If you see this notice, be ye warned.

It probably wasn’t conveyed very well in the last post, but one of my favorite things to mentally catalog are the bumper stickers that people put on their cars.  It seems like a pretty uniquely American thing – or at least I’ve never seen it in Japan and didn’t see it in the UK – and it always impresses me how much people choose to convey with a few bits of vinyl.

I will, at this point, set aside the stick-figure families of the world, whichever quirky variant has been chosen, because those are borderline annoying.  Likewise, political bumper stickers during election season just kind of fade into the noise.  I AM always impressed by someone who’s still displaying a political bumper sticker for the losing side months and years after the election.  It’s a beautifully passive-aggressive way to get a point across.

Mind you, if you’re still flying the flag of the WINNING side years later, that has always struck me as a little tacky.  But I digress.

What I DO love are the bumper stickers that are designed to be very meaningful to a particular in-group and to be fairly meaningless outside that group, and that’s a fascination that started for me a couple of decades ago when I saw a pair of co-workers bond over an “Easy Does It” sticker – the sort of thing that had always sort of faded into the background noise as a fairly banal saying to stick to the back of your car.  When they saw my confusion, they explained that it was an AA sticker, so if you saw it stuck to some guy’s car, you knew that he’d been through the same rough patch you’d been through.

It was an eye opener to be sure.  Up until that point, the only symbolism I’d understood was the Ichthys symbol and all of its variants – living in Oregon, which is a fairly liberal state, you see a lot of Darwin fish, and Truth Fish eating Darwin Fish, and FSM-fishes and the like.

So now, when I see a bumper sticker that just doesn’t seem to make sense, I am compelled to try to figure out what it means and who would find it meaningful.  It’s a kind of modern-day symbolism, and it’s even more interesting when it’s a group that doesn’t have any particular REASON to be obscure but is using slightly-obfuscated symbols to indicate their membership in the group only to other members of the group.

For example, seeing a HE>i sticker on a car instead of an Ichthys, or a ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ sticker instead of an “I’m the NRA, and I vote!”, when neither of these are particularly controversial views, even in Oregon.  We’re 70% Christian and we have a LOT of hunters and target-shooting enthusiasts.

There’s probably a decent thesis paper in there somewhere.  I am long since out of college.  If you have stumbled across this as a grad student in desperate need of something to write about, feel free to take the idea and run with it.

Likewise, while I’m not terribly fond of tarting up the back of your car with little white Apple logos, I get a kick from any car where the driver has dug up a vintage six-color “Apple Computer” sticker as a way to point out their corporate fandom while setting themselves apart from the iPod crowd.

On the other side of things, I have been somewhat embarrassed by accidentally flying the colors of a subculture and having very confusing conversations as a result, like when I stuck a shoshinsha mark on the back of my car as an “I love Japanese things”  sort of message and found out that it had been co-opted by people who were into tuning import cars and I was unintentionally projecting the image that I was, I dunno, into drifting or something.  I stick to just a university alumni sticker and a Dutch Brothers logo sticker now, which are fairly hard to misinterpret. 🙂

Part of my evening commute during the week is picking my wife up from school.  She both takes classes from and works at the local community college, which is in a fairly rural part of the county, so sometimes I see some moderately-terrifying bumper stickers on the cars and trucks out there.

The most disturbing was a “14-88” bumper sticker in Fraktur, which made me very glad when it didn’t turn into the college driveway.  But, I digress.

Tonight’s was, well, less disturbing.  Simply put, I was behind the Honda Civic of the world’s most honest man, and fortunately we were both stopped at the same stoplight so I could take a photo without breaking any laws.

Unknown Honda Civic driver, I salute you.

Also you need to replace a taillight.

I try to limit the number of message boards that I maintain posting accounts on, because history has shown that I am not able to maintain a level head when it comes to arguing on the internet.

Basically, I am this guy.

This is particularly important when it comes to NeoGAF, because it takes months to get your account verified in the first place and then I would blow it and get banned in the first day.  I read it primarily because it is full of teens-and-twenty-somethings raging against the unfairness of the world, and I revel in their confrontations with cold, uncaring reality.

Also it alerts me to sales and the like.  But mostly it’s the watching the millennial train-wreck that keeps drawing me back.

Hey, I have a good decade before I can sit on my porch with a dog and shout at kids to get off my lawn.  Also I need a porch.  I do have a lawn, at least.

But I digress.

Anyway, while it’s normally good fun, there are times when even I can no longer harvest joy from the misfortune of others, when I simply have to look at the world and sink into a fugue of despair for the future.

I need to share one of these with you now.

Now, I’m not a Car Guy by any means.  When I go to do anything – change a headlamp, refill fluids, really any basic car maintenance – I spend a few minutes with the manual or watching YouTube videos, because I’m convinced that anything I do has the real potential to make the car explode.  I blame it on growing up on a steady diet of ’70s cop dramas.

But even I can put on a bloody spare.