Sometimes geek moments happen without warning. We all know this very well. I’m not sure how it happens to me personally. It’s almost like when I’m out in public, I don’t notice people anymore. Well, I do. But then I focus in on things they do, or use, or wear. And if I think it’s cool, I have my geek moment.
I wonder if that kind of act comes from being trained to be that way. Sometimes you end up thinking visually so much, that’s all you really notice.
I was at this sushi place in Long Beach today getting some food with my mom. As I was leaving, my eyes were sweeping the place. I noticed a smallish Game Boy in this guy’s hand. Obviously, it couldn’t be an actual Game Boy unit. Unless somehow he had bought a miniaturized clone of it.
So I walked up to the guy and interrupted the lunch he was having with the girl sitting opposite him, and asked if it was a phone case, and where he had gotten it. The answer? Apparently, our mass industrialized, Communist/Capitalist wunderkind and economic partner China produces many wonderful, cool things. The guy said he got it off Ebay, and that it might have already been sold out. (I did some investigating, and you can actually get it off Amazon.)
I don’t know if I would ever profess myself to be someone who knows what’s current and cool at this point in my life. There are just too many of those things to keep up with. And, really, there are so many sub-categories of coolness in our culture today. You may have your pulse on one thing, and you’ll be completely out of touch with something else.
But this Game Boy iPhone cover is cool. Sure, it’s completely non-functional aside from inciting a sense of nostalgia. But that’s exactly why it’s cool to me. Or everybody else really. It reminds me of those greyscale Tetris blocks free falling on that terribly tiny, green, and incredibly low-res screen. I makes me think of Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ, and all the Game Boy music that got created on that handheld system. (I have this 15-minute Game Boy remix of Depeche Mode songs that I would never throw out from my iPod even if I don’t listen to it very often.)
Sometimes you go out and you notice something that you think is cool, and you sort of have this little geek moment. And somehow even that is cool, too. Do we even remember a time when openly exhibiting that kind of behavior would be considered blasé? Now that nerds rule the world, we all can have our moments of random, cool, geekiness. And that’s exactly how it should be.
Game Boy iPhone cover. Do they have a Tanooki Mario that I can put on my Android?