November 27th, 2008 by Chris Eng

When geeks want to start showing off and figuring out who’s superior, they stop short of whipping their cocks out to compare sizes or kicking the crap out of each other in a seedy bar parking lot. No, instead they compare something else: the size of their collections.

Every geek starts building their collection of Stuff at a young age, because there is an ever increasing amount of Stuff in the world and a limited amount of time to track it down in. The importance and relevance of Stuff when computing superiority works exactly the same way the free market does: supply and demand. Rare Stuff trumps common Stuff. If you have a copy of a comic book that was printed in 1963, but got recalled and pulped, leaving only 50 known copies in the world, that beats anything mass-market. On the other hand, if your collection consists of only a few very cool things, but you go up against someone with every single Spider-Man comic ever made, you may have your ass handed to you—quantity sometimes beats quality. Either way, you assemble your collection as best you can.

Up until the turn of the millennium that meant scouring every remotely relevant shop at every available opportunity. It meant making a list and checking the items off at a painfully slow pace. You didn’t come across Harlan Ellison novels every day, and if you did somehow come across a trove of them, as soon as you’d bought them they were gone; you had to move on and look for the next cache. Assembling a collection in this way took years, but it’s not like we had anything better to do. Let me illustrate with Danny Plotnick’s short film Out of Print:



Due to my geeky needs, moving to a small town was never even a vague consideration. Small town life would automatically preclude some of the things I’d come to view as life-sustaining: a comic shop, a punk rock/used record store, and more than one used book store. Sure, thrift stores back then had pretty good selections of weird stuff, but again—once you picked them over, there was a limited chance that they would be restocked with William Burroughs novels or Power Records albums any time soon. Due to that, geeks were basically forced to live in cities (or become intimately acquainted with process of trading or ordering through the mail).

But all of that changed with the rise of the internet. By 2001 or so, there were multiple sites from which to sustain your geeky collections: Amazon for new books, DVDs and CDs; abebooks for used and out-of-print books; and eBay as a clearinghouse for just about everything under the sun. On top of that, if you were just interested in the intrinsic value of an object as opposed to its physical worth, digital copies had become plentiful, even (or perhaps especially) for extreme rarities. Obscure bootlegged albums and concerts turned up with regularity on Soulseek, eMule and Oink, and comics like Night Nurse and The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love—consigned to the dustbins of history—were given second life through file-sharing. If you were interested in having a huge collection of Stuff and were willing to put in the time online, you could live in locations as disparate as Inuvik, Skidegate or Glace Bay. And if you just were amassing knowledge (or a digital archive), well, that was just about as easy and substantially cheaper.

As a consequence of the changing technology, whatever reservations I’d held about small town and country life (in regard to the proximity of cool Stuff) were completely eliminated. I could live wherever I liked, and as long as I had an internet connection, a credit card and a mailbox, I would never be cut off from my lifeline.

There’s an aside that should really be made at this point, touched on in “Out of Print”: when assembling our collections, the chase was a large part of the fun. It was electrifying to be scanning a shelf full of crap in a sub-standard used book store and spot a first edition of Neuromancer. Sure you can order one off of abebooks now and have it in a week, but there’s no sport in that. For that matter, when someone asks you where you managed to find a copy of The Ramones Leave Home with “Carbona Not Glue” on it, it’s less dramatic to say “eBay” than “I found it in an antique shop in Portland underneath a pile of throw rugs.”

Still, that’s the price that’s paid to ensure that geeks have the ability to move at will across the country—and the world—spreading their geeky knowledge and ways, acquiring ever greater collections of Stuff and astounding and baffling their neighbours. Oh, you didn’t know that’s what we were doing? This is Phase One of Project: Germination—see you all at the Comic Fans Meeting in Flin Flon next year.

November 25th, 2008 by Chris Eng

Picture a two-floor log cabin on the edge of the woods. There’s a large vegetable garden beside it, and next to that are the chicken coops and pig pen. Attached to the house is a waterwheel powered off the creek, which in turn powers some of the electricity. The indoor heat is supplied by the wood stove and the air smells like fresh-baked bread. I’m in the living room and so is my wife—we’re watching downloaded British documentaries being played on our PC and shone onto a pull-down screen through a projector. This is the fantasy.

And I’m not unaware that the reality—the lifestyle one my wife Carla and I are working toward—will inevitably be an assload of hard, tough and possibly brutal work. I’m pretty sure it will never match up to the idealized Black-Forest-Meets-Similkameen fantasy in my head, but that’s okay—it’s something to shoot for. And we’ve got five years to get ourselves on the path.

The beginning of this story starts with me, Chris Eng, in 1973, being born into a life of tightly-woven pop-cultural milestones. The first movie I remember seeing in the theatre was Star Wars. I started collecting comics when I was six. I got turned on to Dungeons & Dragons at age nine. We got our first in-house computer when I was 11. Most of my adolescence was evenly split between BBSing, video games and geek culture in general. Punk caught me around 13. I got my first college radio show at 16 and started writing professionally in my twenties (for magazines like Vice and Punk Planet). I was given my first editorship at 28.

I mention all of this not for whatever bragging rights I might accrue on account of packing such colossal geekiness into three decades, but to emphasize what’s missing: there’s not a single mention of country living or a simple life anywhere. This is not selective omission—it’s because there was never a point in my life where I’d considered cabin-based self-sufficiency a viable option.

Growing up in Victoria (the capital of British Columbia, with a population of around 400,000) and eventually leaving for Vancouver (with brief stopovers in Calgary and Halifax) didn’t prepare me for a quiet existence. None of the places I chose to call home are small towns… or, indeed, towns at all. In fact, the most I’d ever really seen of small town life growing up was either passing through on vacation or the Old Town exhibit in the Provincial Museum.

Work-wise, most of the jobs I’ve held over the course of my life were retail (with a few writing-related posts for flavour). There was no tilling, hewing, feeding or gathering anywhere in my past. I would be surprised if there were more than a few isolated incidents of mowing.

Have I convinced you I’m grossly unqualified to lead the dream life described at the top? I have no inborn skills (that I know of) that would be any use in moderate homesteading. Why, then, would I make this decision and turn completely away from the life I’ve spent three and a half decades building up? There’s a few reasons, and I’ll explore them at length in future entries, but it more or less comes down to two things:

1) I’m tired of city living, and
2) The way we, as a society, are living isn’t sustainable, and I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.

So I’m going to give a shot to putting the past behind me by starting my life from scratch just weeks after turning 35. Carla and I have set my 40th birthday as the deadline to be living on our own property and practicing the basics of DIY living. We figure five years is a reasonable amount of time to change our habits and lay the groundwork for what’s to come.

But here’s the crux of it: I’m not giving up my geeky affectations and lifestyle. You can have my internet when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, and those Rock Band instruments aren’t going to play themselves. Still, I want to use different methods of harnessing electricity to take me off the grid as much as possible, and with luck and perseverance the lion’s share of our food will be grown or raised on-site.

On top of everything else, this is an exercise in becoming organized and responsible—two things that weren’t always easy for me. Getting there will teach frugality and patience (possibly the hard way), and will hopefully reemphasize the importance of friends and family as the basic cornerstones of everyday living (though I don’t undervalue either of them now). I don’t expect the journey to be easy, but I do expect it to be rewarding and satisfying.

I also think it will be amusing to see how as unabashed an urban technogeek as myself makes the transition to multifaceted outdoorsman/handyman. So, if you’re interested to see how I pull forward toward my goals (as well as periodically fall flat on my face, I’m sure), please come back and check up. I’m going to try to update a few times a week—whenever I have anything to say. And if you have something to say, please introduce yourself in the comments or at chris@geekunplugged.com.

As one last note: before I begin in earnest, I’d also like to ask for your patience. Being completely new to some of the concepts I’ll be talking about, I’ll likely say some naive, ignorant or simply downright stupid things from time to time. This is going to be an unfortunate part of the learning curve and I apologize to everyone in advance, but there’s nowhere for me to go but up. Thanks!