Best Buy — Embrace your Inner Geek

I love Best Buy, and I hate Best Buy. I think they both can fit in the same sentence. If I  could write a slogan for Best Buy, it would be something along the lines of “Embrace your Inner Geek,” if it isn’t already taken.

The Good News

Best Buy is an electronic superstore. If it can play movies or music or games or Windows, you’ll find it there, somewhere.
And if it is movies or music or games… welcome to the store!

I was pretty sad when I heard the Virgin megastores had closed. I never had the blessing to see one myself, but if I could remake in my mind, I would only make the media section of my local Best Buy a little bigger. Best Buy has virtually every genre of movie available, and customer service reps will (or should) be walking around, asking if everything is all right, and helping you look up products and offering to order them in for you if they don’t have them in stock.

Maybe it’s just a small-town thing. But I love it.

Of course, I love the section catering to the niche market of Japanese animation enthusiasts the most — the otaku. Way out in the boonies, there are no stores that stock Japanese animation, save for the occasional title at the local Movie Gallery, perhaps. But Best Buy boldly puts out a whole shelf of the stuff! It has much more, of course, if you care to look.

The Bad News

The Geek Squad makes me cringe, and I would never, never trust a computer in their service. Maybe it’s just because I’m a computer geek myself, or maybe it’s because I’ve seen a friend shell out a couple hundred dollars to fix a problem that shouldn’t have been there, and could have been resolved with a little extra elbow grease.

Geek Squad has been exposed once with claiming a working, virus-free computer was bogged down with viruses and had to be replaced. It has also “accidentally” stumbled on child pornography. It makes me wonder how much they have also “accidentally” stumbled on that isn’t illegal that they might have kept to themselves? I’m sorry, I don’t want Geek Squad to go through my stuff.

Another random gripe: Watch out for cable prices. RadioShack will gouge you a little less when you need to buy a cable for a printer that didn’t come with one. Of course, cableless printers inherent to lazy printer manufacturers, so don’t blame Best Buy on this one.

The Bottom line

If Best Buy would let me, I could live there. Watch a little anime on a flat-panel TV, eat a little food and sip a Red Bull, then curl up somewhere in the audio adapters section for the night’s sleep…

Merry Christmas!

I figured I owed it to my devoted readers to post a Christmas picture or something. Heh, just kidding. I don’t have any devoted viewers. But anyway, here’s something I just finished today. It’s a little late but I hope you enjoy it.

Merry Christmas!

Anime… as art

I was coming back, with friends, from a Math Team competition. Some of us managed to get to a nearby Chef Chu’s. I realized it was the same one I had gone to before, and an artist/waiter there had started displaying some of his art on the wall. So there was traditional oriental art on one side of the restaurant, and Japanese anime on the other.

I could have cried. It was not my influence that inspired him to draw, but I’d like to think I encouraged him to display it prominently.

Yesterday, I was at the same restaurant, and found a somewhat edited artbook, “Arts – not for Sell,” lying on a bench, hidden behind a plant, semi-available for the public to appreciate. After eating, I admired it. A small picture of a schoolgirl that I had printed from the Internet, trimmed, (and subsequently included with a prior tip) had been inserted into the cover, along with Mr. Vang’s re-interpretation of the picture.

It’s always pleasant to find another otaku… even if I’m not much of an otaku myself.

Penguins

 

A quote from Josh Meroneck: “Penguins are just simply evil, because they’re both black and white.”

I’d tend to disagree with this. Penguins are suited gentlement (or, if you’re an OS-tan fan, girls). They are simply too amazing to really insult. And the Penguin is the symbol of Linux. Go Linux! (If anyone out there is equally obsessed with penguins or linux or girls in steampunk costumes, feel free to go to www.jkhp.it/OS-tan for more of the same.)