#nerd slam

[doclubenpoetry]

[doclubenpoetry]

NEW VIDEO !  Doc Luben - "Star Wars: A New Hand" @WANPOETRY (NPS CYPHER 2017) (in which Luke Skywalker talks about what it means to have a robotic hand)  Thanks so much to @wanpoetry for taking this gorgeous video of my gorgeous face saying Star Wars(ish) words.  

[doclubenpoetry]

After two years of wrestling with this slippery beast of a poem, it is finally alive and I am real proud of it. Thanks to Button Poetry for hosting such an amazing event and doing such fine shooting and editing, and for all they do to support and promote this crazy microculture of spoken word. (via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBfgXXPZ7S4)

[doclubenpoetry]

The Hacker

New poem for Rose City ComicCon, Portland Nerd Slam, Sept 2014

Crash Override

They call it breaking the link.

As a video game nears its release date,

the code becomes so complex and intertwined

that it is no longer safe to just delete any part of it.

If they want to remove a chunk of bad dialog,

or get rid of a character

or eliminate an ending they no longer want to be possible,

they do not erase those elements.

They simply break the link so the player never encounters them.

Every game disk

is littered

with the ghosts of what might have been.

Hidden in the code

is the secret room where Duke gets the O.P. grenade launcher,

Hidden in the code is the scene

where Booker finally fights the Songbird,

all those the things the developers were embarrassed by

or just didn’t have time to finish,

hidden in the code is the novel

I lied to my girlfriend about writing

while I secretly sat in my office

Jack Torrenceing the phrase “this will be over soon”

in notebook after notebook after notebook.

buried deep behind a blessedly broken link

is the memory of my dad helping the nurses

hold me down

while they tried to unprogram

the handfuls of pills I had installed.

I am a member of the world’s most secret

modding community, the ones whose brains

were released to market

before they were finished,

who spend our days trying to recover the broken link

to the scene where we actually

leave the house in the morning,

pouring over line after line of code

to try and buff our “talking to another human” stat,

figuring out which value needs to be set to zero,  

because the developers for some fucking reason,

didn’t include an option

to turn off vibrate on the controller.

No matter how many doctors I see

or how many drugs they give me,

I never refer to myself with the phrase “mental illness.”

I am not a neuro-dysfunctional manic depressive.  

I am a hacker.

I can figure this out,

I own this game,

and the terms of service are bullshit.

I will change it as much as I want

until it does what I know it can do.

Cheat codes are for amateurs;

I am getting right into the config file.

I know there there is a skill tree

I was supposed to have access to,

I know there is a better ending

than the one I keep getting.

That part of me was not erased.

The link was just broken.

It’s still in there. I am going to find it.

I’m getting my goddamn grenade launcher,

I am going to be the one player

who finally fights the Songbird.

--

[bostonpoetryslam]

Phil Kaye and Franny Choi perform a Pokemon-themed "Monster" parody at the NPS Nerd Slam in 2011. If you want to top them at this year's event, you might want to start writing now.

[eloisavaldes]

Starting 2013's #LastFrys with some cool geeky spoken word - "I'm the eternal nerd of spoken word (...) I came here to role play (...) I'm coming at you in 3D". Shappy's"I am that Nerd" got me hooked since the first verse. :D

[enema0fthest4te-blog]

Trailer for a new YouTube podcast I will be on sometimes. Subscribe to the channel, it'll be great! Reblog/share the video as much as you can! :-)