Geekumentary: Nerdcore Rising

Nerdcore Rising follows MC Frontalot, the godfather of Nerdcore Hip Hop, on his first national tour. Along the way, Frontalot fanatics and music industry notables reveal the roots of the genre, the dorky complexity of its artists, and one MC's quest for nerd stardom.

It's 12:45 AM and I just finished watching the newly released Nerdcore Rising. As many as three of you may recall I stumbled onto Frontalot recently by way of the Get Lamp documentary (in development). Imagine my elation to hear that this was a 2 for 1 discovery! Frontalot was just coming out with his OWN documentary. There was a Boston screening of the film last week which I tragically missed, but held my own tonight on the couch, draped in a blanket and two cats.

Nerdcore Rising follows the MC Frontalot crew on their first big tour, which culminates in an appearance at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. I can't WAIT till PAX comes to Boston in 2010!

"I do get emotional when I read Harry Potter books" - MC Chris, Nerdcore rapper

I enjoyed this documentary, largely because I am all about this artist's music at the moment, but it was entertaining regardless. One thing that struck me was that these guys are just so normal. It's really quite endearing when you see their reactions to being snubbed by a college radio station, or how excited they are when they see the line of people at PAX that are waiting to see THEM. My very favorite part was when one of the band members issued the bubbly proclaimation, "So Kimmy says she wants to learn Magic: the Gathering, anyone else?" which elicits Frontalot's perfectly intoned, "You can't be #$%$@ serious." What followed brought me back to my early days learning M:tG. If you've played Hassle: the Dorkening (even once...especially once), you'll laugh.

"Frontalot raps about all the things I care about, like Magic: the Gathering...and internet porn addiction" - fan

Nerdcore Rising ranks in my top 10 geekumentaries list because the very nature of Frontalot's fanbase means that interviewing them hits on many geeky genres. There's frequent wookie yodeling by the band, and the fans include IT professionals, WoW players, LARPers...nerds. In a good way. The doc's also got interviews with Weird Al on the subject of nerdcore, which automatically gives it a +2 nerd check.

"...comic books, horror films, video games...all stuff that 15 year old kids love, and I'm not 15."

Right on, Brian Posehn, me too! I've been nerdcore all this time, and only now begun to appreciate it. Nerdcore is indeed rising. Hello, world!

Read about other geekumentaries in my Top 10 Geekumentaries article.

MC Frontalot

Where have you been all my life?! (or, Why do I always have to be the last one to know??)

Last week I mentioned my first experience with MC Frontalot, when a friend sent over the It is Pitch Dark video. At the time I took note of other intriguingly named videos there such as The pr0n song and Crime Spree, but didn't have time then to check them out.


A few days later, I was on the Rock Band forums in search of Moving Pictures news. I was reading the list of latest DLC tracks, the PAX pack, and noticed that an MC Frontalot song was in there (as well as a Jonathan Coulton track). So that night we downloaded Livin’ on the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe. It's got a GREAT beat, though medium guitar on the song is way too easy, and hard guitar is WAY too hard, at least for me. At the end of it, though, I said, "That's it, I'm buying this guy's CD."

The next day I went to the MC Frontalot website, and a whole new world was revealed unto me. This is my new Weird Al (all due respect to Al, I'm just sayin' it's awesome to find another artist of that caliber).

Get Lamp - early 80s Text Adventures

Maybe it's just me, but I often experience a brief moment of hesitation when a friend throws me a YouTube link these days. A brief moment where I wonder, OK, is this going to be worth clicking right now, and sacrificing minutes of my life to? It's partly due to the prolific number and variety of videos on YouTube, there's just so much there, you never know what you're going to get, or if teh funnay will be strong with this one.

My friend Sean recently sent me such a link. Now Sean is a good source for cool; when he's not taking clever perspective pictures with his action figure collection for storyboard comics, writing toy reviews for scifi.com, or creating art for The Lord of the Rings Online (his "day job"), he's writing Infocom-style text adventures. So naturally, I checked out the link with confidence, and so should you:



The long and short of it is, there's a documentary in development about text adventures called Get Lamp (which I'm constantly almost mis-reading as "Got Lamp?") and MC Frontalot was inspired to do a song on the subject. I hadn't heard of him before (OMG, have I been missing OUT!), and it's been a decade or more since I've played a text adventure, but the song is really catchy, and any gamer can pretty much get the gist.

Now, the last few years have been amazing for geeky documentaries: Wordplay, Word Wars, Darkon, The King of Kong, and the upcoming Chasing Ghosts to name a few. In this gluttonous era of plenty, a documentary about text adventures is maybe taken a bit for granted, but is just as welcome as another birthday present would be. One of the biggest and most fertile subject matters yet to be documented, as far as I know, is Magic: the Gathering. That should be good - trust me, there's easily as much drama and intrigue there as was portrayed in The King of Kong.

But I digress. For those of you who aren't familiar with Infocom, they were the primary producer of text adventure games for the PC back when PCs were new. Games like Zork and Planetfall may ring a bell. I didn't play them extensively, but I do remember them, and the heartbreaking moment in Planetfall where Floyd...well, it was one of the first times I remember a game making me feel emotion. The Get Lamp site summarizes this genre very well:

...adventure games would describe a place, and then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory.

The reason these games were so engaging was the fact that you were not picking your next move from a handful of 5 or so stated choices; you were coming up with commands (such as get lamp, open hatch, go north, climb ladder) on your own. It took the concept of Choose Your Own Adventure books to the next level, and the focus was on the story, because there were no graphics. You had to plot dungeons and environments on a piece of paper as you explored them, and really read the text, which honestly, you don't have to do in most RPGs these days. Overall, this labor intensity meant one had a lot more time and work invested in a text adventure, which is what made them special.

The nice thing is, people are still creating text adventures, and there's even software available to do it with. If you are inspired to check out the old Infocom titles, you will have some luck on the amazon.com resellers scene, or Ebay, and can also find JAVA versions online to play free.

UPDATE: On creating text adventures, Sean had the following to note:

The de-facto standard language for writing text adventures at the moment is INFORM. There are two currently-used versions. Inform 6, which is very code-like, and a new and very hot Inform 7 which uses almost English commands, allowing people who don't know coding to write their own games fairly easily. The IF community hangs out in a newsgroup, and I7 has more-or-less supplanted I6, though I'm currently using I6 because I like code more than I like pseudo-english for coding.

He also mentioned another popular text adventure coding language known as TADS. Hope that helps any of you interested in taking a stab at it!

Get Lamp was originally due to be released this past June, but seems to have been delayed. I'm really looking forward to it, and will keep you posted!

UPDATE - Nov. 25, 2008. A new weblog has been created for Get Lamp. Check out Taking Inventory for the latest news on the film's progress!