I’ve been catching up on several weeks’ worth of On the Media episodes, and was listening to their May 7 podcast at the gym last night.

During a segment about the death of D&D creator Gary Gygax, host Bob Garfield asked Time columnist James Poniewozik about the game’s nerd appeal:

BOB GARFIELD: Over the years, it’s been accused of inspiring psychosis and witchcraft as well as being the pastime of geeks. I’m talking true nerds, and Time Magazine columnist and admitted D&D player James Poniewozik makes no bones about that.

JAMES PONIEWOZIK: It was fair when I played it. It was certainly fair of me [LAUGHS] at the time, but it’s probably not fair to say that any more. Role-playing games are things that popular and unpopular kids play now. It’s sort of, you know, the dominant mode of the culture.

You know, as we know from the whole dotcom boom, from the success of Bill Gates from, you know–all these different factors, there’s kind of a pride in dorkiness that certainly didn’t exist back when, you know, I was rolling my 20-sided dice when I was 12 years old.

I suppose that what we are supposed to take from this answer is that nerdy-types are now afforded some degree of respect rather than constantly having sand kicked in their faces by muscle-bound jocks.

I’d be willing to bet that nerdy kids in elementary and high schools across the country are still having their lives made just as miserable as ever by their more popular, sports-playing classmates. Sure, kids who were D&D-playing dorks (myself included) have grown up to be successful, but one has to wonder if that has had any impact on the one who are in school now. Given the emphasis our society places on good looks and sports, I’d guess the answer is “no.”

From an article in yesterday’s Ottowa Citizen:

Compulsive e-mailing and text messaging could soon become classified as an official brain illness.

An editorial in this month’s issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry says Internet addiction — including “excessive gaming, sexual pre-occupations and e-mail/text messaging” — is a common compulsive-impulsive disorder that should be added to psychiatry’s official guidebook of mental disorders.

In other news, ZOMG!!! The sky is FALLING!!!

I’m tired of reading this kind of story. It’s been making the rounds in one form or the other for at least the last five years, maybe longer—”The internets are bad and scary and filled with perverts and criminals and anyone who spends more than five minutes a day on them is some sort of deviant.”

While we occasionally see stories about the amount of time people spend sitting in front of the TV, where is the hand-wringing coverage of sports addiction? What about all those poor phone-addicted souls? And the countless families destroyed by magazine and newspaper subscriptions? It’s the silent epidemic that’s tearing our society apart!

My point is that, while there may very well be some small percentage of web users who spend 23 hours a day doing one thing, stories like this one completely mischaracterize Internet usage. The web is an information and communication medium, and as such, it is can encompass many disparate activities that have traditionally required separate media. You spend time reading the paper, I get my news via the web. You talk on the phone with friends and coworkers, I use IM, email, IRC, and Skype. You watch the ballgame on the TV, I play World of Warcraft. You sit down in front of television and flip through 289 channels, I watch the show I like on my computer.

You look at me and say, “I do all this different stuff, but you just sit in front of your computer.” I call bullshit—it’s just two different means of doing the same stuff.

According to the Internets, NBC/FOX’s Hulu.com is officially open for business, so I figured I should check it out.

At this point, the expectations for online offering from any major content company are so low that anything would be an improvement. Taken in that light, Hulu doesn’t disappoint.

Make no mistake—the site is frustrating. Navigation borders on appalling, and the overall effect is one of spinning a roulette wheel. For arcane marketing reasons, what’s available and what isn’t seems entirely random. For some shows, the entire run is available, for other, just a season or two. Yet other shows have just a few episodes online and an assortment of clips.

On the bright side, in the “better than nothing” category, the shows that are available are in Flash, and play just fine even on Linux. They can be played fullscreen, or in a pop-out window, and I have yet to run across any inline advertisements. The videos are streaming-only, but the bandwidth seems adequate, and I haven’t encountered any problems with playback.

On the whole, Hulu isn’t terrible, assuming that all you’re looking to do is catch the most recent episode of series shortly after it aired. There’s also a reasonable assortment of back-catalog titles available, the first season or two of older shows. Will it stop people from downloading shows from BitTorrent or ripping DVD’s? Unlikely, but when I take off my nerd hat for a few minutes, I can see how it could have some mass-market appeal.

Besides, how can I really argue with two whole seasons of “Emergency!”? That was my favorite show when I was five.

I was just perusing PC Magazine’s list from a month or so ago of their rankings for the best free software.

I didn’t really learn about any new apps, but I did learn that PC Magazine has the most horrifically ugly site I’ve had the misfortune to look at it in quite some time.

I’ve been badly burned by movie previews in the past.

Preview looks really awesome, I get all excited, go see the movie without waiting for reviews, and it turns out to suck. This exact sequence has happened enough times that I made a solemn pledge to myself four or five years ago that never again would I go see a movie in the theater based solely on the preview.

All that being said, the new Iron Man trailer is pretty bad-ass.

I’ve been experimenting with two different web services for the last week or two, both of which have turned out to be rather helpful.

The first is Instapaper. It’s yet another bookmark management site, but whereas del.icio.us and other such services have all sorts of bells and whistles, Instapaper focuses on ease-of-use and a clean interface. You create an account (they don’t even require you to have password, although I chose to have one) and add their “read later” button to your browser toolbar. From then on, any time you find an interesting site that you don’t have time to read right then, click the Read Later button, and Instapaper remembers the link for you.

Originally, I used to keep a folder of bookmarks called “Temp” for this purpose, but it quickly filled up with crap, and I was constantly having to delete links blindly to keep it manageable. I’ve also tried Google Bookmarks, but again, there are too many steps involved if all one wants to do is save a link quickly.

With Instapaper, I get a nice, easy-on-the-eyes list of sites. I can either read an entry, skip it (which saves it for later), or delete it. No menus, no right-clicking, and no unnecessary “share this with all my friends!” cruft.

Another service which has been coming in rather handy of late is Todoist.com. As its name implies, Todoist is a web-based task list manager. Like Instapaper, it focuses on basic functionality. Create your account, log in, and you’re ready to start adding tasks to your to-do list.

So far, I have been finding that Todoist offers a nice balance between functionality and simplicity. It does more than the bare-bones to-do list Google gadgets—tasks can be divided up between different projects, and the due-date field understands “tomorrow”, “next fri”, etc., and can handle recurring tasks (e.g., “every tues”). However, it’s not so complex so as to force users through a learning curve.

More importantly, unlike so many other web-based task-management apps (RememberTheMilk, I’m looking at you…), Todoist does not appear to be too tightly wrapped up in David Allen’s creepy GTD cult.

My one gripe with Todoist is that their mobile site needs some work. It’s functional, but that’s about all that can be said for it. On the other hand, they offer a Google homepage gadget that works pretty well. There’s also a premium service available, but as far as I can tell, the additional benefit one receives for one’s $3/months aren’t that great—reminders sent via email, txt, twitter, etc, color-coded labels, and SSL encryption. All things considered, their free services seem perfectly adequate for anyone not obsessed with fine-grained planning of every single last aspect of life.

Stephen Fry, in his latest “Dork Talk” column in yesterday’s Guardian:

The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.

I am writing this article on a kind of mini John the Baptist, a system that prepares the way of the software saviour whose coming will deliver the 90% of world computer users who suffer under Windows from the expensive, clumsy, costly, ugly, pricey toils of Microsoft.

The subject of the column is the Linux-based Asus EEE PC. However, I’m more impressed that A) Stephen Fry has a regular technology column in the Guardian, and B) Jeeves himself runs Linux.

If you’re Apple, you force your customers to unnecessarily upgrade.

But wait—doesn’t Apple love its customers? Isn’t Steve Jobs a hero who battles against evil monopolists? DOES NOT COMPUTE! DOES NOT COMPUTE!!

While I have, in the past, railed against the endless embedding of YouTube videos on blogs, I can’t resist…

If only I hadn’t given away my Baron Karza, RocketTubes, and Biotron.

I suppose I should somehow care that last night was George W. Bush’s final State of the Union address, but right now, it’s pretty tough to summon up any feelings whatsoever regarding the matter. One can only rail against the idiocy for so long before the outrage fatigue sets in. This administration has been so incompetent and so mendacious on so many levels, and Bush himself is such a perfect figurehead for that legacy that I can only roll my eyes at this point and wait for it to be over.

So instead, I’m reading comics.

Now that the final issue is out, I have at last gotten around to reading Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man. I’m about 13 issues in, and it’s quite good. The setup is that a mysterious plague instantly kills every male animal on the planet, which exception of the title character and his pet monkey. I was pretty dubious of the concept going in, but so far, Vaughan and co-creator/artist Pia Guerra are pulling off a pretty engaging tale.

I’ve also started the Grant Morrison run of Doom Patrol, but I’m only a few of issues into it. It’s not often you find costumed heroes fighting armies of non sequitur-spouting Dadaist henchmen who dispatch their victims by cutting them out of reality with scissorhands. Fun stuff!