Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))

Illiad revels in the trappings of techie culture--abundant references to Star Wars, The Hitchhiker's Guide, Tolkien , Quake and Linux ("Stef thinks he's a penguin. Is he all right?"). But there's also humour here for those who aren't white, wired 18-30 year-old males. Illiad gets the way technology is changing the way we live: our curious relationship to spam ("I read it every morning like I read headlines! 'Be wealthy in 30 days!' 'A free turnip!' and 'Babette is waiting for you!' I want Babette to be waiting for me!!"); our habit of hiding behind disembodied digital communication ("I just find that in chat I can be a lot more expressive"); plus a healthy dose of self-deprecation ("You hit it off with A.J.? That's like Angelina Jolie being attracted to Illiad. It would just be wrong.") Smart and quirky, Illiad's cartoons cut through market-speak with laugh-out-loud humour, documenting the idiosyncrasies of a subculture that's moving fast into the mainstream eye.--Tamsin Todd

The comic strip USER FRIENDLY maintains a continuous storyline, so EVIL GENIUSES IN A NUTSHELL picks up where the first collection, USER FRIENDLY, left off. The main characters - the staff of Columbia Internet - were introduced in the first book.

Written and set during 1999, the year that THE MATRIX and STAR WARS I: THE PHANTOM MENACE were released, there are lots of then-topical references (such as the completely empty offices of Columbia Internet on May 19 and the ultimate possible evil release date for Quake III).

For instance, during one of Stef the marketing guy's dust-ups with Erwin the AI, Erwin is temporarily loaded into a Furby's toy body. (Gentle readers might remember the talking stuffed toys after a little thought.) After Stef destroys it and Erwin retaliates, Stef finds himself in big trouble with the NSA. :) At one point, Erwin ends up talking like Yoda after being stuffed into a reverse-Polish-notation calculator.

And there are plenty of fantasy elements (at least, if you're in management, you can tell yourself that's all they are). Crud the demonic entity, saying that Microsoft is passé, changes over to AOL. The techies have a holy war over which of the various flavours of Linux is The One (TM). Erwin tries to nuke a spammer, with Russia and China joining in. Pitr tries to solve some budget problems by seeking refunds for all the copies of 5 different versions of Windows Columbia Internet has acquired with their hardware. When Microsoft's anti-Linux team arrives, the coders do the logical thing: they sic the thugs onto Stef. Erwin messes with Stef's head when they get him back, almost turning him into a techie ("I'm thinking I should've taken the blue pill"), but Delilah from MS sales re-education changes him back. In between, the techs play with Half-Life, Alpha Centauri, and Rainbow Six. (When a Terminator-like engineer's brain is replaced by a Pentium III chip, our heroes only notice him because his shotgun is a cool Quake weapon.)

*No* real life techies would try to shop a colleague onto the graveyard tech support shift, would they? No sleazy marketing guy would order sleek new computer gear just to impress a good-looking female techie would he? Just fantasy elements.

Right.

Not many Y2K strips, although the techies do prepare, because while Columbia Internet is compliant they're betting that Windows isn't, and that their clients will blame them. (The next collection, THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL, deals with the post-Y2K letdown.)

New characters:
- Artur the possessed engineer, who talks like Ahnold
- Matt the sea urchin, a new friend of Dust Puppy's rescued from a sushi bar


Serious techies only need apply...   March 13, 2001
3 out of 15 found this review helpful

Lets admit it, this is a techie commic strip and unremarkably American. It follows the life of a group of tech support guys (and one girl), a curious "dust puppy" and an AI program that somehow manages to get transfered into any electrical gadget imaginable. The book manages to enforce every steriotype about techies that has ever been thought up and has introduced a few new ones of it's own.

Having worked in tech support myself, I'm sad to say that there will probably be those who do enjoy this kind of humour, but most of the techies around me would find it as I did - boring and a more than a bit unfair.


I don't believe it......   January 9, 2001
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I love it. I love it online. I love it in a book. And now I realise that I haven't got the first one. And I must have it!!!! Seriously though, any self-respecting geek (is there such a thing) should have a copy of this.


Probably better than the last UFie book   July 5, 2000
Hilarious. Buy it, read it. Just not on public transport.


Humourous and sits Invisible with my working O'Reilly books   May 25, 2000
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Some of the cartoons are a bit long, especially when compared to succinct Dilbert.

Full of many trueisms and I can sympathise with the Alpha Centauri addict, as I left a copy on my brothers machine and his productivity crashed!

An excellent view on the world, although I haven't seen any jobs advertised for those with Experience in World Domination yet.

Ideal for M$ hating unix Gurus I eagerly await the network engineers revenge.