Nova Atlantis

I’ve just started watching the 6-episode cable-TV version of This American Life from Showtime. Episode 2 has a great segment…well, most of them are great, but this one, "Joe No Love," is particularly great for RevSF fans. It’s about Joe, a 14-year-old boy who is just opting out of the whole love game. He just thinks all his friends are nuts for thinking about girls and all that. They show him playing D&D with his buds, and even LARPing. Basically, he aspires to be a future 40-Year-Old Virgin.

There’s this moment where he’s asked about what it would take to get him to reconsider, and he says something along the lines of, "Well, if I could go through a door into another world, and I could meet, like, an archer, someone good with ranged weapons, and I’d be like a barbarian, and we’d have a relationship based on hunting monsters. That would almost be worth it."

Needless to say, I adore this kid. I assume that, since the interviews were recorded, at least a year has passed and his hormones have probably kicked in, and he’s probably regretting a lot of what he said. I was probably a lot more like him than I can remember now, and I can only be thankful nobody had a camera around. But I’d like to give him a hug and say, "Dude, don’t worry about it. That’s life."

Oh, there’s a clip of the segment available–Joe is the kid with glasses near the end, jokingly begging a friend to help him escape from some danger during the D&D segment.