technoblogophile: A good weekend for guys

Chances are good that if you're a 20-something male with a decent amount of expendable income, you had a frickin' sweet weekend.

With most college semesters winding down, both the maladjusted and the social butterfly got several opportunities to piss away time that could have been spent studying for that uber-hard SOC test for that professor who is still totally pissed at you for coming to class drunk after that bitchin' frat party.

Not only did May's first days mark the opener for the movie Iron Man, it was also the first weekend since the Tuesday release of the highly anticipated game Grand Theft Auto IV. It even included Free Comic Book Day, when anybody still unable to loosen their sweaty grasp on their adolescence could walk into comic book shops around the country and get, with no monetary exchange at all, their very own V-card insurance. The outcome was a trifecta so complete that it left a normally divided college male demographic of fanboys and fratboys collectively cleaning their shorts from the resulting nerdgasm.

Media reports initially speculated that the clash of opening schedules of GTA IV and Iron Man would mean gamers would draw the blinds and refuse to come out of their man caves. But as Paramount's vice chairman pointed out, certain reporters are underestimating the power that a flying, rocket-lauching super suit containing a womanizing, billionaire, genius playboy has on the male pysche. Throw in The Dude as a bald super-villain sporting a 300-style beard and you just can't go wrong. That observation is supported by the fact that the film topped $100 million in its opening weekend, putting it in the top 10 list of biggest opening weekends.

But putting aside my Robert Downey Jr. man crush for a second, I think one of the best things about this weekend (and what incidentally drew such a wide swath of the dude demographic) was the fact that it allowed technology-equipped consumers to identify with the best and worst kind of human being.

On one hand, we have a video game where players can take control of Niko Bellic, an Eastern European gangster with an accent who doesn't have much of a problem jacking your ride, vandalizing your business for protection money or just good ole fashioned shooting you in the face.

Grand Theft Auto IV is one of the most technologically sophisticated games I've ever gotten my hands on. It's not that it has the best graphics or sets the standard when it comes to open-world style games (its predecessors have done this already). I don't even think the interactive prostitute and strip club scenes are even the main draw, although I think Eliot Spitzer sprung for the game's five-diamond edition.

Don't get me wrong, GTA IV is very good at these things. What sets the game apart is that it uses a lot of different technology, all done well, to draw players into an intriguing world of violence and thuggery that's had anti-video game fanatics in an uproar. Long live the American anti-hero.

On the other hand, we have Tony Stark, a globe-trotting mechanical whiz-kid (man?) who decides to give up the production of super advanced military weapons to use his personally developed exoskeleton for the good of mankind. Of course, he still gets to use bad-ass super advanced military weapons to get the bad guys. And fly. And impress the ladies.

And in the ultimate spirit of guyness, he manages to construct an early version of the suit in a cave using apparently nothing but missiles, sand and, apparently, 98 percent of every man's testosterone (error margin: +/- 2%).

On a side note, although the tech geeks in the audience had to suspend their disbelief quite a bit, maybe the coolest thing about Iron Man is that the concept isn't too far off. The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already funded a fairly successful prototype that's almost ready to kick ass and take names.

The two major releases slopped so deliciously in guys' collective media trough this weekend represent the extremes of an indulgent technological escapism that began with Nerf guns and "Cops and Robbers."

So if you're not in this target demographic and are a little miffed at how little you might have seen the tech-obsessed 20-something male in your life, don't think about how many hours he might have spent staring at a screen in the dark. Instead think of how this weekend's subtle combination of Stan Lee, big guns and hookers show us how much we've grown.