Nerd Pilgrimage

Twenty hours of flying—stops in London and LA—and I finally made it to Vegas. Apparently I’m staying in a villa that MTV used for some reality show, crammed in with twenty other bloggers who had the audacity to start a website. Oliver from Zeitgeschmack is here. Simon from Blogwerk. Anna from Hi-Tech. You get the picture. Some of the others are probably already lost in whatever nightclub or bar passes for fun in this place.

Microsoft invited us out for CES 2012—Consumer Electronics Show, the annual tech pilgrimage. Windows 8, new Kinect stuff, Xbox games. Nintendo’s showing the Wii U. Sony brought the PlayStation Vita. Every tech company imaginable has set up booths, some with genuinely clever stuff, most with devices nobody will remember in a month.

And then there’s the celebrity parade. Justin Bieber is here. So is 50 Cent. Eliza Dushku. Jillian Michaels, for reasons unclear. Miss America showing up to attempt coherent speech. Tiësto’s doing a live concert on Twitter. It’s this strange mix of technology and C-list entertainment that nobody asked for but somehow exists anyway.

I’m hanging around until Thursday, then catching a bus through the desert to LA and flying back to Berlin. If I make it. There’s a Destructoid video that explains CES—gets interesting around minute twelve. But honestly, I’m just here to see what happens when you throw tech nerds, free alcohol, and a party circuit into one place and see what sticks.