Looking for Mr. Right.com

“In what parallel universe do computer geeks look anything like Keanu Reeves?” a friend once asked me as she set about demonstrating that The Matrix was completely implausible.

I had to concede that she had a point.

A computer geek myself, I’ve never in all my years of geekdom met another computer geek who looked anything like Keanu Reeves. Or Carrie-Anne Moss, for that matter.

Asia Carrera
Which is why it’s easy for someone like me to be drawn to the likes of Asia Carrera — porn star and computer nerd extraordinaire (she spends her time offset handcrafting her own website and designing skins of herself for Unreal Tournament) — even though I’m not a fan of her films. She’s the mythical Beautiful Nerd that we never dreamed existed; her presence in this world offers hope — though false — to the utterly hopeless.

And which is why even a quasi-nerd like Sascha Knopf holds such tremendous appeal. Not only is she something of a minor computer geek, but, like Shannon Elizabeth lamenting “Where is my geek?” in American Pie 2, she’s searching high and low for a geek to call her own.

Well, sort of.

For those that don’t know, Sascha runs her own official site at SaschaKnopf.com — that is, she has a Sascha-obsessed geek running her site. But good geeks are hard to find, it seems, and Sascha’s shrine to all things Sascha has been beset by problems from the beginning, all of them stemming from her relationships with the geeks that have built and run her site:

Webmaster #1: Being a harsh mistress is easy to get away with when you’re young and beautiful, but sometimes it can backfire, and in Sascha’s case it cost her the first incarnation of her website. The first blow was struck when Sascha put her stockbroker fiancé in charge of the internet arm of her promotional machine, only to break off her engagement to him two weeks later, leaving it for him to continue maintaining her site while she herself moved away to California. Strike one. There she met and began dating a “manipulative, ’entertainment industry type’“, but when her ex came out to California with hopes of winning her back, she foolishly introduced the two suitors while keeping her romantic involvement with one hidden from the other. Strike two. Matters worsened as the ex continued to woo Sascha while becoming friends with her secret boyfriend. Sooner or later, of course, the Awful Truth came out and the jig was up. Strike three. Things went into the toilet very quickly after that, and among the things to get flushed was Sascha’s site.
Webmaster #2: The distilled wisdom of the first website disaster was: Don’t get into a relationship with the webmaster. Simple enough. And to this end, Sascha apparently had as little to do with the new webmaster as possible: no engagement, no sex, no worries. But no money, either. (Sascha didn’t have to pay the last webmaster, so why should she pay this one?) Predictably enough, the webmaster (who was a fan of hers from her Vampirella days) lost interest in the project and the site didn’t get any further than the home page.
Webmaster #3: Third time’s the charm, yes? Thus far, no. I don’t know what Sascha’s relationship to the current webmaster is, except that it, too, involves neither sex nor money. My guess is that it won’t involve a finished site, either.

So how to solve this problem of going through webmasters like Henry VIII through wives? Obviously, Sascha needs to either pay them or date them, and until her career really takes off, the former doesn’t look likely. Which leaves the dreaded latter option, and when Sascha finally reconciles herself to this, when she at long last resolves to hold her nose and do what she’s gotta do for the good of the site, this webmaster is certainly ready to offer his services.

Hope springs eternal.