I love my new cat Loki. I’ve only had him for three weeks and I already can’t remember what it was like not to have him. He’s a massive dork. He rolls over and falls off the bed. (Like me.) He chases after toys, leaps flailing into the air, and falls to the floor in the most ungracious manner conceivable. (Like me.) He gobbles down his grub and then passes out on the couch, unable to move for hours. (Like me.) He’s even in the Cool People With Green Eyes club. (You’re noticing a theme here.) So far the only thing he does to annoy me is his tendency to lay on my laptop to prevent me from paying more attention to it than I do to him.

I expected that I would make kissy-wissy faces at the kitteh, and that I would worry about his well-being far beyond the needs of an animal that can basically look after himself in luxury surroundings where he is lord and master of his domain. I also expected that he would be expensive, and so far I’ve dropped a good thousand bucks on toys, food, bedding, a water fountain, an automatic poop-scooping litterbox, and wand toys with feathery pom-poms on them. Something I didn’t expect when buying a cat was that it’s impossible to get reliable online reviews for any cat products online.

Typically product reviews online, like if you want to buy a drill or a pair of shoes, you see the following:

1. How well the product functions
2. How easy the product is to use
3. If the product is worth buying

Reviews about products and services written by cat owners include one or more of the following:

1. A glowing thumbs-up endorsement written from the perspective of the cat
2. An explanation that while the product is designed well and in theory should function perfectly, the cat’s psychotic behavior renders it useless
3. Psychotic ranting about how this horrible, terrible, evil, awful product or service isn’t good enough for the cat owner’s little poopykins
4. A detailed explanation of the cat’s defecation process
5. Nasty personal attacks on the designers or purveyors of the product or service

I might be crazy about my cat, but I solemnly swear not to become a crazy cat lady.

Four years ago, when I was cast as the voice of Ahsoka Tano, I scoured the Internet looking for female Star Wars merchandise and I was disheartened by the lack of product. I was told to buy a men’s size “small” because there weren’t enough women that would buy merchandise made specifically for them. How could that be? The number of female fans that share my love for this amazing universe is astonishing and, as I discovered, greatly under served. I started doing my research and I found that close to 50% of all Star Wars fans and sci-fi fans in general are women. I also read hundreds of comments from female fans begging for merchandise designed and made specially for them, and not something that was an afterthought made in pink. I decided that I was going to step up to the plate and be their voice. It’s time for fangirls to be heard, recognized and rewarded!

The point about having to deal with buying mens’ small shirts is so true. Chicks shouldn’t wear shirts made for guys. They bunch up under our armpits and the graphics end up underneath our boobs instead of higher up where they would be visible and less awkward-looking. It’s completely true that if you go to buy geek merchandise, women’s items are generally fewer in number and very limited in selection. This is contrary to the natural order of things, nerds. The breakdown of any reputable clothing store should be 60% women’s clothing, 35% women’s shoes, and 5% menswear. Geek stores have no excuse to violate this prime directive of fashion.

I never would have guessed that Star Wars would have been the first sci-fi franchise to figure this out, but hey, I’ll take it. For my own part, I wouldn’t mind expressing my preference for armor-clad bad boys:

And this new line could help well-endowed fangirls fend off frat boys:

Or you could use fangirl fashion to express true love:

Nothing can compensate for the deep and lasting psychological scars inflicted upon me by The Phantom Menace, but in the spirit of reconciliation, I promise to say 5% fewer nastier things about George Lucas in the future if this clothing line doesn’t suck.

Best Buy is well lit, clean, neatly organized, and the staff are generally well informed about their area of the store. For example, all Best Buy staff I’ve ever met in the video game section are hardcore gamers, and they share my pain when we talk about the Red Circle of Death, how Microsoft still sucks at designing stable hardware, and that if Halo were available on PlayStation, Sony would eat the Xbox for breakfast. Stuff is usually a pretty good price, and sale prices are awesome. Apart from the fact that the manager of every Best Buy store will murder the employees with laser cannons if they don’t ask you how you’re doing every 32.7 seconds, it’s not a bad place to shop. But they won’t have everything, and they won’t have individual components. You can buy a PC at Best Buy, but not very many PC parts.

Fry’s, on the other hand, sells everything and I mean everything from motherboards to lamps to porn on Blu-Ray. And it’s all cheap. But shopping at Fry’s is like getting an enema. You don’t want to go there, but you have to. So you just grit your teeth, clench your buttocks, and try to get it over with as quickly as possible. I had to go there today, and I still have that icky feeling deep down inside.

I’m not saying don’t shop there. I’m just saying educate yourself to the risks first.

Reasons to shop at Fry’s:

1. They have everything. Yes, everything. In one store.
2. There isn’t some jackass in a blue shirt by the front entrance saying “Welcome to Best Buy, I love you,” to every shopper who walks in the front door.
3. The prices are extremely good. There are generally no gimmicky sales, but you can very likely get the most competitive price on what you’re looking for at Fry’s.

Reasons not to shop at Fry’s (aka you get what you pay for):

1. The entire staff wears cheap, cheesy suits that make them look like used car salesmen.
2. The entire staff have no ability to communicate in the English language, even if English is their mother tongue.
3. Nobody on the entire staff knows anything about electronics. Some are only vaguely aware that they are working in an electronics store.
4. Every Fry’s is roughly the size of Tibet, and without your very own Sherpa your odds of escaping are slim. My local Fry’s is so big that it has a restaurant and showers in the bathroom because it takes at least a week to walk from one end to the other. Today I met a woman clad in a robe made from the discarded manuals of HD-DVD players who had set up camp at the base of a mountain of keyboard trays. She said that she’s been living there since 1996, surviving on beef jerky, Rock Star energy drinks, and the hope that one day she’ll be reunited with her WOW guild.
5. At Fry’s, the only apparent organization scheme they follow is to divide each kind of product evenly and randomly between every shelf on the store, guaranteeing that you must walk down every aisle to find what you want.
6. All the signs at Fry’s are about as big as a postcard and all of the price tags are printed in illegible pale gray robotext, so even a competent non-doofus still can’t find anything easily.
7. If you are stupid enough to ask for help, the sales person will drag you back to their station and make you stand there while they put all your items in a computer so they can get commission on it, wasting tons of your time.
8. Fry’s doesn’t trust its customers to wait in line unassisted. They actually pay some dope to stand at the head of the line and help you line up properly. You must then kneel to the gate keeper and kiss their pinkie ring before you are granted permission to walk to the next open register.
9. You get the KGB shakedown at the exit from an illiterate person who insists on checking every single item in your bag against your receipt. Nothing makes me feel better about a company than seeing that they are going to assume that I am a thief, yet they seem not to have heard of a simple device called a magnetic security strip which causes exit alarms to beep.