Fantasy is for losers...

[Loque]

Yeah, I can't say I really know what a geek is. Everyone's computer literate these days, reading was never a big deal as far as I can remember, a few people gave me grief about the "old man's music" I listen to, but generally people gave me the impression that they thought I was cooler than them for the music I listen to. Am I a skinny loner? Yeah, I guess, but I've never had trouble making friends, tend to get on well with everyone, just like spending lots of time on my own. I play bass which most people seem to think is cool, I work in a pub, which likewise seems to rate quite highly on the cool scale.
I think what it comes down to is I never fitted in with popular culture but it was blatantly my choice and I didn't care what anyone else thought and, while there were a couple of years around the age of thirteen where a few people tried to make out I was a freak generally nobody cared and, as I said before, if anything they gave me the impression that I was cooler than them for not caring. Maybe I'm just hopelessly self-deluded but if so I'm perfectly happy with that

<rant>What does annoy me is the people who are proud to be geeks, proud to be outcasts and none more so than so-called "alternative" people. As far as I can see they're the kids who were given a bit of a hard time in school and made to feel a little outcast and so, I imagine, decided to be proud of it but, instead of developing into genuine individuals and making their own way in the world, chose to conform to a different set of ideals the most common seeming to be indie, emo and goth these days. Many of them seem to show genuine hatred and disdain for 'normal' people and think of themselves as better simply because their are fewer of them. They are generally far more elitist than the people they despise and, again generally, a lot less pleasant about it. </rant>

So yeah, people call me a geek sometimes, but I wouldn't call myself one. I'm just me.

[Loque]

That only one at the orgy remark reminds me of the Love Tarp scene from this old show called Men Behaving Badly.

"Just once I wish someone would stay"

Old? MBB isn't old yet is it? That's a scary thought!

[saintjon]

it comes from a time when I was still living in the country watching tv on a regular basis so yeah, to me I suppose it is lol.

[Evil Agent]

You're a gorgeous geek, Leiali.

[Leiali]

You're a gorgeous geek, Leiali.

Why thank you, flatterer!

[Muaddib]

I fit all the requirements for a geek, apparently. But Im a geek with muscles, and I WILL POUND ANYONE WHO MESSES WITH GEEKS!

[Zanzibar]

Thought I'd share a rather rediculous story with you all. While I haven't played DnD since middle school, recently the game stirred up some turmoil at my high school. A bunch of kids wanted to start a group that would meet every day in a classroom at lunch. The teacher agreed and so they started it up. After about a week (maybe two) one of the kid's mothers called in and complained that her son was being abused. The principals leaped all over this and forbade them to play anymore. What was their reason? Well, apparantly one of the kids had their character cast a magical spell of blindness on another kid's character. This apparantly infringed on the school's "No violence" policy. Yeah, that's right. Stupid, huh?

[saintjon]

did the kids make a plan to murder him because of the negative influence of the games on young psyches? No? What the hell, everyone with any kind of authority these days has been pretty consistent that that's what's gonna happen.

What an utterly stupid world we live in.

[saintjon]

Nothing to worry about BoP, they'll be squeegeeing your windshield soon enough...

I actually have a prediction. There's been a consistent correlation in the decline in reading rates among teenage males and the downward spiral in their academic performance. This performance gap is a serious, and worsening problem. Within a few years, women will more and more come to dominate high-end professions, so my prediction is...

Soon, there will scarce be anything sexier than a man reading a book.

I dunno about this one Scott, too many girls get cranky when you are actually able to argue with them about stuff .

[Caitlin]

"Soon, there will scarce be anything sexier than a man reading a book."

Or even sexier still, writing one. Right? Scott?

I dunno about this one Scott, too many girls get cranky when you are actually able to argue with them about stuff .

Cranky? Cranky? Who the #$% are you calling cranky? And if we women argue it's only because the men in our lives are so darn deficient...

[Gary Wassner]

I don't know Scott. My wife didn't think I was so sexy when I was staying up until 3:00 AM reading your books.

[KatG]

I think the females have it both easier and harder. Easier first off because us being book worms is pretty much considered normal. My family certainly was fine with my being one. (And my mom was the person who introduced me to Star Trek.) Also easier because people don't necessarily take notice of what we do and ignore our enthusiasms, letting us fly under the radar, though that's changing a bit now. Harder because we weren't suppose to like this stuff, well not unless it had horses in it, and because we were entering male domains. I well remember being a teenager and being rather nervous about perusing the genre book shelves in stores and waiting till no one was around, not because anyone would think that I was odd but because adult males were the only ones in that section. Now, though, that's not the case, the section is in the middle of the store instead of in the back and I'm a grown up and don't think about it at all. And at the library, it was never an issue.

That's not to say that I never ran up against the odd factor. I used to carry fantasy and sf paperbacks with me to read in snatches between classes in high school when I wasn't talking with friends, and the bright cover art attracted classmates like flies. They'd ask to look at it, the book would get passed around and I knew they thought the books were odd. But there was never any particular hostility to it, just curiousity. Maybe if I'd been a guy, it would have been different. In high school and college, I had a ton of male friends and a good number of female ones who were into "geeky" stuff -- comic books, role-playing games, sf movies, Monty Python, television shows -- and I married one of the guys. Maybe that insulated me, but it seemed like it was normal youth culture at the time -- everyone was into those sort of things. Not too long ago, we had a dinner with friends and we were talking sf/f titles and movies, which is a normal topic of conversation among most people I've run into, even if they aren't particular fans.

I wouldn't worry too much about the kids. Fantasy has always been one of the strongest children's sub-genres and right now, it's the main sub-genre. Kids who read tend to stick with it, but lots of kids stop reading outside of school. However, reading is definitely considered a cooler thing now than it was twenty years ago.

[saintjon]

"Soon, there will scarce be anything sexier than a man reading a book."

Or even sexier still, writing one. Right? Scott?


Cranky? Cranky? Who the #$% are you calling cranky? And if we women argue it's only because the men in our lives are so darn deficient...

Spoken like someone who doesn't have this man in her life lol

(oh crap that's dangerously close to arguing isn't it?)

[alison]

Coming in late here -

As a child, I was what we Australians call a "dag". Dag is a term that is refers to the bits of dried poo that hang from a sheep's bottom. I guess that is something like a geek -

I was desperately shy, and I wore glasses with lenses like the bottoms of bottles (I am very myopic) and I was very serious. I read fantasy AND poetry - beat that! - and I thought I was Emily Bronte. We lived on a farm and milked cows and made bread and all that sort of thing. (I don't think the farm world fits the geek thing somehow.) I NEVER had the right clothes. Until I left school, my whole life was a misery of torment that I wasn't the same as everyone else. All I wanted was a pair of jeans.

Then I left home. Hmmm, things get more complicated then. On the one hand, I was the only girl in my D&D group, but on the other, I've never seen the point of merchandise. I LOATHED The Sword of Shannara, when everyone else was reading it. I got very bored with the androcentric culture of D&D etc: all that Pink Floyd and King Crimson and stoning and so on. But I still liked fantasy. Still do, obviously.

Then there was a long period where I possibly wasn't a geek at all. Unless poetry counts. But I was still very serious.

And hey, these days I wear contact lenses or VERY cool (and rather expensive) glasses, and although I am greying and wrinkling and all those things, I haven't aged like those kids at school who picked on me. I don't own a house, but I have an interesting life. I saw a picture from a school reunion a while back and I WISHED I HAD GONE. (Isn't that the Essential Geekery? Revenge on the persecutors of your adolescence?) But I didn't go, because really it didn't matter to me enough any more.

[saintjon]

I"m not sure if the escapism topic has arisen in this discussion, but it definitely ties in with the weirdness people associate with fantasy readers sometimes (or those who do anything they themselves don't for that matter).

Anyways, I was listening to this writer with MS on CBC radio today who has had this really tough life, and they were reading some of his prose. One of his quotes was something along the lines of "I read and read and read, I read everything, I never stop. An unwise psychologist might say I read to escape the world, but actually I read to engage the dialogue OF the world."

It summed up how I feel about reading sometimes, like the really good stuff. It's more than an escape, it's a participation in a different side of the world.