Your idiolect maps to mine. I'm a literature geek, and yesterday I told my two sections of freshman comp about how National Punctuation Day (seriously, www.nationalpunctuationday.com) proved people out there were geekier about punctuation than I was. (No joke: you can download an official meatloaf recipe for NPD, and use it to bake, say, question-mark-shaped meatloaves, as held by the woman in the photo.)
But geekeries can overlap socially, and be picked up by other strands of culture. Moby-Dick has found his way into a tabletop miniatures game (wargaming geeks!), and into an entire album, Leviathan, by death-metal band Mastodon. (I admit the "Blood and Thunder" video confuses me. I get the "WHITE WHALE! HOLY GRAIL!" in the chorus, but I must have missed the chapter in the original about clowns, bearded strippers, and popcorn.)
Also, yes, the humor. Penny Arcade is a beautiful spoof of geekery -- Looking for Guild misses the mark because all the humor is in-jokey, and the plot is all SRS BZNS. The icon attached to this comment is a lit-geek-humor thang, and it's almost frightening how good Emily looks in Aretha's hat.
Your bad-geek example is almost certainly committing one or more of the Geek Social Fallacies, the very existence of which also points to a level of self-awareness not implied by "nerd."
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-09-26 12:37 pm (UTC)But geekeries can overlap socially, and be picked up by other strands of culture. Moby-Dick has found his way into a tabletop miniatures game (wargaming geeks!), and into an entire album, Leviathan, by death-metal band Mastodon. (I admit the "Blood and Thunder" video confuses me. I get the "WHITE WHALE! HOLY GRAIL!" in the chorus, but I must have missed the chapter in the original about clowns, bearded strippers, and popcorn.)
Also, yes, the humor. Penny Arcade is a beautiful spoof of geekery -- Looking for Guild misses the mark because all the humor is in-jokey, and the plot is all SRS BZNS. The icon attached to this comment is a lit-geek-humor thang, and it's almost frightening how good Emily looks in Aretha's hat.
Your bad-geek example is almost certainly committing one or more of the Geek Social Fallacies, the very existence of which also points to a level of self-awareness not implied by "nerd."