Posts Tagged Geekery

Geek Unity!

So I’m scheduling this post for the last day of Speak Out With Your Geek Out Week, which I heard about from the fabulously profane Chuck Wendig.

I’ve always been a geek. From my  first Commodore 64 to my first webpage, from Donkey Kong and Ms. Pacman to World of Warcraft, I’ve never not been a geek, even before I knew what the word was, and even while I tried to deny it with every breath while attempting to be cool in high school. (Lessee, I went through a goth phase, a hippie phase, a preppy phase . . . if there was a label to try on, I tried it.)  I know it seems extremely hipsterish of me to say that I was a geek before it was cool, but the thing is, I was. And I am still the most remarkably uncool geek you’ll ever find.

While I always loved sci-fi, comic books, rpg games, video games, or fantasy novels, I never really embraced or welcomed the thought that I was a geek, and for the most part these were things I did when I was Away From Other People and Never Brought Up In Company. (Except, of course, with the exception of my D&D group.)

Then, in college, I began to come out of the closet, so to speak (and not just about being a geek). This occurred in part because I met a guy who didn’t blink at me like I was some sort of unfeminine freak when I walked into his room and went “Ooooh! You’re playing Final Fantasy VII!” and partly because when I got to college I met other girls who were also into those things, so I didn’t have to hide that I liked them.  I stopped trying to be cool and different and just started being myself.  And somewhere in there I realized that my self is kind of awesome, no matter how not-unique and not-cool I might be.

I have to admit that I am in that rare position where I am geekier than my boyfriend, though we are both gamers. At Cons, girls tend to get asked “Oh, so you came here for your boyfriend?”.  When we go to a Con, I have to admit that he goes there for me. Which is usually readily apparent, as I’m the one in the ridiculous costume. He geeks out about the minutiae of video games and music. I geek out . . . about almost everything that I love.

And in some cases, I have been known to turn into a rabid fangirl. Complete with squeeing nonsensical jabbering and drool.

OMG, David Tennant’s freckles omg asdfghjkl!!!

Ahem. The BF would never do that. It would be undignified.

Except, possibly, upon meeting a certain Vulcan.

But see, that’s what a geek is. Geeks don’t love anything by halves, we go in whole haul. When you criticize someone for being a geek, you’re criticizing them for loving something too much. And yes, much of what geeks love may seem trivial and inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things, but is it really such a bad thing to love things so much?

And sure, we nitpick and criticize and over-analyze our fandoms, whatever they are, but that’s all part of the fun. It’s part of loving what we love, really studying it and what makes it great.

There’s a lot of drama out there in the various geek communities too, where fandoms go up against members of other fandoms, where there are fandom wars going on sometimes decades long, but that’s something I’ve never understood about the community. Geeks need to unite and stick together, no matter what they geek out about.  If being a geek is about loving something passionately, why can’t we love each other too?

So I’m standing up in Geek Solidarity! I might even be convinced to hug a Twilight Geek!

Can I still stand with them in solidarity while pointing out weak writing and poor character development?

And, here’s the obligatory (partial) list of the Things I Geek About:

• Books (The physical kind. Of any sort. And bookshelves, because, well…)
• Writing
• Classic Literature
• Science Fiction and Fantasy TV, Movies, and Books, including, but not limited to: Doctor Who, Anything Jossverse, Star Trek (all of them, but most particularly TOS and XI – the Kirk/Spock Era), Harry Potter, anything written by Neil Gaiman, Cheesy 80′s Action TV Shows, and Almost Anything Involving Robots.
• Video Games, particularly RTS and TBS type games. I’m good at strategy, not so good at shooters (mostly because they make me carsick)
• Roleplaying (whether in digital form or pen-and-paper)
• Comic Books (I’m a Marvel girl.)
• Cooking
• Crafts (particularly geeky sorts of crafts, or incorporating fandom love into old fashioned crafts)
• Costuming

There are more, I don’t even think I could list them all if I wanted to, but those are the major Things That Make Me Go Squee. What are yours?

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve never been good at keeping a journal. I just can’t keep up with it, and it seems rather silly to write down “everyday days” (ie. Those days that are just like the days before them in that you go to work, you do work, you go home, you feed the cats, you veg for two hours, you go to bed.)

I do, however, keep notebooks. Everywhere.  I keep one in my purse, I keep one in my car, I keep one in the kitchen (generally for writing down recipes I make up on the fly that turned out to actually taste surprisingly good), and I keep several beside my bed.  These tend to be written and ordered in a way that I am fairly certain that only I would understand . . . just as only my grandfather could understand his office “filing system.”

Because, in my way, these journals are my filing system. A filing system for Brain Blurts. Because for some reason, my best and most original ideas seem to come when 1. I am trying to get to sleep; 2. I am asleep; or 3. I’m lying half-drowsy in the morning and petting my kitties.

If I don’t write these ideas down, they get lost.  Along with the good ideas, there are the really weird ones.  Those get written down too, because sometimes the really weird ones are the ones that actually work, when you get down to writing.

Of course sometimes, when I am stressed, my poor beleaguered brain will bless me with The Crossover From Hell. The dream where you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself “WTF is wrong with you, girl?”

Most recently, I somehow ended up with a MacGyver, Stargate: SG1, (new) Battlestar Gallactica crossover. With glitter.  The glitter was important. It was a new cylon detecting device.  I have also previously endured an NCIS/Marvel Universe/Doctor Who crossover where I ended up being rescued from a crowd of Marvel Villains and Cybermen . . . by being thrown off of the roof of a building into a pool of marshmallow fluff (which might actually add a Ghostbusters element to the dream, too).

Ridiculous, I know.  But even in the most ridiculous dreams, I have on occasion found good writing ideas, and not for fanfiction, even when the dreams in question might involve fandoms.  Because sometimes those fandoms are just shorthand – your brain’s way of giving you some recognizable thing to hold onto in the middle of the nonsense.

I’ve even found some serious, not ridiculous stories in the most unlikely dreams.  So I keep track of them. Even if, when I go back and read them, they make no sense whatsoever. Every dream won’t be useful, after all . . . but sometimes the dream you think the least useful turns out to be just the one you need most.

It’s important to keep track of things, no matter where you get your ideas, and no matter how ridiculous those ideas might seem at the time that you get them. After all, you never know when, somewhere in some future story, you might just need to rescue your protagonist by throwing them into a giant bowl of marshmallow fluff.

Image by Mike_Cooke via Flickr

I’ve fallen in love.

I’m late to the bandwagon. It took my gaming computer going to the great binary cloud in the sky to convince me to give it a try. For the last two months I’ve had only my wee, weak little netbook to keep me clinging to cyberspace. I had no games, unless one wanted to count solitaire. I barely have television on some nights, as my netbook’s ethernet connection is spotty, at best (and I had foregone cable in favor of porting my computer through the TV a long time ago).

I have discovered Minecraft.

I’ve always had a bit of a thing for sandboxy games, where I could let my creativity go wild. Minecraft is like virtual legos. At least until night falls.

Get caught in the dark and, even worse, let the creepers follow you home, and that massive dwarf castle you spent hours building is just so much rubble.  Dig dangerously (overhead or underfoot) and you could find yourself falling into boiling lava or having a mountain of gravel land on your head.  Getting lost in underground caverns has proven to be the worst danger for me – forcing me to suicide just to get back above ground, often leaving valuable supplies behind.

It’s repetitive. It’s completely without direction. It has no real point. It is absolutely awesome.

So far I’ve built a hexagonal castle out of glass, with waterfalls flowing down five of its six sides. I’ve built the massive library as I imagined it from my novel, Remnants. I built a dirigible, just because I could. (And left it dangling in midair, dismantling blocks and ladders as I moved down them.)

And every game-night I lock myself into my little mine and I dig down.  I have plans for a TARDIS (complete with an “inside” that is in another “dimension”.)

I’m having fun with it, and with a few open source, low-resource games I’ve picked up that I can run with my netbook.  I haven’t tried Minecraft multiplayer, or joined any of the servers I’m aware of, as I think that multiplayer (at least, multiplayer with a lot of people and a particularly large world) would likely be too resource intensive for my little workhorse.

As far as other games go, it’ll still be a little while before I can buy a new computer, but I’m stashing as much money as I can afford to stash out of my paycheck each week.   I’m not out of gaming right now, just kicking it 8-bit style for a while.

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Deathwing

In case you missed it  I play World of Warcraft (and if you missed it and you’re a regular reader, are you sure you’ve been awake?).

Tomorrow, Expansion Number 3, Cataclysm, will be coming out. This is not news for most of you.

I’m coming back to the game after a 9 month hiatus. It was really the first major break I’d taken from WoW in the five years since I started playing (or is it six? I’ve lost count…)

The break was good for me for a lot of reasons – it’s never good for a game to cease to be a vehicle of entertainment and instead become a way of life, and I had become bored with the game long before I was willing to admit that I was bored with the game. My break gave me the opportunity to get some perspective, learn French cooking techniques and Mandarin (the language) because I was bored, read too much naughty slash fanfiction in German and French, play other games (Starcraft II, Dragon Age, Civilization V, etc.), develop an obsession with David Tennant….you know, all that good stuff.

Because there's never a bad excuse to look at him?

Now that I’ve come back, it’s like loading up a fresh new game in more ways than one.  The world, while familiar, is now so changed that I can find myself getting lost in zones that I once knew like the back of my hand. I find myself torn between nostalgia (Ahh, my beautiful Loch, all gone…how I loved you so, oh the hours I spent fishing off of your dam and roleplaying on your shores…) and excitement (Have you seen Desolace? It’s gorgeous…)

I don’t have as much time to play anymore – I have invented for myself other obligations, more, shall we say, productive obligations. But, I have tentatively decided to reawaken my old WoW blog, Blathering about Azeroth, more to keep my WoW related, erm, blatherings from polluting this blog, which I’ve always intended to be primarily about my writing with the occasional game/movie review and/or political rant – ie. Everything Else and a Bag of Chips.

Generally, my expected plans will be to post here on that “Everything Else” stuff back on my old M-W-F schedule and to post on my WoW blog . . . whenever I feel like I have something to say about WoW.  This might be often. This might be rarely, if ever, at all. We’ll see how it goes.

Related articles

• Cataclysm due for Warcraft world (bbc.co.uk)
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There was something rather surprising about the whole RealID fiasco (and I’m not just talking about the fact that Blizzard actually listened and changed their plans).

The overwhelming majority of people arguing against it were women. As one poster said, toward the end of the epic thread: “Who knew so many women played WoW?”

Well, I did, for one. The majority of the WoW players I know are, in fact, female. But I play primarily on Roleplaying servers, which tend to have a higher percentage of women and tend to be slightly more friendly toward female gamers. However, for some people it seemed that the fact that women play the game was a revelation, especially that women play in such large numbers. Gaming isn’t just a boys club anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time.

And then I read this over on one of the blogs that I happily discovered over the last week: “Geek Feminism as Opposed to Mainstream Feminism”

It brought up a lot of good points, one of which was that a lot of geek women learn to tolerate and even participate in the more misogynistic aspects of geek culture. It made me go back and review some of my own behavior. I didn’t like what I saw.

Like the writer, I have always been more comfortable around geek men than around non-geek women. I rarely find that I can even find common conversational ground with most non-geek women. It’s as if we speak different languages.

But I am a cisgendered – in fact often a very feminine – woman. Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile the typical things associated with femininity with being a geek, a skeptic, or a rational thinker, especially when you find a good many of the things that a lot of non-geek cisgendered women engage in or obsess over to be, well, rather shallow, boring, or silly.

But in branding non-geek women with those adjectives, am I, a long-time feminist, being misogynistic myself? Or worse, by becoming “one of the boys” and tolerating anti-female comments, slang, and stereotypes, have I given up my feminist ideals in favor of fitting in with other geeks? As Mary over at Geek Feminism writes:

It’s fairly common for geek ciswomen to remember a period of being actively misogynist, along the lines of: “I can see why men find women so bad, 99% of women are indeed trivial and annoying” or “I get treated in a sexist way, and it’s the fault of other women, for inviting sexist behaviour.”

Is it possible to reconcile being a feminist with also being a geek? I have to wonder why so many of those women protesting RealID seemed to feel it was okay to allow a misogynistic culture to force us into hiding our gender.  I  do understand why women might want to hide their true gender behind an avatar to avoid bias or sexual harassment, and I think that the whole RealID issue caused extreme privacy concerns  beyond that. However, I have to point out that hiding your gender to avoid harassment is the rough equivalent to just laying down and taking it.

Isn’t it better to fight the misogyny than to submit to it? To go out there and admit your femininity and then show the boys that they’re wrong. The only way that anything in the gaming community will ever change for women is if we show the community at large what is and is not acceptable behavior. As long as we keep hiding our femininity away, pretending to be one of the boys, nothing will ever change.

And so now I say: If you use hate speech of any sort, I will report you.  If you use slang which glorifies violence against women, I will report you.  If you sexually harass me, I will report you. I will not play with you. I will not hide the fact that I am a woman to avoid any of the above, because that does more to help the problem than to fix it.

And if you assume that because I am a woman, I don’t know how to play, I will pwn your ass and enjoy doing so.

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