Speak Out With Your Geek Out Week
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?










And so now I say: If you use 






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