And maybe the killer is some kind of steam-powered robot?

[pyat]

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably familiar with the Lemon Demon song, “Geeks in Love.” It was made into a popular flash animated video that was making the rounds a couple of years back. The lyrics themselves are fairly amusing, though the video bothers me a bit, containing as it does a great deal of hatred for “mundanes.” And while I often feel that way after a brush with marketing staff or alarming people on the bus, I recognize it as more a response to being uncomfortable with people who have different outlooks and goals and background than I do.

I should say that I don’t actually dislike the song, and I don’t want to seem like I’m over analyzing it. However, after getting the song stuck in my head a little while, I realized what else I disliked about it. The geek couple in the video is portrayed as liking random bits of media, and this seems to be the primary criterion of being a “geek.”

And when they hear our favorite bands, they wish that they were geeks in love.
We rattle off our in-jokes while they wish that they were geeks in love.

Novelty bands and in-jokes! That’s what it’s all about. And LOLcats, and dressing up like anime characters. Unfortunately, these are all very shallow things. Basically, if it has a wizard, robot, or superhero in it, or it was drawn in Japan, it’s “geeky.” Or Cthulhu. Cthulhu is geeky.

I think though, that the fan culture as a whole confuses the shibboleth for the substance. People will pile on identifiers and tags indicating that they are a member of fandom, but then not evidence any actual deep interest or critical appreciation of the things they are allegedly fannish about. To use the example of Cthulhu, I once met a man with a personalized Cthulhu license plate and t-shirts and plushies, who had never read Lovecraft, nor even played the RPG based on his works. His “Cthulhufandom” was a sort of formless, amorphous blob at the centre of his being, madly piping out references without context to a meaningless universe where…

… sorry.

I guess I am a geek. The biggest thing I’m fannish about it table-top RPGs. Rarely does a day pass in which I do not make reference to this interest. I know more about the history of the hobby than most people, to the point of taking road trips to look at otherwise nondescript houses in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. This is a fandom I developed through active participation and development.

The second biggest thing I’m fannish about? I have no idea. I don’t watch television. I read a single comic book, and it’s a comic book about table-top RPGs. I’m certainly not up on current SF and fantasy novels, though I did just re-read the Elric books. I don’t play video games at all, though sometimes I go though periods where I play an awful lot of Civ IV.

I shall make a list.

1. Table top RPGs. As noted.

2. George Orwell. I’ve read all his published works several times, along with some biographies and collections of his personal correspondence and BBC memos.

3. Steampunk, sort of. In the sense that I like and read 19th century speculative fiction. I suspect most Steampunk cosplayers don’t know H.G. Wells from Orson Welles.

4. Rumpole of the Bailey! Yes, really.

5. Hard-boiled crime fiction, or at least private eye stories from 1920 till 1955 or so.

6. Victorian England, and Imperial England in general, possibly related to #3.

7. Hard SF, though I rarely read anything written after 1990.

8. Historical curiosities, particularly technology

9. Furry media that intersects one of the preceding things.

So, like, if someone were to write a roleplaying game adventure about Rumpole’s grandfather (a badger) who travels to British colonial Burma to help youthful Imperial Police inspector Eric Blair (aka George Orwell, perhaps a kind of ferret) solve a murder, with the evidence based a curious idiosyncrasy of a Gestetner No. 6 typewriter, that might just be best thing ever.

Comments

[relee.livejournal.com]

I would suppose that geekiness doesn't come from the randomness, but from the understanding. If something is difficult to understand, yet you understand it, then it's geeky, and you're a geek. For some people it's something to be proud of, and for others it evokes a sort of elitism. A sort of "Those pitiful fools don't understand the TRUTH!" that makes 'normal' people 'less' than the observer.

Some people are so ostracized for their individuality that they don't know any other way to socialize, and they ostracize other people for not being more individual, like them. Then they wander, alone, not knowing why people grow to hate them more and more, and they themselves grow to hate people more and more, never knowing that they're doing something wrong, because nobody ever did something right for them, so long ago.

Sometimes, people like that find other 'geeks' and 'nerds' and make some kind of connection, something somehow different from the way other people have treated them. They cherish this interaction more than anything, and this can lead them to act like they're into things that the other geeks or nerds are into, just to belong to something more than themselves for once in their lives.

Or so I have observed.


C'thulhu is geeky because all he ever does is sit in his tomb at sunken R'yleh making LOLcats and posting on chan sites.

I actually read The Call of C'thulhu last year, after a lot of procrastinating. Good golly Lovecraft is racist! And most strangely, he's specifically racist against people like bossgoji! Isn't that weird?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

If something is difficult to understand, yet you understand it, then it's geeky, and you're a geek.

Well, sure, but then why are we sniffy about someone who can reel off baseball player stats?

Is bossgoji black? Lovecraft was sort of uniformly racist, mind you. He didn't even like Italians.

[relee.livejournal.com]

There is such a thing a baseball geek, but they don't usually get to have that touching moment of socialization I mentioned, because sports are often linked with that ostracization I mentioned earlier. You could say they're just 'different', but they're also different in a different way that makes them different, you understand?

As for BossGoji, she's said before that she's a mix of two races, and I forget exactly which ones and don't want to mispeak, but they were the same as the badguys in the Call of C'thulhu. Well, most of the badguys, not the eskimos.

I suppose Lovecraft had more variety in his racism outside of that particular story.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Lovecraft was really bad at being a racist. I mean, yeah he mouthed the old American things, claimed Mein Kampf was full of good ideas, and shrieked when he was in a marketplace full of Black guys, but by the same token his wife and one of his best friends were Jews, one of his other best friends was very vocally Irish, and he thought the New Deal was a lot better than Mein Kampf. My gut feeling is that HPL was a bit of a drama lama, so some of the racism was general xenophobia (oh crap! There are people from places other than America or Britain! There are people from places other than Providence!) and the rest was just stuff he did for image, sort of like the intentionally archaic grammar.

[relee.livejournal.com]

Reading Call of C'thulhu, it didn't seem like he was racist the way people are nowadays. I mean, it didn't seem like he hated any of those people, he just didn't see them as people. You can like cats without thinking of them as people, right?

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

The problem with the "solidarity amongst nerds" thing is something I experienced for myself a ways back, when I was 19 or so. I was then friends with a guy with whom I shared a great many tastes in music and books and so on. It took a couple of really ugly scenes in public to realize that just because someone shares your tastes in things, that doesn't make them a good person or worth hanging out with.

I get the impression there are a lot of people in fandom who haven't learned this lesson sooner rather than later.

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

Ah, Geek Social Fallacies, how we love thee.

[relee.livejournal.com]

I wasn't suggesting it was a good thing or a bad thing, just explaining how it worked, according to my observations and my understanding of psychology and sociology.

But yes, that is a part of what I was saying.

"Sometimes, people like that find other 'geeks' and 'nerds' and make some kind of connection, something somehow different from the way other people have treated them. They cherish this interaction more than anything, and this can lead them to act like they're into things that the other geeks or nerds are into, just to belong to something more than themselves for once in their lives."

Sometimes the social connection I mentioned here ends up being with someone who is generally a bad person.