When people call themselves a geek/nerd

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#31

Means they know the difference between magic and Magic.

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#35

Like they’ve just wiped off the general narrative of the new testament and put themselves in it (probably subconsciously, ultimate rebirth story and what have you)

#36

Agreed :smiley:

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#39

True word geeks!!!:raised_hand: :nerd_face:

#40

One of the Netrunner penoids still uses IRC to connect to the Slack. That’s fairly hardcore.

#41

I only really understand the connecting words in this sentence

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#46

trendy geeks

#47

Laurie Penny does this a lot, I’ve noticed.

#48

I don’t really know about how it is now but it’s basically of the opposite of what I meant

When I was growing up mentioning this sort of thing to anyone who wasn’t into D&D or whatever just got you looked down on: men would definitely take the piss out of you for being childish and it was held that women weren’t really interested in this sort of thing.

Whether or not women did take an interest was sort of by the by: the perception of ‘adult’ society was that these sorts of things weren’t a topic of conversation you had so we all were hyperaware of discussing such things except around other geeks.

Kind of the corollary of men always picking sports as some kind of universal discussion point, as if this is something all men must immediately be able to talk about.

(You obviously still see a remnant of this on here when people make those half-serious “I don’t watch those Marvel films because I’m an adult” type comments.)

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#49

real geeks and/or nerds call themselves peniods now I think

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#50

I dunno. When I was at school it meant, “you have different interests to the majority of people and that is not ok and we will throw rocks at you.” Somewhere along the way it became Problematic apparently. I think I miss the rocks - you know where you are with rocks.

#52

I mean I think the process went sort of like this:

  • geeks/nerds were looked down on and almost totally male as women were massively discouraged from being ‘into’ such things unless they were ‘tomboys’

  • This leads to a lot of disturbing ‘revenge of the nerds’ type of thoughts from male nerds, essentially to the effect that the only real thing stopping them from being found MASSIVELY attractive to all the ‘sexy ladies’ was the sexy ladies in question supposedly not being into playing Nintendo or reading Dragonlance books or whatever.

  • subsequently (the 90s I guess) society changes to the point where women are much more obviously into this sort of stuff too (whoop)

  • this results in a large number of male geeks/nerds discovering that actually the reason the ‘sexy ladies’ weren’t into them was they weren’t actually that attractive probably because they hadn’t bothered to, you know, learn how to interact with people in general.

  • results in MRA-type rage at women and toxic bullshit.

I mean basically there will always be people (men) who will refuse to understand their inability to connect with others as anything they are doing wrong and will see it as others (women) being unreasonable. With nerd/geek culture I think a lot of those guys had a thing that was their crutch around this area; when it went mainstream they refused to think maybe they’d been wrong about stuff? IDK.

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#53

:grey_question: More or less annoying than when someone describes themselves as “random” :grey_question:

#54

I’m whichever one is the secretly sexy one.

#55

Yeah, that’s a pretty good and succinct explanation of the GamerGate phenomena as well as MRA culture in general. It’s frustrating that the word geek has become synonymous with fedora wearing “WELL ACTUALLY” mansplaining misogynist guy, though in the grand scheme of things it’s not the worst hardship to suffer. I’m well aware of the privilege I have in just being annoyed by that rather than having to deal with those arseholes all the time, as so many women do.

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#56

that kind of rings true. and I guess it’s from an insider.

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#59

:smiley: