geeks

I keep hearing that being a geek is cool now, but I'm not sure the rest of the world has gotten the memo

Could a scar be like the rings of a tree, reopened with each emotional season?

Thanks. Seriously, you must have better things to do with your life than waste it on the hopeless?''I've already learned Parseltongue. What else is there?''Elvish.

If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.

But why didn't you just ask me?" I set down my fork and glare at her. "Because you were sleeping," She says, taking a sip if Chardonnay."I was taking a nap, Mom. It wasn't intended to be some kind of Disney fairy-tale hundred-year snooze.

This is Waldo Butters, and his geek penis is longer and harder than any of ours put together.

I think, that if the world were a bit more like ComicCon, it would be a better place.

The library in 2020 will be ruled by geeks. In my happy vision for the future, libraries are ruled by benign geek librarian overlords and the world is full of awesome.

We were there too, the other geeks and weird kids whose lives were hellish at school, who escaped into books and computers, who stayed up all night scanning obscure forums, looking for transcendence, dreaming of elsewhere. We were there too, but you didn__ see us, because we were girls. And the costs of being the geek were the same for us, right down to the sexual frustration, the yearning, the being laughed at, the loneliness. [_] We had to fight the same battles you did, only harder, because we were women and we also had to fight sexism, some of it from you, and when we went looking for other weird kids to join our gang, we were told we weren__ __eal geeks_ because we were girls.

Pop culture. Nobody does bullshit better than us. Right? China took over manufacturing. And the Middle East has us on fossil fuels. That's just geography and politics. We're a nation of whacko immigrants. Scavengers and con men. We crossed the ocean on faith, stole some land and stone-cold made up a whole country out of nothing but balls and bullshit. Superhero comics got invented by crazy genius Jews who showed up and revamped the refugee experience into a Man of Steel sent from Krypton with a secret identity.

To him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy.

Hey, Doc, we better back up. We don__ have enough road to get up to eighty-eight,_ I quoted as I slid into the passenger seat.___oads?__ he replied in an excellent impression of Christopher Lloyd__ eccentric scientist. ___here we__e going, we don__ need roads!__ The call-and-response rituals of geeks were a thing of beauty, and allowed said geeks to identify each other across time and space.

I pat the brand new twenty-seven inch Macintosh computers Mr. Foley brought us. 'These boxes alone should make both of us scream like it's Christmas morning! Snap out of it. Santa came! Now we get to play with all of our toys!

Simon did not solve problems, he just shamed them into going away.

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that__ not really what happened__nd if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?__ey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.

Every rule, every chart, every geeky statistic in a game book or module feeds into this impulse. All those details allow us to take apart existence, look at the individual parts, figure out how they work, and put them back together. Some people relieve stress by getting drunk or high and losing control; nerds find comfort by taking control and applying structure. Logic is like a warm blanket.

The coding was anachronistic, kind of like bokeh in a renaissance painting.