Are you a nerd?
 

Do you consider yourself a nerd, geek, dweeb (or "square" as your parents would say)? If so, are you proud of it? Is it even possible to be registered on a forum like this if you aren't? And is there such thing as a cool nerd (someone who plays football, rides a motorcycle, drinks him/herself silly then comes home and plays Ecoquest all night)?

I for one consider myself to be a respectable geek. In high school I always walked the fine line between those people who weren't aware they had a moustache (that goes for guys and girls alike) and the spoiled white kids who thought they were poor black kids.

How about you?

I'm a nerd and don't have a problem with it.

In the modern computer age it's the nerds who wield power. No-one dares take the piss out of the guy they might be calling on to fix their machine the next time it crashes.

I'm a huge geek.
I have never bought a new computer in my life. Instead, I prefer to comb the second-hand shops for old ones that I can resurrect. Even in computer-savvy circles I'm a geek because I prefer Macs over PCs. In Mac circles I'm a geek because I prove daily that OS 9 is still a viable operating system, and that newest isn't always best.
There are a whole bunch of other reasons that I'm a geek, but I'll just post that one as an opening bid. :)

I'm a geek, and proud.

I consider respectable geeks to be traitors to geekiness.

Do the words geek and nerd only apply to computer obsessions of different kinds or is it possible to be a geek or nerd beacuse of devotion of any interest?

Hardly! I'm a nerd and proud of it. The nerd in me definitely outways the non-nerd, but when need be, I can suppress my geeky tendancies and appear somewhat normal on the outside. It's like a camouflage I use to lure the ladies into my geeky dwellings.

I think D&D would certainly qualify for that.

In gambler's parlance, I think you've just agreed to see my computer obsession and raise me a social handicap. ;)
Okay then, in normal society I'm a geek because I'm gay and therefore have very little to add to discussions about the aesthetic qualities of, um..."jiggly bits". In gay society I'm a geek because I'm a "bear" (a hairy, older, and reasonably masculine guy...the exact opposite of a metrosexual) and because I couldn't care less about fashion or dance clubs. In bear society I'm a geek because I have long hair instead of the requisite buzz cut and because I openly associate with non-bears.

Are you a geek in the long-hair-non-bear-associating-bear society?

I guess any old interest doen't make me a geek/nerd then.
IMO I do have some kind of geek/nerd personality though since throughout my life I always have had some kind of interest that has absorbed me.
Right now it's adventure gaming.

Btw Sage I saw you at our local liquer store today.
Male, american, long curly black hair, facial hair (though not your kind of beard).

I think there were nerds prior to computers :) .
Though I'm not computer inclined, I have many other attributes that fit in the nerd/geek categories. In high school I belonged to the ping pong club, and was on the back-up team for 'Reach for the Top' (a TV show pitting high school acedemics against each other). Had we had computers in the 70's, I'm sure I would have been a techie. I'm not into sports, but read and did math and logic puzzles for fun. Even now (at 47), I'm into high fantasy books, and have participated in a few Lord of the Rings forums.

Yes I am, because I'm far more into cars than guys. :crazy:

Eh, my facial hair changes with the weather and my mood. The only constant is that I have some. :D
If the guy you saw was buying rum, the "Mount Gay" brand in particular, he may well have been my doppelganger/long-lost twin brother. ;)

The reason I noticed him and his g/f (!) is that I was standing behind them in the cashier line. He was buying beer and cider.

The latter, of course. That's why there are band geeks, among several other kinds. :)

By the way, wasn't the original meaning of "geek" something to do with carnies biting the heads off of chickens?

What bothers me is this: why would you ever need to suppress your geeky tendencies, if you really are as proud to be a geek as you claim you are? It's not like women aren't interested in geeks - unless, of course, you're going after the wrong kind of woman...

As a side note, I'm also bothered by how being geeky/nerdy/dorky is now considered fashionable, thanks to such pop culture icons as Napoleon Dynamite. It's really not fair to those of us who were geeks for years and constantly got picked on for it.

I'm a geek. I love many things that are considered geeky, and never really fit in with the hip crowd (though you have to note that here in Germany the groups are probably not as clearly defined as they are in the US. There's many shades of grey). I can rant on about a topic and will be happy as long as people are listening. Often they only understand half of it, even if for those short times my ranting makes sense (depends on the topic of course).

I have recently explained the past and current state of Sierra, LucasFilm Games/LucasArts, the Adventure Genre, the irrational plot of Monkey Island 4 (and how it was impossible to have an Australian Land Developer in the Carribbean during the high time of piracy in that area which ended around 1720 when it wasn't until 1770 that Captain Cook started to map the shore of Australia.) in relation to "Pirates of the Caribbean 2", and how there's still hope for the Adventure Genre as there's new ones coming out in Europe...as a post in a thread titled Free Joghurt for all!!! - That was only yesterday, come to think of it.

I've also explained the subtle differences in the connotation the term "suburban" (and to a certain degree "urban" and "rural") holds depending on which country the suburban areas are located and how it varies depending on different factors like history of cities and whether the country is an LEDC or MEDC...all in a thread called Calling all Males! (or maybe it was in the thread Calling all Females!. The discussions shift widely in those threads. The last I know that happened in "Calling all Males!" was one forum member throwing shoes at one forum member/one forum member's ground squirrel seen in their avatar, and me pinning the shoe thrower's sleeve to the wall with a well aimed arrow from my bow, in mid-throw. I can't remember what we are currently talking about in "Calling all Females!". I've found that after leaving the thread for 4 hours to get some sleep, 4 new pages were there upon my return. But most of the anwers are quite short.)

I've also explained how similar the first two Monkey Island games are to the PotC movies, and why (we all know why, because they are inspired by the same thing)...in a thread that was actually about the movies, for a change. The fun thing is, that while the other two detailed posts were hardly understood by the other forum members (mostly due to the fact that in that part of the forum people are a bit reading lazy. They usually write something like "Uhh...that's too much for me to read...". There's more than a few one or two word posts in that forum section.), this post was actually understood, and people agreed that Barbosa looks incredibly like LeChuck. Maybe it's because I used pictures to illustrate my point (I showed them the picture from where LeChuck is flying in the air above Melee island, and the box art of Monkey Island 2. I also showed them the picture comparing the scene in the prison from the PotC ride in DisneyWorld with the same scene in Monkey Island 2.).

And at one point I did a geek test, and despite not knowing too many programming languages and such stuff, my result was "Geek God". :D

Oh, and of course I am a Loony.


- :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

Am I a nerd? Isn't that a type of sweet?

The answer is probably "yes", though.

Ahhh, I know this one! Geeks are those dudes in carnivals who eat bugs and small animals while they're still alive, like The Enigma (think I saw him on Penn & Teller). So yeah, they probably bite the heads off chickens too.

I used to be a pretty big film geek when I was at school (pre-college), mostly cos I had nothing better to do with my time. I don't have the time to watch many films these days though. I try to keep up with Asian horrors and thrillers when I can, so I guess I still have geekish tendencies.

Yes. :) I think I have perceived myself as one and others have since the day I started high school at 14. :D

I'd list the reasons why but I'm too lazy right now and will be doing a protein assay very shortly (how's that for some science nerdiness :P).

Well, the definition I knew for "geek" was always "A person that bites off the heads of life chickens at carnivals." - You should see the face of people if they inquire what a "geek" is (which happened several times to me, since I wear one of those "geek girl" dogtags you can buy from ThinkGeek.com. Another sign that the groups are not as defined here in Germany is the fact that this also happened in my school, which has English as the language of instruction. Few people actually know what a geek is around here, it seems. And if you think about it, it's quite hard to put a definition to the word. So I just tell them the classic definition, and watch their expression shift to one of sheer terror. :D) and get this definition as an answer. Priceless!



- :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

That would be geek as in...

... right?

I've learnt something today.