Geek Musings...

I just took the Geek Test again for fun, and I suspect I've moved up. I think before I was a Major Geek, and this time I just crossed the edge into Total Geek. I am 25.64% Geek. This means I am one or two percentage points geekier than I was before. I wonder where I made the gains. Certainly I have spent inordinate amounts of time playing That Star Wars Game. Oh, and I watched a Star Trek movie the other day. The Geek Test is a couple of years old, though, and it feels outdated to me. I don't get any points for my slight obsession with all things Firefly. Plus I think even in the last couple of years, the web has become more mainstream. You need to be a hard core web geek in order for it to count toward geekdom. And there are so many more ways to be hardcore. There is so much geekiness there to be explored and exploited. (How about, for instance, a how many hours do you spend on LibraryThing question? Or how many times a week do you Technorati yourself? Or really, I just demand credit for being online approximately 65-70% of my waking hours.) They need to do a Version 3.2. The reason I don't score higher on the Geek Test, I figure, is twofold: I haven't played roleplaying games, and I don't care for science.

The next thing you'll be saying is, "But Sarah, aren't you writing a science fiction novel?" But hey, whatever. That's why it's the trend to call it "speculative fiction," rather than hard science fiction. Like, I speculate what it would be like if my heroine lived on another planet, colonized by Earth several generations ago, and stole ships for a living. I can speculate on that without having any clue how a spaceship would work. I don't know how my car works. OK, I lied. That's why it's called space opera, not science fiction. But the whole point is the idea of it. If you're the kind of person who looks at the stars and sees imaginary people out there and wonders how they live, it appeals to you. It's about "otherness." It's about imagination. Really, I just want to tell an adventure story. But the fun part is putting it in space and seeing how that affects things.

Oh, and I want geek points for naming my cat after an obscure Jedi master. Oh. Crap, I think I found where I gained my points-- wasn't that on there? Haha! "I have named a pet after a gaming, literary, or B-movie character."

Yeah.

Tags: geekdom