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Sugar posted an entry on her blog about hawt geek girls. Her open letter to wannabe girl geeks made me laugh out loud in the office, but also got me thinking. What is a geek? What are girl geeks like? Why is been a geek so fashionable lately? What makes me a geek?

I did a little search on the definition of geek to see what others say. According to open2net a geek is “a common term for someone who is obsessed by their computer, and has achieved a high level of expertise in their chosen area. …” and according to wikipedia “A geek is an individual who is fascinated by knowledge and imagination, usually electronic or virtual in nature. Geek may not always have the same meaning as the term nerd. …”

I have, for years, tagged myself as a geek. While I don’t post hawt (lol) pictures of myself on the internets, my geekines is evident all around my person and my home, like an aura. In my bookcase you can find anything from linux manuals and design books to girly and crime novels. Would the geek factor be the linux manuals or the fact the I own over 500 books and have read many many more than that? In our living room / office we have two laptops, a mac and a pc. Also a large number of game consoles and quite possibly over a 100 game titles.

I read .net magazine instead of Cosmo. I pay more attention on what pops up in my iGoogle reader than on the TV news. I’ve been known to use photobooth on my mac to check my hair before a meeting instead of a mirror :P I play WoW on my mac, while streaming a movie or music from the net onto my laptop next to me if I’m not raiding. What is the geekiest bit? The fact that at my age I play WoW, the fact that I raid or the fact that I stream all my entertainment from the internets. For those who don’t know what raiding involves, it requires a lot of out of game research into encounter strategies, commitment of large chunks of time and effort and attention so that, along with 24 other people (or 39 in the old days), you can go kill monsters in a virtual world and get phat lewtz

The question is when do you stop being an enthusiast of technology, gadgets, games and books and turn into a geek? And that is just one kind of geekines. It’s not just blogging and twittering and facebooking (sic) that makes you a geek but knitting and bird watching and train spotting and being a trekkie. Is a geek just someone who takes the interest and hobbies into extremes? And last but not least I wonder, is being a geek such a bad thing after all?

PS: You are not a girl geek if you don’t crave on of the above binary manicures

May 2008

Tags: geek - wow - mac - loose talk