I am a geek.
Or a nerd, I tend to use the terms interchangeably.
This comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me or knows my work on Stargate. I’m often rattling on about my childhood fascination with computers and science fiction (specifically in the form of Doctor Who as played by John Pertwee or Tom Baker) But it's something that I've started to think about a lot as I think about as I consider my home on the web, dGeek.com.
There are a lot of different type of geeks. My wife Jane, would call them “enthusiasts”, but she means the same thing, she's just much more diplomatic than I! I always assumed that nerds were just computer geeks. That’s how I got myself labelled as one! But then I met my filmmaking friends, and it became apparent that the same obsessive passion could be applied to movies as well... which naturally I went along with whole-heartedly. Still, the more people I meet the more the term widens out to embrace all sorts of fellow nerds. Having been given a series of different hand knitted Daleks I can safely add knit nerds to the mix! It’s nice to see nerdom spread out from my original image of a solitary geek tapping away at some arcane computer programming language.
I started thinking about all this because I've been discussing how my uncle, a Train Nerd, could go about creating a train enthusiasts community. He loves the idea of using the railway to teach kids about problem solving, science and the like. He has built an impressive railway system himself, which runs around my Grandfather's property. He ran out of room on the flat, so he's now zig-zagged the line down the side of the hill, which definitely gives it little more Indiana Jones-style excitment...something that's not often done in Train Nerd circles apparently. The cars are currently pulled by an old diesel loco that was once used for mining, but there's a steam-powered locomotive that they are currently rebuilding from the ground up. When they can't find a part, they create them! He would probably wince at how simplistic and general I'm being about the whole thing, but then I'm just a train nerd in training!
The point being, there are a lot of nerds out there... and the thing you'll find about them is that if you get them talking, if you've got a shred of inner-geek in you that is, you'll get caught up in their enthusiasm for these specific nerd niches. I find myself drawn into all kinds of cyber-steam punk possibilities after just one afternoon up at Grandpa's railway with the train nerds!
I was never a very social geek, in part because I didn't think that I was one. I was too cool for that nonsense! But I still wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons. Seeing as I was such a solitary nerd I kludged together a dungeon master program in BASIC on my Commodore 64. D&D without all that messy human interaction... what bliss! Had I been less of a nerd, I'd have sold them instead of writing over the tapes every time (yes little nerd babies tapes!) Luckily the nerds of today are a lot more social... and probably better organized!
I want dGeek.com to be a place where these different forms of nerd can be discussed, perhaps even cross-pollenated to create evil new ones! So let's get the 20 sided die rolling here...tell me what you're into. What kind of a nerd are you, and why?
Can't wait to hear what you're up to!
Cheers,
D!
