A friend recently asked me “What is Geek Chic?”, by which I assume he means ‘What do geeks think is awesome?”.
I answered with the following:
(In no particular order)
- Fast internets
- Gaming
- Mainstream games that they are good at
- Obscure references to geeky movies, books, games, music or science
- Ninjas
- Penny Arcade
- Star Wars/Trek
- Gaming-literate musicians like MC Frontalot
- Nerf Weapons
- Thinkgeek
- Wil Wheaton
- Zombies
- XKCD
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Hating Jack Thompson
- Pirates
- Memes
- Lists of things
- Recursion
Can you add any more?
Good thing you kept Pirates and Ninjas apart or that’d have shredded that page to tatters.
What about LOLcats, PWND and FAIL/WINs
Battlestar Galactica
Stargate
Anime (fo shizzle)
xkcd.com
slashdot
American Chopper, oddly enough
Well, you forgot .. Pirates are cooler than ninjas.. so they should be in BIG writing 😛
And.. Dr Who and Order of the Stick and anything with a USB plug and and and… SPAM
Hawt chicks who put out? 😉
Neat/cool hardware?
Geek chic is not quite the same thing as just geeky. I’d say there are two categories of geek chic:
1. Things which are geeky but have enough general exposure to the general public to be known. For example, pacman tshirts worn by hipsters who may well have never played pacman.
2. Things that are still unabashedly geeky, but made cool by the fact that geeks now have all the money. For example, wearing sneakers with a suit is not cool, but the fact you also have $3 billion makes it chic.
I should have included Portal and MacGyver.
Yeah, isn’t it not so much the things that geeks like, as the things that, though they have overtones of geekiness, are now fashionable, even desirable?
The pacman shirts are a good example. A certain type of glasses, a certain haircut. Anime fits.
Jason,
what about computer hacking? Thinks like war-drives could then be put here as ‘Geeks behaving badly’.
The original question that prompted the list was about geek chic, and geek magnets. What do geeks from all walks of technology find irresistible. What joins us all?
Sure we all thought Lord of the Rings was cool, but we didn’t think our coolness rating went up by association.
Ninjas and Pirates are talked about with grins on our faces. Guitar Hero and Grand Theft Auto, we spend hours on, and while/after doing so feel cooler. Dr Who does stuff we all wish we could do, and know the non-geeks want to do too (mebe for different reasons). THAT’s the sort of geek magnets the list was after.