Inner Solace

Real Geek Spotting Tips

(via Belle de Jour)

9. Real geeks don’t need a press release to tell them what to like. I love Apple as much as the next girl but well-designed, widely popular, mass-marketed entertainment devices are not geek. Fact.

8. Real geeks aren’t only focussed in technology areas. If you know someone who can discern tulipwood from kingwood at thirty paces, then that my friend is a geek and it don’t matter what fucking phone he owns.

7. Geek isn’t necessarily holding qualifications, but it is intellectually rigourous. If you can wing it with half an hour on Wikipedia, it’s not geek.

6. Real geeks don’t care what’s next, because that would imply caring what other people think. The process of deciding whether or not you care what other people think is inherently not-geek.

5. Real geeks know that to a man who only has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, but they will probably try to turn a screw with a hammer anyway.

4. If real geeks had to do it all over again, they would do it all over again. Apart maybe from the ramen bit.

3. Real geeks can’t stop doing and thinking what they’re doing and thinking. Remuneration for it does not really enter the equation and holidays do not switch it off.

2. Irony is not a part of a geek’s worldview. If you like dodecahedral dice and polyester shirts, you like them without inverted commas. And real geeks don’t give a shit what comic books you read.

1. A real geek is either fully aware of his geekiness or shockingly unaware of it. There really isn’t an in-between, but these two states can exist together.

0. Examples: Springer-Verlag, Samuel French, and Loeb Classical are geek; Penguin is not. Burda is geek, McCall’s is not. Dallas Dhu is geek, Benromach is not. Juggalo is geek now, emo isn’t geek anymore. Trapeze was never for geeks and diabolos are never not. Invented a new way to yo-yo? You’re a geek.

I made a punny

Re: &F&c1&d2&k3%c0w2 on t-shirts. Recognisable only by tech support vets. It’s like a secret handshake! Heee.

I got swatted by Eric for that one. And Jono said it was the worst pun he has heard this month. But oh so completely worth it.