Mainstreaming is awesome when it comes to getting special effects.  Look at the Lord of the Rings—the best you could do previously was a cartoon.  We have some really cool looking things now, and not everyone looks at you funny because you like SF, because—big goddamn movie means lots of people like what you like.

The bad part about mainstreaming is that you get lots of money thrown at special effects—and sometimes that’s all they do.  Look at Shyamalan’s travesty of Avatar: The Last Airbender ( or rather, don’t because it really is that bad) 

Mainstreaming that cartoon well had the possibility of introducing and including lots more folks in the coolness of that world and perhaps getting more stories.  Instead, Shyamalan whitewashed the cast (except for the ‘evil’ Fire Nation which became much darker hued) and sucked all the life out of the characters.  And gave one of the Katara’s best speeches to a boy.  And made her wimpy. And made Earth benders idiots.  And then tried to hide the whitewashing by mispronouncing their names ‘properly’.

So. Much Suck. 

And he had, like, $100 million to suck with.

It’s true that when you have to use crappy sets, often you get more focus on characterization or plot.  But you can also end up with pure cheese because you can’t afford to do anything but try to appeal to the lowest denominator.

Overall, though, I think it’s better.  More productions mean there’s more chance of good stuff as well as bad stuff.  More people enjoying good stuff is a positive.

I vacillate on this question. On the one hand, I love Patton Oswalt’s epic rant in Wired about the difference between being a geek in the 80’s, when you had to hunt down crappy Tai Seng VHS dubs of Hong Kong action movies, for example, and the present day ubiquity of HK tropes. Mainstreaming dilutes the objects of our affections into bland mediocrity eventually. It reminds me of how the word grunge became meaningless the moment it applied to Candlebox as well as Mudhoney.

But on the other hand, you’re right, who is really being hurt by mainstream acceptance of formerly shunned entertainments like doorstopper fantasy epics? It injects new blood into the insular world of fandom. And in any case, once the media spotlight moves on to some other hot trend, the hardcore true believers will simple keep chugging along as they always did, only with the benefit of having more material for inspiration and re-interpretation.

@ Caren: you’re right about the movie, but on the other hand along comes Legend of Korra, which is shaping to exceed the heights of the original series IMO. The new series can simply disregard the misfire of the live action movie, and I do wonder if the movie helped Korra off the ground in some way.

Is the mainstreaming of geeky stuff good or bad for geeks?

I’m gonna come down heavily on the side of mainstreaming geeky stuff being a good thing. As a kid I was into Dungeons & Dragons, Dr. Who and similar geeky things. But I always hated, HATED the weird snobbishness around it… I always wanted it to be part of the mainstream culture. I never wanted to have a “sub-culture” as such, or at least I never wanted to police the limits of the subculture, I just wanted to enjoy the geeky things I liked and invite other in.

I actually like the new Dr. Who’s, with their faster plotting and better special effects, as well as the older episodes. I like that the show has changed, while keeping the important things about Dr. Who the same (his utter rootlessness, his strange & ambiguous romances with human women, the way he seems to need Earth as much as Earth needs him). As far as I am concerned, the more geek culture mixes into the mainstream, the better off both kinds of culture become.

Whether or not mainstreaming stuff is good depends on why you liked the material in the first place, and this counts for more than just “traditional” geeks.  As a metalhead, one thing that other metalheads do that drives me crazy is measuring how good a band is by how underground they are.  Therefore, any band that gains a large following immediately loses its status as “good” or gets segmented such that all their albums from when they were not well known are good, but everything after they became popular is bad.  Furthermore, they often consider anyone who hasn’t gone to multiple shows to not be a “true” fan, which neatly excludes anyone who doesn’t live in close proximity to a major city, where said bands are most likely to perform.  Most fans that act like this self-identify as outsiders, and the mainstreaming of their interests tends to threaten that identity.  For other fans, that like the material for aesthetic reasons, mainstreaming of our interests means new people to share it with, which is always a plus in my book.  This also happens to a certain extent with punk, primarily hardcore punk, but it doesn’t seems as bad as it is in the metal community.  Anyway, metal is just one of many geek cultures, and I’m not sure how many parallels it shares with sci-fi geek culture, which I am not as familiar with, even though I like plenty of sci-fi stuff.

Well, atheist managed to say what I wanted to say, but much more concisely. :/

@Comment #5: progrocker on 05/30 at 10:21 AM

Very good points about metal. It does seem much like the Sci-Fi subculture, or like the BDSM subculture.

“Will this be bad for the J/e/w/s geeks….”

@2: It’s a lot like the battle over the mainstreaming of punk and indie rock under the term “alternative”. There was a lot of anger at the time, because people who had appreciated the good stuff all along had every reason to be furious about the existence of Candlebox. But in the long run what happened was a lot of people who didn’t have access to the cool stuff, people stuck in suburbs or rural communities or just underserved areas, grew up with Nirvana, and that made them more interested in more good stuff. Now that stuff sits in a comfortable area, not mainstream but not out of it, either, and there’s a cheery inclusiveness to it. Which is ironic, because this is the era when people are bashing “hipsters”, you know, right when the actual snooty music snob who thinks their beloved band is ruined by mainstream acceptance has basically died off.

I’m all for the mainstreaming of geekiness. I like seeing references to my favorite things in “mainstream” shows and movies. Also, I like that the idea that the shows and movies that I geek over are becoming mainstream.

Geek stuff has gone mainstream, sure, but I think it’s the culture that’s changed, not the geek stuff. There’s always been the strain of hard sci-fi snobbery, but it’s always been a fairly artificial construct to keep the serious, important people separate from the rabble. Geek hierarchy is a great sociological question of tribalism and nonsensical rankings based entirely around making sure that, if you have to be one of the weirdos, you’re the king of the weirdos. Watch the way furries and LARPers get piled on by people who are just as into their comic books and card games as their victims are into their rabbit costumes and boffing weapons. It’s intra-cultural bickering. If you look at the old greats of science fiction you’ll find a lot more character interaction and intriguing philosophical musings than you will descriptions of spaceship workings. The highly technical, theoretically cerebral stuff existed, but it’s mostly forgotten. Pick up some Gene Wolfe, for instance, and you’ll find far more about people than about hyperdrives. The central idea of science fiction and fantasy has a lot more to do with stories and characters than it does shiny macguffins.

You’ll see this dynamic in place at places that are entirely geek dominated, even today. Maybe especially today. You can hardly call it mainstreaming when the old white guys on the panel are declaiming the merits of only writing very serious and important hard science fiction, while women and minority writers are dismissed for fantasy, even when they’re writing highly technical science fiction. It’s geek-specific cultural policing, that’s all.

The last refuge for the truly geeky will always be books.  A book allows for a lot more exposition, historical and pseudo-scientific details, and even maps and glossaries.  For a true geek, a movie or television series is preferable to a book only if the filmic version came before the book.  We geeks will watch movies along with the rest of the mainstream, but if there’s a book, we’ll read that, too, probably in advance of watching the movie.  From books we came, and to books we shall return.

Filmic renderings of books are a mixed bag.  I agree with Caren’s comment about marketing racism above.  We could compile a lengthy list of offenses in this particular category of white supremacist distortion of racially enlightened classics.

There are serious limits to movies, even in terms of special effects.  Consider, for example, Peter Jackson’s LORD OF THE RINGS movie, which is indisputably great in terms of what it shows.  But there’s one glaring problem: Movies can’t show absolute darkness, at least not for very long, because it’s boring and a waste of film space.  Darkness is a realm that only books can enter for any extended time, and only books can describe the things that lurk unseen in complete darkness.  This is why the LORD OF THE RINGS movie, which must show rather than describe, cannot render either the underground passage of Moria or the dark tunnel through Shelob’s Lair accurately.  You simply have to shine some light down there to show that big, ugly spider.  This unavoidably diminishes the role of the Phial of Galadriel, which is to bring light into the darkness.  There are other examples of the very limited ability of movies to show darkness.  A large chunk of Ursula K. LeGuin’s book THE TOMBS OF ATUAN takes place in darkness, so forget about trying to film that.

Another thing that books can do well, but that films often do poorly, is express interior monologues and mental and emotional states.  Quite a lot of literary magic works by messing with the mind of the main character (and the reader as well).  A film can do this, but has to use completely different techniques.  I wholeheartedly approve of what Peter Jackson did to make the obsessive mindset of Sméagol/Gollum clear to movie viewers, but this is very different from what Tolkien did in the form of text.

So I will not declare that the best movie is always the one that hews closest to a literary text.  The two media are so different that a movie has to go its own way in order to be truly faithful to a book.  And there remain some things that only a book can do.  That is why true geeks, as I understand them, will stick to books.

(If you think my concept of a “true geek” runs afoul of the “true Scotsman” fallacy, you’re right.  Ultimately, geeks differ from each other, and what I say about them, as an old geek, is limited in both time and space to my own cohort.)

I think one of the unique things about geek culture is that it also manages to avoid a lot of the “underground is better” phenomenon that you see in some other subcultures (like metal and punk, mentioned above). In general, geeks love to share their passions. There is nothing better than making a new friend and discovering that they are into the same shit you are into. So in a general sense (can I GET any more general), mainstreaming just means there are more people to share with.

(but on the other hand, I think Fiercebadrabbit has a great point about the other side of this same coin. Mainstreaming means there’s also a lot more people to put into bullshit heirarchies.)

Of course, the problem with books is—-and this is beyond just geek stuff—-that books have a hard limit on their use as the opportunity for socializing. Movies and TV shows have a much wider audience, and not just beyond geeks, but within geek circles. There’s fewer to consume and they take less time to consume, so any random product is going to have more people who’ve seen/read/experienced it when it comes to TV and movies than books. They also have more of a time hook than books.

Geeks do seem to read more on average than most people (though still not as much as like true bookworms, though there’s overlap), but it seems the community mostly comes together over filmed materials and maybe comic books, a visual medium. That’s as an outsider I’m talking, of course, but I’ve been to one con (I was speaking) and the vast majority of themed parties and costumes were based around movies and TV.

I wholeheartedly agree with what “atheist” said about the new Doctor Who series - and I grew up with Tom Baker.  My wife and I both love the new Doctor and have followed the entire series on Netflix.

I envy “atheist” a little.  I can’t say that I always wished, as a geek, to belong to the mainstream.  For me and my cohort, it was simply a given that the mainstream rejected me, and my self-respect seemed to require me to reject the mainstream right back.  I’m not sure what to do about the popularity of some geek culture.  It makes me nervous, as the mainstream always has.

My geek attitude toward the mainstream places me somewhere between Mr. Spock of the first STAR TREK series and Data of the second.  Mr. Spock was disdainful of human beings, whereas Data was fascinated by them and eager to become human.  I would declare my intellectual position to be one that combines Spock’s independent judgement with Data’s humility and ability to evolve.

But neither Spock nor Data accounts for geek feelings, including pride, prejudice, fear, and love, things that my old white male cohort of geeks never quite examined deeply.  Geeks are unfinished human beings until they turn their critical minds toward self-examination, discover what they have in common with non-geeks, lose their elitism, and become caretakers of their own emotional and social selves.  Shyness is not a virtue, and being able to cultivate one’s shyness in a culture of shy people like oneself is actually a hidden privilege.  Social responsibility requires all of us, even geeks, to come out, forge alliances with people unlike ourselves, and join the public sphere.

There are certainly “exclusive” hard sci-fi fans out there, but I’d say there’s a certain gender slant to this as well, and that this has mitigated the spread of their view through the wider “geek” sub-culture. 

Much of the “hard sci-fi” going back to the late 50s, and represented today by the writings of Larry Niven, has a very “boys adventure” feel to it.  The protagonists are capable, confident males, their interactions with other characters are shallow and plot-determined, and what women are in the mix tend to be not very well fleshed out.  This aspect of “hard sci-fi” has been a turn off for “Gen-Xers” and Millennials due both to the, largely unmentioned, success of feminism in changing attitudes and in the large number of girls and women who have entered “geekdom” in those generations.

To put it simply, the gender-progressive and socially inclusive element of sci-fi/fantasy “geekdom” has triumphed because it has the numbers.  While gender negativity and hostility, as well as sub-culture policing, can certainly still be encountered in these associated fandoms -particularly at conventions and on forums- those voices are fighting a losing battle as they have been since the 80s, and they know it.  And with all the brightest lights of sci-fi and fantasy being enthusiastic feminists -G.R.R. Martin and Niel Gaiman in particular stand out on this- that more inclusive and progressive element in geekdom also benefits from a real sense of approval from the artists their fandom celebrates the most.

Shyness is not a virtue, and being able to cultivate one’s shyness in a culture of shy people like oneself is actually a hidden privilege.

This is probably one reason I see the mainstreaming of geek culture as a good thing. It’s very difficult for me to meet new people and make friends, so the more geekery becomes mainstream the more opportunities there are for meeting people. I’ve never been an outsider by choice, and I suspect the same is true of many other geeks.

This conversation reminds me of the lyric from the Dead Kennedys song “Chickenshit Conformist”: “Hardercore than thou for a year or two/Till it’s time to get a real job.”  Most of the people who do the subculture policing and claim “I liked ‘x’ before ‘x’ was popular,” are doing it in an attempt to attain or maintain a status of power within the subculture, and the mainstreaming of their interests is seen as a threat to said power because the newer, more mainstream, fans will probably be less likely to buy their bullshit argument for being the ones in charge.

I think it’s great.  When I was a kid I dreamed that one day they would make an X-Men movie, which at the time seemed impossible.  And a Lord of the Rings movie.  And they did!  Who doesn’t want to have more opportunities to share their interests with other people?  Jerks, that’s who.

Overall I think mainstreaming geekiness is good, but I do struggle with the impact geek-chic has had. I am excited that it is no longer assumed that being a geek excludes one from being physically attractive. Sometimes, however, feels like now there is an expectation that now, in addition to having some deep knowledge or skill, a geek also has to hew to a certain high aesthetic sensibility. There is a portion of this mainstreaming or acceptance that I sometimes feel only falls on those who meet particular beauty standards and so there are many geeks who are still excluded from the larger culture but now also feel, in some ways, alienated from what was a natural home. I don’t claim to speak for everyone, this is just my own experience and something I have seen with some of my students (I teach in the sciences).

It’s kind of hard to separate
1. mainstreaming of geek stuff
2. the internet making fan-bases bigger and being able to locate other geeks
3. (this is just a guess) the tech boom, more money in tech jobs, and the coming of age of D&D generations and programmers, being related to more monied geeks. I know, not all tech ppl are geeks, vice versa, but it sure seems to correlate.

It’s kind of a two-way street; geeks are mainstreamed, but the mainstream is also geek-ified. When my mom goes online to a perennial bulb forum to argue about whatever it is she finds on those things, she’s participating in what used to be a geek activity. Same with my dad and his stupid Cadillac Allante forums. He actually went to a “con,” but it wasn’t called that, for Allantes, where he met some of his online friends. Two decades ago he used to go to car shows in the middle of no-where that had a totally different state fair / outdoor dive bar feel, and keep a “Road & Track” magazine in the bathroom that covered a wide range of cars in little depth. But because geeks made the internet and now my dad uses it, he’s been molded into kind of a geek too.

I’m jealous of geeks and the instant community they can find. I’m a “social sciences” / arts nerd, which just feels… different. I don’t click with my husband’s geek friends, but thanks to the mainstreaming of geekery they shit they talk about isn’t as esoteric and impenetrable as it used to be. That’s nice.

The other thing is, I think it was Dave Eggars writing about comics who said that because comics were so cheap to produce they could be more original and daring. Like, he said, if Peanuts were an expensive movie the Great Pumpkin would have to show up at the Steven Spielberg ending and Charlie Brown would have to be a winner, otherwise the movie would never get made. I guess that’s what Caren-Sun-blocking Creator of Animorphic Pancakes was saying about Avatar: The Last Airbender. But that’s not just a geek problem. It happens to classic literature and kid’s stories, too.

But on the other hand, you’re right, who is really being hurt by mainstream acceptance of formerly shunned entertainments like doorstopper fantasy epics?

From the movie Zero Charisma:

“People like us have built this culture on a century of oppression and loneliness.  And now?  It’s being co-oped by a bunch of neo-nerd hipster douchebags for profit!”

Shyness is not a virtue, and being able to cultivate one’s shyness in a culture of shy people like oneself is actually a hidden privilege.

True. And for some people, it is a hard fought privilege to have. Personal space in a comfortable environment is something worth treasuring and protecting. 

Sure, I am as critical as the next guy of the stunted developmental environments that some of these subcultures have (and have separated myself from them over the last several years), but demanding “how dare you cultivate a culture of like-minded people??” is pretty insulting.

@ #14, Re: Geeks vs Hipsters.

Yes, it’s very ironic that hipster bashing is everywhere now and is in some ways more socially acceptable than picking on geeks. Anecdotally, I see people on geeky websites just rattle off comments like “hipsters ruin everything” in the same way 13 year olds say that things they don’t like are just “gay”; it’s a reflexive and generalized putdown that’s doesn’t seem to be specifically attached to any real person.

Just recently got into a semi-heated discussion with a poster on io9 who absolutely insisted that hipsters cannot be compared to geeks at all, because by definition hipster = poseur. Someone with no inherent passions or creativity, and also someone who is rightfully hated because they look down at everyone else for no good reason.

Yeah, that conversation went nowhere fast. It was impossible to get across the idea that geeks and hipsters are very, very much alike in ways that are more important than their differences. And are often the same person on different days!

I love that it isn’t hard to find people who are in to some of the same geeky stuff that I am, even in real life.

However, one of the things I find frustrating is that, as geeky things become more profitable, people come in to make money off of it who aren’t necessarily into geek stuff at all.  For instance, Olivia Munn.  I cannot tell you how irritating it was to watch a show supposedly about video games headlined by a woman who was clearly there for titillation and not video game knowledge.  I mean, I have no problem with Olivia Munn herself; she’s an actress, she got a job, well done.  But it was definitely odd.

And with regards to indie-type music as well, I live in a city where a truly independent radio station playing awesome music should be able to do really well.  But instead our “alternative” station is owned by a radio conglomerate, plays the same hit song 20 times a day, and seems to be DJ’ed almost entirely by folks with communications degrees who don’t seem to express any personal interest in any songs they play.

I mean, I’m OK with the things I like being marketed and sold to me.  It’s just kind of bittersweet when they are sold to me by people who don’t seem to care about them at all.

But I don’t care about the love story or about how hard it is to be a teenager when there’s planets and stars to explore and macguffins to disassemble.  It’s not that I don’t want it to be mainstreamed… It’s that I want to explore the possibilities, not to be hung up on the same exact relationship trivia that is in every show.

I don’t find relationship trivia interesting, fascinating, or even all that intriguing - if people just opened their yaps, apologized or explained, most of these problems wouldn’t happen and we wouldn’t spend all this time wasted in front of a beautiful backdrop.

Ugh.

“Will this be bad for the J/e/w/s geeks….”

Heh.

“Mein Fuhrer, as required, we placed the geeks in a camp.”

“Good.  And the Final Solution?”

“Well, there’s a problem there - the camp, it… it…”

“Yes?”

“It appears to have taken off into orbit, Mein Fuhrer”

But I don’t care about the love story or about how hard it is to be a teenager when there’s planets and stars to explore and macguffins to disassemble.

Mainstreaming geekery doesn’t mean that mainstream people will become interested in geeky things. It just means that they will be interested in the same things and stories they’ve always been interested in, but with a geeky backdrop. Every “historical epic” movie is like this, too: notice how a movie about the events of Pearl Harbor was “really” just a story about a love triangle.

There are maguffins to disassemble—it’s just that the maguffin is that science fiction/geek setting before you find out what the relationship story is.

I don’t find relationship trivia interesting, fascinating, or even all that intriguing - if people just opened their yaps, apologized or explained, most of these problems wouldn’t happen and we wouldn’t spend all this time wasted in front of a beautiful backdrop.

ha! agreed

There will always be a subculture in-crowd to any geeky interest, a way of separating out the tourists from the true believers.  Any in-crowd has their own slang/acronyms/secret handshakes, and geekdom is no different.

I ran across this while exploring the Society for Creative Anachronisms.  The attention to detail - would a peasant girl hem her dress in year 16xx?  Would a knight have that kind of lance in year 15xx? Was a fork used in that time/place? - was to them completely reasonable, and was to me completely excessive.  I was a tourist; I just wanted to enjoy the role-playing and craft skills.  They were true believers; they wanted to actually live that life, even just for a short time.

As several people have pointed out - mainstreaming is great. Who doesn’t want to share their passions?  But there’ll always be the hardcore in-crowd, because their passion often includes total immersion.

Thinking about it, geeks have usually been marginalized, so why wouldn’t they want their own closed protective circle?  At school. a sci-fi geek might be pushed around by the jocks, but in HIS world, he is king and the jock is the outsider.  What’s not to love about that?

I recently had to go to a comic book convention to promote a graphic novel I did the color work on, and it was one of the most depressing things I’d done all year -  It’s hard to explain, but it was like meeting a whimsical, uncontrolled childhood friend again after many years and seeing they’d become a respectable, bloodless suburbanite.
Everywhere was the same ZombieRobotNinjaPirateSpaceshipVampireKittyGamer package, treated as that scene’s sacred inheritance instead of displaying attempts to share some personal vision of escaping the mundane and living out what you think is most important, or at least loosening the constraints of culture and expectation to have a genuine Romantic Adventure.  It was all recombination - Everything was a tshirt showing shells from Mario Kart shooting out of the Death Star.  I bought a book of scratchy, minimalist ink drawings about binge drinking since it was the only thing that struck me as still having a genuinely personal sense of fun.

I’m not railing against the *mainstreaming* of the fantastical, but I think it’s reached the “hair metal” stage of cultural evolution and needs to be reinvented.  I’ve been doing what I can but I can only get work drawing stories about vampires.
Maybe this is just a stage everything has to pass through in the process of mainstreaming.  Or maybe it’s been like this forever and it’s only in the last few years I paid any attention.

Isn’t this something that seems to come up every 5 years or so at least since the completely geeky and intertextual Star Wars became a breakaway multi-media marketing hit, inspiring a flurry of sci-fi blockbusters and television franchises?  It seems to me that a central part of “geek” ideology involves rewriting history to marginalize their own pet interests. When Empire came out, Lucasfilm had a product tie-in on practically every aisle of the department store. I was a poor kid for just having Luke, Fett, and a Sandman. Five years later, you couldn’t give away the action figures that ended up in 5-cent bins at garage sales by the dozens. Even D&D had a popular cartoon tie-in that ran for three seasons, and inspired many of the conservative histrionics as Madonna would a few years later.

Science fiction, fantasy, and adventure have been central parts of mass media from the start . Most of that was recycled from other media or earlier works. So I don’t find the Dr. Who revival to be all that surprising or “geeky.”  I’d say the difference between fandom and mainstream is in terms of longevity of interest. Millions of people will see the comic-book movie Avengers this summer. Fans will be engaged with Avengers along with original and derivative works five years from now.

But I’m ambivalent about “geek” because it’s so closely tied to the dialectics of teen socialization and subculture for me. If you self-identified as a geek it was because the process of HS clique formation identified you as a geek first. 

@16: My view is that explicitly feminist SF&F is still fairly marginalized, especially as it more and more frequently wrestles with multiculturalism. I couldn’t even find a copy of the Locus-nominated “Who Fears Death” at a bookstore that just cut the genre section by a third to make room for an entire shelf of teen paranormal romance.

When I was young, I was a nerd - I was not a good social fit in high school, but having a subculture I shared with the other smart, odd kids meant a lot to me. I wonder what the misfits of today have to call their own, when all the old touchstones have been packaged with fancy effects and sold to a mainstream populace who have never spent a microsecond pondering the mechanism of trapping the light of the Trees in the Silmarils.

I wonder what the misfits of today have to call their own

We’ll probably find out in a few years when it gets marketed to us.

I think it’s great! I’ve been noticing this, and rejoicing in it, since the first of the big movie adaptations of old Marvel comics, like “Spider-Man”, “Iron Man,” and “X-Men”, and, now, “The Avengers.” These movies finally had the budgets to do justice to everything I loved about the comics—- not just decent visuals, but also the writing and the acting. Even though they don’t supersede the comics for me, it’s nice to have moving, talking versions of these characters, even when they are very different from their comic antecedents.

I was actually just marveling at the fact that you watched “Game of Thrones,” because I love that series of books and had never thought you would get into it ... so much fantasy history and whose-ancestor-did-what that I thought would bore you. But I’m happy that you do watch it—- now I get to read your commentary about something else that I love. (“Mad Men” being the other).

And I consider that to be one of the more interesting fringe benefits of geek-culture mainstreaming ... I get to read what pop-culture critics think about the stories that I like, that I’ve grown up with. I get to see them in a totally new light now that more people are seeing them and writing about them.

I don’t find relationship trivia interesting, fascinating, or even all that intriguing - if people just opened their yaps, apologized or explained, most of these problems wouldn’t happen and we wouldn’t spend all this time wasted in front of a beautiful backdrop.

Really? Because when I hear that, what I think of is this: http://xkcd.com/592/

Relationships make good entertainment because they are what most people’s lives revolve around. They are our most intimate obsessions.

I don’t think that the mainstreaming of geeky ideas and stories has happened because geek culture has become more “normal” and consumes works that are more human-focused. I think that geeks have instead now gotten writers and producers who respect them and honor their interests with quality work.

Is the mainstreaming of geeky stuff good or bad for geeks?

As a self-identified geek I’m glad you think most geeks take this mainstreaming in a positive way, because I like to think I do but you do see naysayers out there. And I tend to find them extremely annoying. So it’s nice to see a self-identified outsider thinking geeks are inclusive

Relationships make good entertainment because they are what most people’s lives revolve around. They are our most intimate obsessions.

That’s true. And it’s also true that not all relationship writing relies on cliched misunderstandings that would be dissipated if people just talked to each other, or apologized, and so on.

I’ve found that the relationship stories I most enjoy are those where the obstacles rely on actual character differences, or the obstacles are overcome in a reasonable fashion by all involved. This does exist.

One example that struck me this way, which might actually be a bad example I don’t know I’m not that much into romance, is “Nodame Cantabile”. There are a number of cliched relationship obstacles, but it’s mostly just that the two main characters, much as they care for each other, aren’t actually compatible. Even the most cliched “why didn’t you just TALK to each other ?” dispute I saw was a case of this, because really given their personalities you could totally understand why the misunderstanding occurred. As in, it wasn’t some artificial ad-hoc obstacle, it was the kind of thing you could see would happen again and again and they’d need to learn to deal with simply because of who they both were.

I was actually just marveling at the fact that you watched “Game of Thrones,” because I love that series of books and had never thought you would get into it ... so much fantasy history and whose-ancestor-did-what that I thought would bore you. But I’m happy that you do watch it—- now I get to read your commentary about something else that I love. (“Mad Men” being the other).

That’s the thing, though, she isn’t getting most of that really geeky stuff. You and I know what the song from the last episode signifies in the fictional history of the show. TV viewers who haven’t read 5,000 pages of mostly grim fantasy world told in strict POV chapters just know it’s a Lannister song because Bronn told them so.

I like the mainstreaming of comic book geekery lately, because I drifted away from superhero comics many years ago into “alternative” comics and forgot how much I loved that stuff once all the recent spate of Marvel and D.C. movies came out. Although in my geek circle, Marvel and D.C. were considered “mainstream”. One person’s something is another person’s something else or something.

Lately I find my science and policy geekery outpacing the sci-fi/comic geekery of my youth. At least in the small details: “what the hell is Magneto doing bending copper, copper’s not affected by magnetic fields, that’s bullshit, grrr!” and “the EPA can’t use the NYPD to shut down the Ghostbusters’ ghost containment system, they would have to use federal agents to enforce the law, and he said he was from District 3, when New York is in Region II, and if the containment system is radioactive it would be regulated by the Dept of Energy not the EPA, that’s bullshit, grrr!” Of course, I’m totally fine with a guy controlling magnetic fields with his mind and a group of people that busts ghosts.

That’s true. And it’s also true that not all relationship writing relies on cliched misunderstandings that would be dissipated if people just talked to each other, or apologized, and so on.

I’ve found that the relationship stories I most enjoy are those where the obstacles rely on actual character differences, or the obstacles are overcome in a reasonable fashion by all involved. This does exist.

Well, that makes me wonder if I misread Crissa’s post as a general complaint about relationship story lines when she meant it as a complaint about bad writing in relationship story lines. And if so - sorry, Crissa!

But anyway, point taken. Crappy writing about relationships is infuriating. But then, that’s all crappy writing, ever.

“the EPA can’t use the NYPD to shut down the Ghostbusters’ ghost containment system, they would have to use federal agents to enforce the law…”

THIS HAS BOTHERED ME FOR SO LONG.

Am I the only geek here who loves Doctor Who, Community, Battlestar, Spaced,  but cannot for the life of me get into Game of Thrones? I just don’t get it. I feel like I should love it, but I just don’t. I even tried the books….I could not read them!

  “the EPA can’t use the NYPD to shut down the Ghostbusters’ ghost containment system, they would have to use federal agents to enforce the law…”

THIS HAS BOTHERED ME FOR SO LONG.

You know what bothered me? That Egon didn’t build in a backup power supply in a city famous for massive blackouts.

re: relationships
I see a difference between well-written characters who relate to each other in some way through the course of the plot, and characters who have relaaaaaationships that *are* the plot. Jane Austen, for example, does a fantastic job with the latter, but it gets frustrating to see so many plots where the relationships are extraneous, or a naked ploy to get a tween fan-base involved, or a substitute adrenaline high because they didn’t make the final space battle very compelling so they have to top it off with a kiss in front of the sunset (or they didn’t make the relationship very compelling so they have to have the kiss ride the space battle adrenaline for the viewers to even care). Movies like Terminator 2 do a great job with centering relationships but frankly in most SF/F where the creators don’t have a gift for writing relationships I’d rather see more fantasy world exposition or other plot than tacked-on relationships. Take Buffy, for example. When the relationship is well-written and compelling (Buffy and the Scooby gang, or Xander and Cordelia) it’s fun to watch. But I’d rather have more details about that big underground facility than details about Riley and his stupid feelings. I guess relationships are often written in a way that feels like a lazy replacement for a more inventive plot. That’s my complaint.

“<blockquote>the EPA can’t use the NYPD to shut down the Ghostbusters’ ghost containment system, they would have to use federal agents to enforce the law…”

THIS HAS BOTHERED ME FOR SO LONG. </blockquote>
I thought I was the only one! So this is what it sounds like when doves cry!

I guess I’m blocking on the idea that any of this is obscure. Martin’s books were NYT Bestsellers shortly after publication. Spider Man has been a flagship title for Marvel with daily strip and repeated television adaptations. DC has been more successful at bringing their franchises to television and the big screen.  Dr. Who apparently had peak ratings of 16 million in the U.K. and was canceled in the 80s with between 3-5 million viewers in the U.K.. The reboot was one of the most popular shows on the BBC One.

I think a better argument for the mainstreaming of fan culture is the fairly explicit nods to fan-derived works that seem to be appearing more and more often. 

@Jimmy:

“what the hell is Magneto doing bending copper, copper’s not affected by magnetic fields”

Yes, that does tend to bother me, too.

For the most part, I can shrug off movie/comic discontinuities because I see the movies as another alternate universe, where, say, Rogue was never a villain,  Mystique is not her adoptive mother and Magneto’s powers work on adamantium, but violations of actual physics do bother me a lot. (The worst thing for me was in “Spider-Man 2” where Spidey quenches a miniature sun by dousing it in a river. Yeah, because fusion reactions require oxygen ... ? It especially bugged me because Spidey and Doc Ock are both physicists/physics nerds!) So that’s the one fly in the ointment for me, is when there are technical errors in mainstream adaptations. But you often see them in the source material too, so I don’t see it so much as an inevitable result of mainstreaming so much as of science fiction sometimes being written by people who don’t know science.

(Also, I don’t have HBO so I am approximately 1 season behind on GoT—- I assume the song you are referring to is “The Rains of Castamere”?)

Is mainstreaming of geek culture good?

When it results in budgets for interesting and fun projects, yes.

When it results in craptastic nonsense trying to capitalize on the zeitgeist, no.

It’s the difference between new opportunity and exploitation.  Of course, this is true of everything, so it’s hardly a profound point.  It is indisputably better that kids don’t get their ass kicked for wearing “Han Shot First” tee-shirts anymore, but, of course, the bullies have just found new means of isolating and humiliating their targets. 

The worst thing for me was in “Spider-Man 2” where Spidey quenches a miniature sun by dousing it in a river. Yeah, because fusion reactions require oxygen ... ? It especially bugged me because Spidey and Doc Ock are both physicists/physics nerds!

Would someone kindly explain what Spiderman’s web is attached to when he swings down on to the top of a building?

But you often see them in the source material too, so I don’t see it so much as an inevitable result of mainstreaming so much as of science fiction sometimes being written by people who don’t know science.

The big social game of science fiction is that writers take liberties, and readers point out those liberties and try to “fix” them. It’s similar to the way in which mystery/thriller readers try to predict the twist ahead of the narrative and protagonist.

I’ve found generally that the biggest literary dick-waving about “hard” science fiction comes not from writers, who usually freely admit to fudging things in order to make the story work, but from fans who think that a veneer of plausibility slapped onto their FTL or NAFAL horse operas gives them a critical uniqueness, usually involving the phrase, “big ideas.”

Would someone kindly explain what Spiderman’s web is attached to when he swings down on to the top of a building?

A taller building, duh!

When it results in craptastic nonsense trying to capitalize on the zeitgeist, no.

The worst sort of example is mainstream authors or creators trying to shoe-horn in by writing in the genre without enough understanding to avoid butchering it.

A recent example, a book I simply threw across the room because it was so bad, was “Toys” by James Patterson.  He’s a perfectly good crime writer in his own right, but this is the first time I’ve read his attempt to branch out into sf, and it was poorly written, poorly plotted crud. he may have been lending his name to a “collaboration”, of course, but it was the worst kind of unbelievable cheese.

And it’s not as if over-the-top supermen can’t work as a sf trope - go and read Keith Laumer’s _Plague of Demons_ to see how it *should* be done.

I’m a geek and I’m absolutely thrilled about the mainstreaming of my culture.  A big part of that though is that I’m a female geek.  Without the mainstreaming, I’d be very isolated, largely because sexism is strong and raging among many male geeks.

I think there are several factors contributing to this though, not the least of which is the internet.  It allows people to easily find others with the same interests, and allows me to meet a diverse group of people who wouldn’t normally be part of my circle.  This means I can still do all the “normal” young adult woman things with my “normal” young adult woman friends, but I can also find groups just to do the geeky stuff with.  Without the internet I would have never been able to find D&D groups, and especially not the ones where I fit in well.  I went to school for engineering but I could never get into the campus gaming groups because they were hugely sexist and would only accept women into the group if they were fucking the DM or one of the players.  But through the magic of the internet, I’ve been able to find several different groups and all but one have turned out well.  One gaming group is somewhat large and I’m the only woman but I fit in just fine.  A few other groups have had one or a few other women.  One group was actually majority women.  That would have been tough as hell to find before the internet.

I also think fanservice is playing a part in mainstreaming geek culture.  The last two Doctors are much more attractive than the previous ones.  Now that some people are starting to accept that women like to look at attractive men, they’re cashing in on it.  I don’t think LOTR would be nearly successful without Orlando Bloom, Elijah Wood, and the guy who played Aragorn.  And even the Harry Potter guys turned out pretty well, although I suppose that’s mostly luck because they were all cast before puberty.

The thing I like about “geek culture” is celebration of thinking and creativity.

Since there is no possibility that the mainstream will ever be in favor of either of those things, I don’t worry about geek culture going actually mainstream.

The thing I like about “geek culture” is celebration of thinking and creativity.

Ideally, sure. But among a lot of geeks, especially the insecure dudes who use geekiness as a kind of counter-machismo and think they’re superior to women because women can’t understand science, there’s less an appreciation of thinking and creativity than of intellectual preening and posing. Many of these guys don’t actually know a whole lot about real science or anything involving real-world analysis or critical thinking, but they do happen to be good at memorizing lots of trivia about stuff that doesn’t matter much to anyone else, so they do the best they can with that.

Yeah, I don’t think that geeks are more thoughtful and creative as a group than any other subculture.

I’m happy as a clam about mainstreaming precisely because it’s great to finally see movies like Lord of the Rings brought to the screen and adapted well. Sure, there are going to be stinkers, the big budget messes. That’s Hollywood. Of course, it’s unfortunate when the train wreck is adapted from a favorite book or other source. But that’s just the nature of the business. There are craptastic adaptations in all genres.

Of course, despite being a life long geek (with an educational background in science), I’ve also always been on the edge of geekdom because of my fondness for relationships, especially,—gasp!—romantic stuff. Everything I write has a significant romantic subplot. I call myself a misanthrope, but I want my F/SF to be grounded firmly in relationships, romantic and platonic. I’ve never played well with the hard science, relationship-aversive crowd.  Consequently, I welcome the new blood into geekdom.

@Amanda, on #14, I’d say the costume phenomenon is because TV and movies, more than books, gives a concrete and easily identifiable way to imitate a good character more than because TV and movies dominate the geek culture. I’d also say there are four major Pillars of Geek, so to speak, and there’s a lot of mixing and matching: Books, Games, TV and Movies.

As for the mainstreaming of geek culture - I’m with the “mixed bag” people.

On the one hand, it’s always easier to like what you like and be who you are without a bunch of negative stigma attached, and the more people who like something, the more products/events are available to feed that. That part is awesome.

However, while there will be people who like some of the things you do, it can be hard to turn that commonality into a conversation or a friendship. I think the comic book movies are a good illustration. A comic book geek is invested in the characters and their world, and their view of the movie is colored by that. It can make it tough to talk about the movies with someone who only knows that world and those characters from the film, and isn’t interested in getting into the comic books, especially because a movie necessarily has a different sense of world-building and character development. In essence, you mean different things when you both say “I like the X-men.”

On a kind of horrible gender note, it also means you get a lot more people at events focusing on the sexual aspect of a “geek girl” because they’re going more to sight-see than to engage.

And even the Harry Potter guys turned out pretty well, although I suppose that’s mostly luck because they were all cast before puberty.

Pretty well?

Did you see what happened to Neville Longbottom?  He totally mastered the Puberty Spell.

Now I can get into the geekery of whether Neville was really the chosen one or not…

or not.

I think “geek culture” seems a lot more powerful than it really is. Here are some reasons

1. “Geeks” are more likely to be an active online presence, and the internet is now a dominant medium though many are just passive consumers

2. Many “content creators” such as writers, producers, directors, or whatever are very likely to be geeks or at the very least plugged in to geek areas of the internet and are sensitive about not pissing off fans.

Reference this article about why funny cat pictures are dominant on the internet

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/why-the-internet-chose-cats/

Think about it. Do you know about “chargin’ mah lazer” or “chocolate rain” or “over 9000” or any number of internet memes? Most of these started on 4chan. Not that many people post on 4chan, I mean really post. Many people first see these memes third or fourth hand. The internet is basically a megaphone that allows a few people to have a greatly amplified voice.

if people just opened their yaps, apologized or explained, most of these problems wouldn’t happen and we wouldn’t spend all this time wasted in front of a beautiful backdrop.

In most of the examples of well-written Relationshipsy Science Fiction I can think of, someone opening their yap, apologizing or explaining would solve very little, or there are quite good reasons why it is that the characters not doing those things believes that they can’t.

I’m not interested in shitty sitcom writing, but I’m also not interested in stories about people that act nothing like people, vis a vis doing stupid things for misguided reasons. If people want to read stories about the adventures of hyperlogical emotionless robots, then someone should just write that story because it’s science fiction and you can do that, you don’t have to spend the entire story pretending to the audience that they’re humans.

The worst thing for me was in “Spider-Man 2” where Spidey quenches a miniature sun by dousing it in a river. Yeah, because fusion reactions require oxygen ... ? It especially bugged me because Spidey and Doc Ock are both physicists/physics nerds!

That irritated the shit out of me.  Ruined what was otherwise a fun movie.

Yeah, I don’t think that geeks are more thoughtful and creative as a group than any other subculture.

Uh…sure.  That’s why the geek subculture is so rare among scientists and philosophers.

Oh, and engineers.  But the geek subculture is massively overrepresented in professional sports, of course.

Punditis, most geeks are just average working-class people, because most PEOPLE are average working-class people.  There is actually a name for this fallacy, but damned if I can remember it.  Maybe I’ll dig out my old social psychology textbook and see if I can find it.

Would someone kindly explain what Spiderman’s web is attached to when he swings down on to the top of a building?

fun bit: using a weird wrist flick during the webbing spray (the same subtle manipulations that allow him to produce a wide net, or a tight ball of webbing as an impact weapon) he in fact forms a wide, parachute like formation at the end of the webbing rope. It doesn’t fly, obviously, and uses an awful lot of material, so he can’t do it indefinitely, but it allows him to swing and generally maintain the same elevation even if he’s passing over shorter buildings.

Which brings me back to a different problem I’ve had with this thread, which is interchanging “hard scifi” with “scifi that focuses on tech more than people.”

The distinguishing characteristic between hard and soft scifi is how close to real science it is. Scifi can be entirely focused on the details of the macguffins and be completely absorbed in shallow, plot device story telling, and hard scifi can be focused entirely on character interactions. Hard scifi has to have respect for the science, but that doesn’t mean it has to spend screen/page time actually explaining it. The harder scifi is, the fewer questions you could ask of it would be answered with “it doesn’t really matter. It just is.” But the author can devote all of that to Q and A sections at conventions without spending any time of it on the page. Like (for instance) web swinging off a tall building.

Last year’s film Melancholia is a hard scifi film. It is pretty much entirely a character portrait in the face of impending death.
Star Wars Attack of the Clones was literally nothing but minutiae of plot devices and special effects spectacle. And yet, it’s so squishy soft it doesn’t even really count as scifi (“space opera” is generally the preferred term.)

This bothers me not because I dislike seeing terms semantically abused (although there is that) but because hard scifi is being used as a pajorative, which it most certainly is not. Firefly is one of the hardest scifi TV shows that has ever been on television: no FTL, slugtossers for weapons, conservation of mass and energy seem to both apply. A psychic is about as far as they’ll stretch real-physics. but few people would say that it is worse for it.

I couldn’t find my old social psychology book, but Wikipedia came to my rescue.  The cognitive bias is call the representativeness heuristic.  Basically, we attribute someone to a certain group based on similar we think they are, without taking into account the actual proportion of the population that belongs to that group.  So in this example, it’s easy to attribute geeks to the group of STEM professionals/students, but that’s a small group so most geeks actually aren’t part of that group.

I come at this topic via music.  I’ve had three experiences with being there at the very beginning when a band I loved from the get-go starts the record/tour cycle:

REM: Went nuts for the Radio Free Europe single when I heard it on KROQ
Echo & The Bunnymen: Had a friend play me the Rescue single, loved it
The Smiths: Saw the cover of the Hand in Glove single [NSFW], luckily the song was great

In each case, I experienced being there from the start, knowing all the words, knowing all the songs from the first few bars etc.  Very cool, but I was also happy when those bands got more popular: better venues, more energy at the shows, better sounding records etc. 

However, at a certain point the experience changed with all of them.  They still weren’t Top 40 fodder (REM not yet at least), but the crowds changed, they were drawing a lot of people that only knew the radio hits.  I’d be at a Bunnymen show post-Porcupine and the crowd would sit on their hands until they played The Cutter or The Killing Moon > they’d go nuts when they played those songs > return to sitting there, talking to their friends because they weren’t playing those two songs.  The Smiths crowd changed after Meat Is Murder, REM after Document and the stupidest wedding song ever, The One I Love became hits.

Luckily, rock music is dead now and I don’t have to worry about that happening again. /sarcasm

I think it is great to see geek culture rolling out into the mainstream. Isolated subcultures are a great creative of societal memes. When the American western frontier closed, the minutia of the poorly paid mounted farm hands rolled out as several generations of Wild West shows, theme parks, movies, television series and so on. (I only hope that the roll out of science fiction geek culture is a sign of an opening and not closing. After all, we are just entering the golden age of materials science.)

Geeks do tend to be intense and thoughtful. I knew a comic book geek who became a VP at a large comic book company. I knew a band geek who parlayed his interest in band choreography into a computer animation career and an Oscar. I knew a cartoon geek who works as an Emmy winning cartoon scriptwriter. I also know a lot of computer geeks who have turned their obsessions into careers. Moving into the mainstream doesn’t end the creativity or intensity, though it does attract a lot of other types who have their own motivations. Don’t sell them short. Their motives may be different, but they can often do things that sheer geeky creativity and intensity can’t. (To be honest, some of them are sales or marketing geeks, and you can learn a lot by just watching them.)

P.S. Don’t expect computers to give good recommendations. After all, most people can’t. I use recommendation engines as a way to find new aisles of stuff in humongous websites. Just click on a recommendation and look at the also-boughts.

P.P.S. Game of Thrones?  Who watches that? It’s too popular.

The worst sort of example is mainstream authors or creators trying to shoe-horn in by writing in the genre without enough understanding to avoid butchering it.

It’s not even the butchering, it’s not having enough knowledge of the genre to realize that their brilliant new idea that will show those SF geeks how Real Writers(tm) do it, while sufficiently well written, is rehashing a plot that someone else wrote as a novel in the early 80s, which was inspired by a short story from the 1950s, which was taking ideas that E.E. Smith came up with in the 1920s.

I have no idea why people do this all the time with SF&F. You don’t see many people claiming they’re going to reinvent the detective novel with their brilliant new idea about a quirky genius detective…

You don’t see many people claiming they’re going to reinvent the detective novel with their brilliant new idea about a quirky genius detective…

here’s the pitch: he lives his life of adventure and luxury with a longtime companion, and instead of being a private eye hired to spy on cheating lovers or whatever, the police hire him to solve their toughest cases!

KeithM : I have no idea why people do this all the time with SF&F. You don’t see many people claiming they’re going to reinvent the detective novel with their brilliant new idea about a quirky genius detective…

It is kind of interesting to compare the to genres, because they’re both considered genre, they were both widely read at the turn of the last century (everybody knows Sherlock Holmes, but then Conan Doyle also wrote about dinosaurs and Jules Verne and HG Wells are also well-known in the mainstream), and things sort of changed in later decades. Agatha Christie was a mass popular hit while science-fiction was the in pulp magazines and fantasy was children’s literature.

Oh, I love it when someone comes along and spends LOADSADOSH on bringing the worlds in the books I love to life (as long as they get it RIGHT of course).  To costume the people, to build the buildings, to write the songs ...  static art is nice, but I like to see it in motion (I’m afraid I don’t have a very visual imagination).  (and yes, people dress up in film-costumes more - because *someone else did the design* and that makes it easier).

Still, I usually prefer the books.  More opportunity for endless details   Also more portable, and consumable in shorter chunks.

Mainstream authors sprinkling SFF tropes over their work makes it harder to find good SFF though, that’s a definite downside of mainstreaming of those tropes for me.

@52:

[Mainstreaming of geek culture + the Internet] allows people to easily find others with the same interests, and allows me to meet a diverse group of people who wouldn’t normally be part of my circle.  This means I can still do all the “normal” young adult woman things with my “normal” young adult woman friends, but I can also find groups just to do the geeky stuff with.  Without the internet I would have never been able to find D&D groups, and especially not the ones where I fit in well.

As another female geek, I’ve got to disagree somewhat strongly.

Mainstreaming of geek culture is great for the people who are marginal geeks—people with a passing interest in science fiction or fantasy, people who enjoy D&D as a part-time hobby, etc. But one big thing about in-person geek-centered groups (e.g. the SCA, most organized fandom societies) is that they are *far* more accepting of (relatively high-functioning) people with ASDs than the rest of society.

When I went to my first SCA event, I was shocked at the fact that I could *clearly* identify some of the adults as exhibiting symptoms of an ASD—and it seems like a massive percent of the people there have children who are on the spectrum. The same goes for organized fan associations.

For all the talk about an online ASD community, there’s a *lot* more to be said (IMHO) for organizations IRL that tolerate—if not welcome—people with ASDs. (For one thing, an online community won’t gather at your place to watch BSG. For another, it’s kind of nice to be united with people because of *who* you are rather than *what* you are.) And when geek communities become mainstreamed—i.e. when the organizations and clubs are seen as ‘unnecessary’ because everyone is a fan of a show— that means that the people who *aren’t* able to fit into normal social circles get marginalized.

One can argue about increased tolerance in mainstream groups—and it’s possible that that will help to resolve some of the problems. But the death of geek clubs and groups means that people who are isolated already become even more isolated. And that, IMHO, is a rather disturbing trend. I’m not sure it’s one that can be changed, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily one that should be celebrated as somehow being liberating.

what the hell is Magneto doing bending copper, copper’s not affected by magnetic fields, that’s bullshit

Actually, diamagnetic materials such as copper can be affected by magnetic fields if they’re strong enough (and all conductors become diamagnetic in the presence of a changing magnetic field). You can build a maglev rail with electromagnets, a 3-phase AC supply, and a billet of aluminium. The aluminium will be levitated and propelled by the magnetic field, even though it’s not magnetic, because the changing field induces loop currents, which themselves produce magnetic fields of opposite polarity, resulting in repulsion.

Geeks are just like other people - a lot of the shit they think they know is wrong.

“what the hell is Magneto doing bending copper, copper’s not affected by magnetic fields, that’s bullshit”
Actually, diamagnetic materials such as copper can be affected by magnetic fields if they’re strong enough (and all conductors become diamagnetic in the presence of a changing magnetic field). You can build a maglev rail with electromagnets, a 3-phase AC supply, and a billet of aluminium. The aluminium will be levitated and propelled by the magnetic field, even though it’s not magnetic, because the changing field induces loop currents, which themselves produce magnetic fields of opposite polarity, resulting in repulsion.
Geeks are just like other people - a lot of the shit they think they know is wrong.

Bit of a misstatement on my part, I understand how current is produced. Additionally, all materials have some form of diamagnetism or paramagnetism and will be affected by a magnetic field, however minimal, so technically Magneto shuld be capable of moving anything with his powers.

It should, however, be more challenging, so depending on what version of Magneto we’re talking about, it might be a cool plot point.

Punditis, most geeks are just average working-class people, because most PEOPLE are average working-class people.

Yes, average working-class people who value thinking and creativity, which was my point.  Geekery is about actually being capable of understanding the rules of Settlers of Catan or the White Wolf franchises enough to play—and then doing something fun with that knowledge.  That’s just a different state of being than the American mainstream, and the two will never meet.

Re: geekery and ASDs: yeah.  Well, it turns out it’s really easy to interact with folks with those states of being if you know the rules and they’re willing to put a little energy in.  So why not include them?  They have cool ideas, too.  Sometimes spectacularly cool, because of their different perspectives.

One can argue about increased tolerance in mainstream groups—and it’s possible that that will help to resolve some of the problems. But the death of geek clubs and groups means that people who are isolated already become even more isolated. And that, IMHO, is a rather disturbing trend. I’m not sure it’s one that can be changed, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily one that should be celebrated as somehow being liberating.

Well spoke! Well spoke!

When I went to my first SCA event, I was shocked at the fact that I could *clearly* identify some of the adults as exhibiting symptoms of an ASD—and it seems like a massive percent of the people there have children who are on the spectrum. The same goes for organized fan associations.

At the same time, those opportunities didn’t always exist for everyone, so while you may see it as shutting you out, I see it as opening things up. I’ve always been a geek, but I’ve not always been in a position to turn that into ways of connecting with other people. Where I grew up, those sorts of groups either didn’t exist locally, or at least I wasn’t aware of them. I’d be lying if I said it was easy for me today, but between the internet and growing popularity of the types of things I’m interested in, there’s more for me to hook into than there used to be.

Punditus, it really doesn’t take that much intelligence to play Catan. And the fact that so many nerds think it does is part of why I’m so happy that so much “geek” shit is going mainstream—if I want to totally geek out over Game of Thrones, I have the option to spend a billion hours on the Dothraki forums, but I can also more easily find people to have a nice fun conversation about last week’s episode with who aren’t going to spend the whole time relentlessly nerd-cred policing and pretending that their habit of spending thousands of hours playing WoW in their basement totally puts them in the same “club” as people curing cancer, but me spending my childhood reading Victor Hugo for fun instead of watching all the proper TV shows totally makes me Not A Real Nerd and, like, Paris Hilton or something.

There are a lot of different ways to define being a “geek,” and a lot of very, very, very different sorts of people with widely varied interests and HUGELY varied levels and kinds of intelligence consider themselves “geeks.” Trying to police geekdom as a single subculture is and has always been a useless, fallacy-ridden, and mean-spirited exercise. The sooner we knock it the fuck off the happier we’ll be.

i flip back and forth on this one.

on the one hand, i present the movie adaptation of Starship Troopers, which bears so little resemblence to the novel i almost cried. i could - i have - write a 20 page disertation on it, and still have to cut 80% of my words.

the fact that i’m still pissed proves my geekiness.

the D&D movie is another one - all the awesome that has been written, and they went with… that. i swear, they killed Gary Gygax. however much Temple of Elemental Evil pissed me off, it was awesome

on the other hand, we have Avengers. and all the similar things; not just the other Marvel movies [though Thor is a big plus here, being that it passed the Bechdel test beautifully. and said passing was interesting and forwarded the plot, even!] but Jumper.. Sure, they changed a lot. a lot. for a book written in 80’s [and managed to have a hilarious but tearful scene where the kid drops his abusive dad in a lake with the major-terrorist leader, why wasn’t THAT in the movie? given the time, it should have been. anyway] that was an extremely awesome adaptation. the Jumper/Paladin thing was somewhat annoying, but only because i’m annoyed when people HAVE to put in a good/evil struggle like that. there was a good/evil struggle in the book, but on a much more personal level.

anyway.

absolutely NO ONE i knew had read Jumper before the movie was advertised. i forced a few people to do so, and everyone i made read it loved it…

but it was obscure. then, over night, everyone knew what i meant.

then there was Push, which was so awesome i actually ran a game centered on the idea for a while. [Also: Chris Evans? should be illegal, and Dakota Fanning is my favorite actress ever, at least favorite under-40 actress.] when Heinlein wrote about psychics in the 40s and 50s, people didn’t get it - now they do, and it’s awesome.

but people still laugh at LARPers and mention boffa-weapons, not knowing [or caring] that LARP waaaay-predates the whole boffa-craze, thank you.

also, i once got to teach a workshop for an AP English class, on using RPGs to create characters for books and plays. how cool is that? that was actually a dream of mine, back when i had a shot in hell of becoming a teacher, and thought role-playing would get students more involved in history. back when the mere thought of an RPG would get you fired, or at least shunned.

i’m just babbling. glad the surgery went well, hope it continues - please humor me and be vigilant about checking for infection. MRSA is BEYOND not fun, na da? and after all the surgeries to get rid of the MRSA, my leg is so destroyed they might as well of never done the original surgery. NOT. FUN. watch it.
[this paranoia brought to you by Doctors For A Bigger Paycheck]

Ursula K LeGuin also had a witty piece in that edition of the New Yorker recalling the early days of the National Science Fiction Writers Association in their genre ghetto. She described it as something like buffalos facing outward in a huddle against the attacks of ‘literary’ critics.

She also mentioned the climate for a *woman* scifi writer in that era….

Pundititus: Have you ever actually tried talking to a non-geek about something they find interesting? A hobbyist gardener, say, or a DIY home improvement buff, or someone who makes their own clothes, or…

*Most* people have an interest (or several interests) into which they pour large amounts of thought and creativity. It’s actually a requirement for pyschological health. The only difference between geeks and non-geeks is what they find interesting and how they express that interest—geek culture tends to encourage wearing your interests on your sleeve (which is cool) and making them a part of your identity (which can be problematic, since it leads to exactly the sort of in-group out-group nonsense you’re spouting).

As for why scientists are more likely to be geeks than other fields? Simple: science is considered a geeky interest. If you’re not interested in science, you’re probably not going to become a scientist. If you are interested in science to anywhere near the level needed to do it professionally, you’re almost certainly a geek. It’s like asking why science fiction convention attendees are more likely to be geeks than cereal-grower convention attendees: science fiction is a geeky interest, agriculture is not.

As for what makes an interest geeky or non-geeky? Purely arbitrary cultural standards. We’ve just declared some interests to be geeky and some not.

denelian, not to get into a huge fight, which I’m sure it could, but I would say that literally every change in the Starship Troopers film was an improvement. It took an overtly pro-fascist and racist bit of “what if we did Pacific War style Island Hopping IN SPACE?” and turned it into a dumb action film with about 10 minutes of clever anti-fascist subversion dropped in between.

Heinlein is one of “the greats” but he, far more than other greats (like the ABCs of Asimov, Bova, Clarke) suffers from the macho-bating fantastic racism that plagues scifi, and as a result he, more than many of “the greats,” will benefit from adaptations that are structured in the “suggested by” adaptations. I Robot was a travesty. Starship Troopers was pragmatic.

The die is cast

I’m not interested in shitty sitcom writing, but I’m also not interested in stories about people that act nothing like people, vis a vis doing stupid things for misguided reasons.

I tend to think stories about killing vampires or fighting aliens or dark lords or whatever are all about the drama of being a teenager anyway, with the setting ludicrously magnified to meet the intensity of the emotional state of the average teenager (and the average adult who wants to re-experience the melodrama of adolescence in a way that’s actually fun). The point should be that we don’t have to obsess so much about whether our boyfriends or girlfriends really, truly love us or are cheating on us when we can channel our emotional energy into killing demons. It’s unfortunate when these narratives seem to forget that point, Buffy probably being the classic example.

denelian, not to get into a huge fight, which I’m sure it could, but I would say that literally every change in the Starship Troopers film was an improvement.

Starship Troopers the Movie should be considered a totally different work than Starship Troopers the Book. One was by Verhoeven, one by Heinlein.

Verhoeven’s movie was a combination of cheesey militaristic action flick and a satire making fun of the audiences that consume cheesy militaristic action flicks. It was a Ralph Wiggum of a movie - stupid, and occasionally using its stupidity to make a larger point.

*Most* people have an interest (or several interests) into which they pour large amounts of thought and creativity.

Ah . . . no.  Many people.  Not most.

I’m sorry, but this is stupid.  The definition of “geek” revolves an interest in the world as it might be.  Most Americans—like most people—are these sort of sheeplike beings that float in a world of messages created by the local power structure, unquestioning in even the most dire circumstances, and selecting a role from the menu offered and living it fully.  Never knowing how or why.

karpad;

yes, he was so very racist that no one expected the main character in ST to be not-white

i mean, no one *did* expect it, but not because he was racist. even in the 40s, he was writing fiction with main characters who were black or “mixed”. everyone thinks he’s racist, and aside from Farnham’s Freehold - a book with racist characters, whose function was to tell white people to stop being racist - i don’t ever understand it.

also… ST was written, in large part, to break his contract with a publisher.

as for the “fascism” - is the US fascist? i don’t mean is it *becoming* so, i mean is it, was it in the 60s? it’s a republic, and just because we’ve been trying to extend the franchise doesn’t mean we didn’t start with it limited. one of the things that annoyed Heinlein - and annoys me, i’ll be honest - is people who don’t vote. it’s not just a RIGHT, it’s a responsibility. people not voting is what got us here. Heinlein was - correctly - pointing out the logical end point of people, en masse, not voting; eventually those who DO vote are going to take over.

Starship Troopers was an anti-war novel that people still mistake for a pro-war polemic. it bugs me. the movie made it worse.

[there are lots of things i’ll agree with people about Heinlein - he tried really damned hard to act as if everyone *were* equal, because his ethics told him the color of someone’s skin means nothing, which for his time was beyond enlightened. “racist” has conintations that just aren’t accurate, including ignorance and an unthinking clinging to that ignorance. “sexist” is the same, except it’s plumbing instead of melanin.
the fact that, 80 years after his first short story, featuring a main character who happened to be both a doctor and black, people insist on treating him as if he weren’t much old than, say, me, bothers me. you hit a “berserk button”, for which i apologize.]

oh, for the…

in the second the last paragraph, the word “but” is missing; i’ll agree with people about Heinlein - BUT he…”

gah. sorry.

Pundititus: Have you ever actually tried talking to a non-geek about something they find interesting? A hobbyist gardener, say, or a DIY home improvement buff, or someone who makes their own clothes, or…

Yes, regularly.  If you did, you’d understand that the general human population is profoundly incurious.  They simply will not know the answers to the vast majority of questions you’d think to answer.  Even on the things they do daily or profess to have a love for.

There are a lot of cool people, and a smaller but still large lot of amazing people.  But they aren’t a majority.  They are a sizeable minority.

I agree with JakobFabian01 that there’s a lot you can do with books that you can’t do with movies. Maybe it’s just that there’s a certain activation energy needed to make a movie or TV show, whereas all you need for a book is one person with time, talent and ideas. The sheer amount of weirdness that you can get in books dwarfs what you see on the most experimental, out-there movies or TV shows.

I’m very happy that things are, in a sense, being made for me now. Well-done superhero movies, difficult and intricate shows like Mad Men—it’s a giant relief, after feeling alienated from regular culture for so long. But the value was never in the obscurity, and geek culture at its worst is about stupid pissing contests about who has the most obscure trivia. (Among other things—there’s the insularity, the victim complex, the casual bigotry.)

The thing I worry about is that people will take mainstream SF—“Battlestar Galactica” or “Doctor Who”—and think that that’s as far-out as SF gets. And though there’s some very, very good SF in that format, it’s a tiny slice of the ideas available there. The rabbit hole goes so much deeper, and I guess it just makes me sad that people are missing out without even knowing it.

For my part, the hardness-in-SF thing has always been considerably more complex than focusing on relationships or gizmos. Greg Egan—my current favorite—tends to write about both, and I think the combination makes a lot more sense. There’s a scene in Distress where the protagonist gets cholera, and has a near-religious experience really understanding what it means to be embodied, to be made of flesh. Is that hard-SFnal?

Or consider his short stories “The Planck Dive” and “Oracle”. They’re about people and their relationships, and they’re about speculative physics at the same time. (And I freely admit I got choked up when I finished the first section of “Oracle”.)

I agree there’s a lot of boy’s-own out there. Niven, certainly. I read Vernor Vinge’s “Zones of Thought” books, and they’re pretty short on the character development too (at least, compared to Egan), while being quite long on the space-opera scale events. But that’s not an inherent property of SF, even when it’s stuffed full of hard science.

Also, there’s a lot you can do with movies that you can’t with books.

Is this supposed to be an original observation?

Katherine: Is this supposed to be an original observation?

Heck no! It’s for emphasis—I’m lamenting that a lot of fans don’t go to, and may not even be aware of, the truly weird places SF can take them because the weirdness is in books rather than movies. (You know, the rest of the stuff I wrote.)

I can’t otherwise make sense of how it’s not bleeding-obvious that “Starship Troopers” the movie was a parody of “Starship Troopers” the book. Are we so used to adaptations stripping out the interesting parts that this wasn’t clear from the get-go? (Also, written SF does a better job of satirizing itself; Norman Spinrad’s “The Iron Dream” is, for my money, still the final word on hordes of faceless evil aliens.)

<blockquote>Pundititus: Have you ever actually tried talking to a non-geek about something they find interesting? A hobbyist gardener, say, or a DIY home improvement buff, or someone who makes their own clothes, or…

Yes, regularly.  If you did, you’d understand that the general human population is profoundly incurious.  They simply will not know the answers to the vast majority of questions you’d think to answer.  Even on the things they do daily or profess to have a love for.</blockquote>

I have also talked to plenty of non-geeks, and my experience does not match yours. The null hypothesis is that geeks and non-geeks are the same on any given trait; the burden of proof is yours. Properly constructed and conducted statistical studies, or you’re making a negative assumption about a large and diverse group of people without evidence. There’s a word for that.

I don’t find relationship trivia interesting, fascinating, or even all that intriguing - if people just opened their yaps, apologized or explained, most of these problems wouldn’t happen and we wouldn’t spend all this time wasted in front of a beautiful backdrop.

Exactly.  Arthur C. Clarke avoided most of that relationship crap.  (Some of his collaborators reinserted it, to disastrous effect.)

Science fiction should be the literature of ideas.  The best stuff has all the various narrative facets nicely balanced, but frankly, a good (not great) s.f. yarn can be totally lacking in relationships, or even characterization.  The ‘puzzle stories’ of the 50’s and 60’s were fine tales.  Olaf Stapledon’s (sp?) cosmic epics didn’t really have characters.

But trying to take the space travel out of BSG, or even minimizing its importance, is like trying to take horses out of Zane Grey.

(Darn it, I wish I’d gotten here earlier; this is a fascinating topic. Hopefully the thread’s still somewhat active.)

LMM: But the death of geek clubs and groups means that people who are isolated already become even more isolated. And that, IMHO, is a rather disturbing trend. I’m not sure it’s one that can be changed, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily one that should be celebrated as somehow being liberating.

This sounds like a positive side effect of the tendency for geek groups to avoid marginalizing anyone, which also leads to the Cat Piss Man failure mode. Do you think they’re separable?

Punditus Maximus: Most Americans—like most people—are these sort of sheeplike beings that float in a world of messages created by the local power structure, unquestioning in even the most dire circumstances, and selecting a role from the menu offered and living it fully.  Never knowing how or why.

Yuck! I think this is geek culture at its worse—the “fans are slans” idea, that participating in this particular culture makes you better than everyone else. Next thing you know, you’ll start using the word “sheeple”.

SF fans can be as closed-minded and unquestioningly foolish as anyone else. Hell, if you touch their objects of fandom, people can get downright weird about the things they like and the idea that reading “Ender’s Game” makes you better than other people. (“In ant colonies they are called scouts. In human societies they are called forerunners. They are the pilots of the mindless swarm and without them, humans would have gone extinct long ago.” Seriously, read it.)

It makes me sad that more people don’t read Greg Egan (seriously, follow the links! it’s rewarding!) or take an interest in good philosophy, or the like. But I don’t think that the fact that I do makes me inherently superior, and that way of thinking is a festering ooze on the fandom.

Also:  Magneto and copper:  vigorous handwaving about eddy-currents and induced magnetism….

denelian, you are my new hero.  Thanks for stating things so clearly (and defending Heinlein from the know-nothings).

+Greg Egan:  YES, YES a thousand times yes!  The hardest of hard-sf.  Plus, he wrote the best sf/gay/detective story EVER   (“Cocoon” —nothing to do with the movie).  Hell, a sizable percentage of his stories don’t have ANY humans in them.

And you gotta love it when hard-bitten mathematicians Save The Universe.  With MATH.

Eric_RoM, this is from an interview Egan did. I think it sums up my views on the subject rather nicely.

Q: You’ve been criticized for not developing your characters as fully as you could. How do you respond to this? Is characterization important when the story is about the science?

A: There’s a preconception in some circles that the characters in realistic fiction ought to have a certain quota of relationship problems, family issues and emotional baggage of various kinds — and some people seem literally unable to believe that a real human being can be more passionate about scientific ideas than anything else, even though the history of science is littered with people for whom that was true. I write about characters for whom the events of whatever story I’m telling are among the most important things in their lives, and there’s not much point writing about science through the eyes of someone who’d rather be down the pub.

(Also, mathematicians saving the universe… are you talking about “Luminous”?)

#98 grendelkhan—nice find, ::hattip::.  Yep, “Luminous”, and its sequel.  Of course, a different kind of ‘math threat’ played prominently in “Permutation City”.

Both Egan and Clarke’s characters never give a feeling of flatness, it’s just that, RIGHT NOW, they’ve got more important things to worry about.

BTW, if you like Egan, you might LUV Ted Chiang.  Smartest s-f ever.  If only he wrote faster.

Eric_RoM, I remember talking about Egan with a friend of mine, and saying that he sure had written the most uncomfortable consensual sex scene I’d ever read. He agreed, but it turned out that I’d read Permutation City and he’d read “Oceanic” (but not vice-versa). And when he does focus on people (people in insanely strange situations, but still people), he does that well—like “The Cutie”, “The Infinite Assassin” or “Into Darkness”. When I first read Axiomatic, I kept looking up every few minutes and exclaiming to no one in particular, “that just blew my fucking mind!”.

Thanks for the recommendation; I just put “Hell Is the Absence of God” on my reader, and will be chugging it down this evening.

Eric;

well, gods know i get in enough fights about Heinlein, i’m used to condensing :D not helped because i’m a woman, and so i should see the inherent sexism and run away or something [and it’s not that i don’t see it - it’s that Heinlein started in the *30’s*, and even then his abiding sin was to make women who were superwomen, not ‘bimbos” - not always great for one’s self esteem, to try and live up to Heinlein women as rolemodels, but a lot better than most other women in SF when i started reading it. in… 84? i think] *shrug*

I remember Luminious… i should re-read it. thanks for reminding me of it, guys

I can’t believe that a bunch of people who live in George W. Bush’s America are trying to lecture me on how brilliant and awesome the average person is.

Whatever.  I live in the real world, and geekdom, for all its manifold flaws, is obviously a reaction to the anti-intellectualism and deliberate idiocy of dominant culture.  The average person is stupid and incurious.  Half of them are dumber and less curious than that.  The reason geeks are marginalized in the first place is that popular culture was anti-intellectual and incurious, and those aren’t the values of geek culture.

Just because you escaped and live somewhere nice doesn’t mean everyone did—or that there isn’t a place to escape from which is the default.

This feels like a variant of the Pundit’s Fallacy—everyone likes the same thing I like.  So you like learning things and understanding the world and getting good at something, so you assume that everyone likes those things.  Spend some time among the lumpen proletariat, get lectured on how suburbia is the greatest invention in human history.  A lot of people are awesome.  The average person is just barely a smart monkey.

Did you know Heinlein invented the waterbed?:

The Invention:

The waterbed. For background, Heinlein served in the U.S. Navy until 1934, when he caught pulmonary tuberculosis, which, like any illness with that number of syllables, is something you really don’t want to have. So Heinlein found himself lying in a hospital bed for a long period of time with nothing to do but think about how uncomfortable his bed was.

So, he started doing exactly what science fiction nerds do while the rest of us are imagining attractive people naked—he drew up absurdly detailed schematics in his mind for a thing that he wished existed. As Heinlein wrote in 1980:

“I designed the waterbed during years as a bed patient in the middle ‘30s; a pump to control water level, side supports to permit one to float rather than simply lying on a not very soft water-filled mattress. Thermostatic control of temperature, safety interfaces to avoid all possibility of electric shock, waterproof box to make a leak no more important than a leaky hot water bottle rather than a domestic disaster, calculation of floor loads (important!), internal rubber mattress and lighting, reading, and eating arrangements—an attempt to design the perfect hospital bed by one who had spent too damn much time in hospital beds.”

Punditus, we’re not saying the average person is awesome, we’re just saying the average geek isn’t any better. We’re saying that there are plenty of intelligent people who aren’t part of the “geekdom” community (Amanda, for example—some people might call her a music nerd or a social justice nerd or we might find her “geeking out” about Mad Men or whatever, but she doesn’t consider herself “a geek”) and there are plenty of people involved in “geek” activities who are dumber than a box of hair. Many geeks are deeply anti-intellectual, stupid, and incurious about anything out side of their particular field of One True Geekdom, particularly within the STEM fields where you get all the assholes who think being a mid-level lab technician or computer programmer means they are, like, OBVIOUSLY way the fuck smarter and better and more creative and generally awesome than anyone in arts, social sciences, or humanities fields. There are people heavily involved in SF/F fandom who throw the biggest whiny baby tantrums you’ve ever seen if you try to critically analyze any aspect of their beloved movie/book/TV series instead of just rotely memorizing the minutae and barfing it back at people, because clearly rote memorization is the highest form of intellectualism.

It’s a core value of geekdom to consider yourself intellectual, which is a vastly different thing than actually being so.

Re: geekery and ASDs: yeah.  Well, it turns out it’s really easy to interact with folks with those states of being if you know the rules and they’re willing to put a little energy in.  So why not include them?  They have cool ideas, too.  Sometimes spectacularly cool, because of their different perspectives.

I know you mean well, but, honestly, those sorts of lines really don’t help. A lot of adults will espouse such views when faced with an abstract situation, but when it comes to interacting with—let alone befriending—someone who actually *does* have an ASD? (Let alone being friends with someone with an ASD while they’re a *teenager*?) I will *openly* state this—and I have been told by multiple people that I deal with my ASD way better than most people: It is hard to be my friend. Period. I can be an asshole. I can blow up at people. I can blow them off. I can embarrass them in public or fail to know how to interact with someone or take something they do for granted. And I can do all of those things without realizing it. It’s not actually easy to be friends with someone with an ASD, and to insist that it is really doesn’t accomplish much.

Not to mention: My original response was to a woman who said that she could go out with her friends and do normal girl stuff and then go to a D&D group on the weekends. Neither I nor most other people with ASDs that I’ve met are particularly good at normal girl stuff—even if there is the occasional discussion of Harry Potter. (That *is* somewhat an overgeneralization, but I don’t think it’s a huge one.)

***

@95: This sounds like a positive side effect of the tendency for geek groups to avoid marginalizing anyone, which also leads to the Cat Piss Man failure mode. Do you think they’re separable?

Yes, I do—in fact, I think they’re *somewhat* unrelated. Many (young, high-functioning) people with ASDs, particularly those who have not previously been diagnosed, are capable of self-care and basic politeness—mostly, what they lack are both the nuances of social interaction (reading people, having two-sided conversations, etc.) and overlapping interests with most mainstream groups. (I’m speaking *very* much from experience here—I was part of one of the two-ish geek social circles during college, and I saw a *multiple* people, myself included, go through this.) Geek groups tend to be more tolerant of this sort of behavior, even if some of the individuals are not—and, ultimately, the only real way to gain social skills is to have a community of people your age to practice on. It’s language immersion of a sort.

I’m not selling geek culture as a panacea. It has *massive* flaws—not the least of which can be misogyny. But fandom groups (like other technical / hobby-related organizations, I will point out) often contain a large number of people on the ASD spectrum—and the death of such specialized groups means that people who might take advantage of them won’t have them available.

(And, yes, I realize that a lot of places don’t have such groups and that, for those people, the demise of a specialized geek culture does help them. That doesn’t negate the roles they play in the lives of people who *do* have access to them.)