I have a dark secret. I’m not a real geek.

I’ve tried to be, I really have. I played D&D, watched a lot of Star Trek, gotten into arguments about Return of the Jedi being the best Star Wars movie. I’ve been to conventions, ran games, expressed outrage at the canceling of Firefly, all kinds of things.

But I’m not really a geek. There are so many things my geek friends rave about that I am at a loss on. I didn’t really like World of Warcraft, Battlestar Galactica or Stargate SG-1. I don’t read comic books, gaming manuals or most science fiction books.

I masquerade as a geek so I can be accepted with them. Maybe I can’t keep up with every conversation, but I can at least fake it until I can throw out some Nathan Fillion news.

But I am a geek. I love Star Trek and Doctor Who, I read a lot of Heinlein and Haldeman and I’m in school for network engineering.

This puts me in a strange place in the geek culture. I live near a border that I cross on a regular basis. A Schrödinger’s geek, if you will. When you open the box, you don’t know if I’ll be installing Linux on a computer or watching WWE wrestling. This means I get to watch and observe. I get to take a look into the world of the geek without becoming completely immersed in the fanboy culture. I can look at things passively and give both the geek and the outsider’s viewpoint. I am perched on a stack of Anime quietly studying them.

These geeks in the Mist

Stay tuned for observations…