It Ain’t Easy Being Geek

As this is Speak Out With Your Geek Out! Week, I’m going to spend part of the week blogging about things that gets my geek up, that brings out the geeky part of my personality, that has people turn in my direction, point at me and say, “Geek!”

And I wear this title proudly.

So what’s on tap today?  What is Geek and What Does it Mean?

When I was in high school, I owned a slide ruler.  And I could use it.  Now, you could point to a lot of things at that time–I was into science fiction; I worshiped Star Trek; I was into movies like few people; I knew the names of every person, American or Russian, who’d flown in space–but whipping out a slide ruler and being able to use it tattooed the label of “geek” on my forehead better than anything else I would ever do or love.

I suffered from a number of issues, personal and mental, as a teen, and embracing my geekness helped me through that time.  (So did drugs and booze, but, hey: it was the 1970′s.)  When other people were out on dates, I was down to the mall looking for books and games.  When my friends were out with their girlfriends, I was in my room checking out the latest novel while listening to some prog rock (I was big into ELP, Yes, Genesis–or, as my friends called it, “freak music”) or WLUP, Chicago, which at that time was pretty much as “underground” FM as it got (and would often freak out my Top 40 AM friends whenever they were over and a song came on that actually played longer than 4 minutes).  When my friends were out with their girlfriends, I was often driving around in the middle of the night, the top down and the wind in my then-pretty-long hair, and I’d have some story running in my head.

You might noticed a theme in the above paragraph . . ..

At certain points in my life I spent a lot of time alone.  I lived in a small town, and if you were even the slightest bit different, everyone knew it.  And some would go out of their way to let you know that different wasn’t a good thing; I was beat up a few times in school, and there was at least one guy who spent all of high school tormenting me whenever he had the chance.  This last had a happy ending, however: said tormenting stopped when, while at my senior prom–yes, I actually had a date!–this person spent a significant amount of time talking smack about me, and when I confronted him I let it be known to him and the dozen or so people watching, that if it didn’t stop I was going to drag him into the parking lot and beat him with a tire iron.  Yes, you could do that in 1975; yes, if by that time people knew you were a little “crazy”, then they began leaving you alone when you acted out.

But I was alone.  A lot.  Even after getting married I spent a lot of time being alone, as I still didn’t fit in with the activities enjoyed by my brother-in-laws (cars and guns and hunting and Country & Western . . . oh, yeah, yee-ha).

That began changing slowly, however.  In the early days of cable I discovered Doctor Who on WTTW Channel 11, and believe it or not my stepson began watching it with me.  It wasn’t long before he started so getting into it that he wanted to know more and more about it, and eventually that led to us spending several days at a huge con in Chicago.  It was time to walk around and dress up (I had a 19 foot scarf, guess who I was?) and go to panels and attend screenings–and, in general, enjoy the fact that you were hanging with your own kind–geeks.

Then I discovered GenCon, and yes–I’d found heaven.  One thing I will just thrown out here: in my own gaming groups I’ve encountered a few butt clowns, all whom have given butt clowns a bad name.  But the majority of gamers whom I’ve encountered at events like GenCon have been great people.  I mean, when you are at GenCon running a Cyberpunk game where your objective is to kill the player characters before they wise up and realize they’ve been had (which was the plot of one of the games I ran), and when it’s all over you have a discussion about (1) how great the session was, (2) where we, the players, sort of messed up, and (3) all love for the GM . . . your life feels worthwhile, even if just for a few hours.

(And not to feel too snarky, but one of my best moments did occur at GenCon when I ran into one of the aforementioned butt clowns who hated me because I’d been the first to make him roll dice so everyone could see his rolls, and he started talking down to me, getting all superior and such before he laid a snide, “So are you doing anything interesting?” on me . . . and it was then I flipped the “Judge” badge he hadn’t noticed ’cause it was hanging from the hem of my tee shirt, and I told him, “Gee, Glen, I’d love to stay and chat, but I got a game I gotta run,” and the way his face crashed and burned as I walked away remains in my memory to this day.)

I was born too early; I really was.  Yes, I have seen a lot of things and been there at the beginning for others.  I have that creed that most people can’t touch.  But I grew up in an age of isolation; finding people who were interested in the same geeky things was a chore.  That small town where I grew up?  I was probably the only gamer there.  When I showed one of my friends an Avalon Hill game for the first time, he looked at me like I’d just tossed the body of a dead cat on the table.  You had to do some real hunting to find people.  The first gaming group I encountered was hanging out in the smelly, musty basement of a pet store, but these people formed the core of my original gaming group, one that lasted for nearly 12 years.

Today you have the Internet to connect and find people.  You have sites where you can hang and talk all the geek stuff you want.  There are sites where you can set up and run games.  My daughter–who is becoming a geek in her own way with anime and manga–has several sites that she frequents and is able to connect with people who share her interests, and this year she’s bounced ideas off me about “cosplaying” for Halloween at her school this year.  (Hint: it involves blue hair.)

And there’s even “geek dating” sites where one may be able to find that individual who is going to make your geek heart flutter and roll a straight up 20.  Trust me, were I looking these days, I would head over to Geek’s Dream Girl and get me a profile created, ’cause having a geek in your life is a great way to go.

Yes, there are still those who view us with a jaundiced eye, who see us as something to avoid because . . . well, you know, we’re geeks.  There are those who try to put us in a corner, to marginalize us, to make us somehow seem less than worthy.

I got news for these people:

We are great; we are many; we are bright and interesting and loved.

We are geeks.

And you will never take that from us.

I’m Ready For Your Closeup

As this is Speak Out With Your Geek Out! Week, I’m going to spend part of the week blogging about things that gets my geek up, that brings out the geeky part of my personality, that has people turn in my direction, point at me and say, “Geek!”

And I wear this title proudly.

So what’s on tap today?  Movies.

As a kid I grew up in a time where TV was the “vast wasteland”, where there was 5 channels and nothing on, and I do mean that: you had the Big Three networks and WGN on VHF, and WDLD, Channel 32, on UFH.  That was it.  And if you think TV bites it these days, hey, man, I was made to watch My Mother the Car, which is about as close to existential horror as once can get when you are 8.

But there was one good thing about growing up then: there were a lot of movies.  ABC showed literally every monster and sci fi flick from 3:30 to 5:00 PM every weekday, and WGN ran old movies from 10:30 PM on.  Since I was home from school by 3:15 PM–and I was the sort of kid who didn’t do homework because, well, it bored me–I sat down and watched things that you almost never see these days: The Monolith Monsters, Teenagers From Outer Space, The Giant Gila Monster, The Mole Men (which really scared me for some reason–it’s the eyes, you know).  But I also caught Them! and Kronos (the giant energy stealing robot) and It Came From Outer Space and Invaders from Mars (another flick that scared me a lot).

At the other end of the spectrum I had a huge amount of exposure to all things classic: the Jimmy Cagney catalog, Humphrey Bogart and George Raft goodness, the Thin Man series . . . it was all there for the taking, and it was free.  Just con your parents (in this case my mom, who owed me big for the mental torture of having to watch her stuff) into letting you stay up late and promise to get up for school the next day (which I could, since I could get by on 4 hours of sleep without a problem), and you were In Like Flint (which I also saw).

It was by using this scam that I was able to stay up until 11:00 PM one night and, with no one else awake, watch Forbidden Planet for the first time.  That was really a bit of magic that, these days, you’d be hard pressed to match that.

But late night TV wasn’t the only place to find this magic.  To me, the 1960′s and 1970′s were a time of major insanity for film, as it seemed like just about everything and anything was up for grabs.  Sure, I didn’t see Midnight Cowboy as a kid (no getting into X-Rated movies then, you know?), but I remember getting hauled off to a drive-in to watch a double bill of Patton and MASH, and how you can get a greater dichotomy on that subject, I don’t know–triple bill it 10 years later with Apocalypse Now, I suppose.  (And my slice of morning trivia: MASH was the first major Hollywood release to drop the f-bomb, done so in an ad-lib by actor John Schuck.  So I was there at the beginning, so to speak.)

I saw The Godfather; I saw The Exorcist two weeks after it premiered in a theater that was nearly empty; I saw Jaws; I saw Silent Running and The Black Hole . . . I conned some friends into going off to see the original Rollerball and wondered when we could see guys on roller skates beating the hell out of each other.  I hauled at least a half-dozen friends off to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on 5 different occasions . . . let put it this way: if the movie is listed in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, I saw it in the theaters (and if you haven’t read this book, you should).

And as the ’80′s and ’90′s came around, there was the discovery of movies from Europe, of movies from Hong Kong–and if you’ve never seen the pre-Hollywood catalog of John Woo, you should do this while reading Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head, ’cause it doesn’t get any crazier.

Sadly, these days I’m not as much a film geek as I once was.  Maybe it’s the feeling that everything these days is little more than an effort to put butts in the seat while convincing movie goers that a billion dollars spent on the production of 3 movies detailing the exploits of a line of 1980′s toys is really a good thing leaves me wanting.  Maybe it’s the feeling that the visual is all and story is something that gets in the way of putting pretty CGI on the screen that bothers me.  Maybe it’s the notion that Touch of Evil and Sunset Boulevard are really a quantum leap ahead in everything when compared to just about anything made today, save that done by Christopher Nolan.

Still, movies have soothed my jones for decades.  They affect each of us differently, and while what you like isn’t likely going to be what I like, never the mind: it’s the magic within that counts.

And this is the glue that real binds all us film geeks together.

Into the Final Frontier

As this is Speak Out With Your Geek Out! Week, I’m going to spend part of the week blogging about things that gets my geek up, that brings out the geeky part of my personality, that has people turn in my direction, point at me and say, “Geek!”

And I wear this title proudly.

So what’s on tap today?  Space and all things Space Flighty.

I’m a child of the 1960′s.  Sure, I was a teenager in the 1970′s, but that gets us into disco and I don’t want to go there.  (Though I was at Disco Demolition Night, and that was tons of fun.)  I started coming into my own, mental illness and all, in the late 1960′s, and that meant my life was, dare I say, pretty interesting.

Now, as I stated in yesterday’s post, as a kid I read a lot of science fiction.  Nearly all of that came from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, so that meant a lot of what I had before me dealt with ships zipping through space to destinations known and otherwise.  When a large part of your youth is tied up in such endeavors, you find yourself gyrating towards real life things.

And in the mid and late 1960′s, there was plenty of the real thing to go around.

Yes, I was around before people were in orbit around Earth.  I saw the start of the race; I was there through Gemini and I do remember when sitting for 2 weeks in a capsule the size of a Smart Car was a world’s endurance record.  I remember the Apollo 1 fire; I remember Vladimir Komarov dying in Soyuz 1.

I remember the moon flights.  I was there for a small step for mankind, and all steps after.  I remember the flight that didn’t make it, and I remember people driving on the Moon.  (This last actually cost me a friendship because I wouldn’t hang with this guy as I was watching the first Apollo 15 lunar EVA.  It was also my first encounter with idiots who believed the moon landings were faked, so it wasn’t a great loss.)

Yes, the years since 1972 haven’t always been the best for manned space flight, but in the unmanned area we’ve seen more and done more than one could have imagined.  Today we know a far different Mars than I knew as a kid; we’ve “seen” the surface of Venus; besides the Moon and Mars, there are probes orbiting Mercury, Saturn, and the asteroid Vesta, another is on its way to Jupiter; and in a few years we’ll do a fly-by of the Little Planet That Way, aka Pluto, and finally see in detail, that system.

I love, as io9 calls it, “space porn”.  I love the universe.  I love that with advances in science and technology, we are learning about just how strange yet wonderful the universe is.  I owned a telescope when I was 7, and I still have that and a 25 cm reflector.  Exoplanets excite me, and I know it’s only a matter of months (yep, that’s right) before we find a totally Earth-like planet (not a super-Earth, but one likes this rock) in the Goldilocks Zone of another star.  Are we going to find Vulcans?  Probably not, but I just want to tell people, “I knew this was coming a long time ago.”

Now, yes, I know space flight hasn’t lived up to my expectations, and I’m never going to see a probe leave for the nearest star before I die (unless I get very, very lucky, or live until I’m like 500), but I can imagine and dream–and game it.  Sure, there are a lot of RPGs that take you into space, but how about if you go there old school and real?

Diaspora is one game I’ve reviewed where the designers have tried to put science back into science fiction.  (And if you enjoy reading about gaming and game designs, check out the blog of Brad Murray, one of the authors of Diaspora.)  It’s a great, fun game, and it’s going to give you a feel for what being out in the black is really like.  (Hint: for the most part you won’t be traveling with beautiful companions.)  Stellar Wind is another such game where science can and does come into play, and space flight isn’t just a matter of aiming for the first star on the left and engaging your warp drive.  And if you’re totally into the Rocketpunk Genre, Cold Space–space flight as it could have been–is the way to go.  (Of course, with Rocketpunk comes The Elephant in the Room–)

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention–I love modeling solar systems.  I’ve done this for a few stories, and I’ve done this for a couple of games I’ve run.  I’ve used AstroSynthesis for years (bought during one of my many visits to GenCon), and of late I’ve found a few sites on the Internet that allow me to figure out Goldilocks Zones for the systems I’ve designed.  And if you like to have your solar systems created quick and dirty, National Geographic has just the site for you.

Seriously, before I die I would love to go into space.  I’ve done it many times in my imagination, and I would look to spend a little while above 100 kilometers floating next to a window, even though I know physically I’d feel like I was about to die.  But . . . that’s a minor thing compared to the experience of entering that Final Frontier–

‘Cause sometimes you gotta suffer for those things you love.

Say Hi to Sci Fi

As this is Speak Out With Your Geek Out! Week, I’m going to spend part of the week blogging about things that gets my geek up, that brings out the geeky part of my personality, that has people turn in my direction, point at me and say, “Geek!”

And I wear this title proudly.

So what’s on tap today?  Science Fiction.

I was 8 when I went off the rails.  Let me explain:

As a kid I read a lot.  There wasn’t much else to do where I grew up, so I was down to the library a lot.  Back in my day Young Adult fiction consisted mostly of “See Dick Run” and the like, so if you didn’t want to bore yourself to death you moved into the Adult section pretty fast.

So I’m rolling around looking for something to read and I discover an omnibus, two novel in one book.  Never heard of the author before, but I liked the titles since they seemed to have something to do with the Moon.  I picked it up, checked it out, read it–

And went off the rails.

The novels were A Fall of Moondust and Earthlight, by Arthur C. Clarke, and it was my first exposure to science fiction.

Long before it was evil to be a gamer, being a “sci fi nerd” was a moniker for those, like me, who had strange ideas, who had their brain looking ahead to the future, who was just a little different.  Yeah, as a kid I caught a lot of flack.  Most of the people I hung with didn’t much read, so when you started talking about reactionless drives and life on other worlds and time travel, you stood from people enough that you might as well have been chanting “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” on street corner.  (Although, for the amusement of a very cute check out girl in the store when I once worked I did chant that–and got the stares from others I knew I’d garner.)

In otherwords, I learned to be an outcast long before being an outcast was hip.

I dug into science fiction in the 1960′s.  My exposure to Clarke was follow by exposure to the Grand Masters of the genre, and every week I was down to the library checking out whatever work they had in their stacks.  And then 1966 came along, and that saw the premier of Star Trek and the beginning of the adventures of the Enterprise and–oh, look!  Now I have something else to be shunned over!

And I was, trust me.  My school system had about 2000 students total, from 1^st Grade to Graduation, and you try being the only kid who knew about this show that had a guy with pointy ears . . . yeah, I was shunned like Charlie the Unicorn.  I was even once beat up over my love of Star Trek.  Hey, punch that kid for me, too, will ya?

Harlan Ellison once wrote of using reading as an escape, and I know I did that with science fiction.  I loved where it took me.  I read as much as I can, and when I was able to afford books, I bought them.  My own copies of A Fall of Moondust and Earthlight cost $0.95 each–yeah, that’s right, 95 cents–and I remember buying them at the same time as two other books which were collections of his short stories, Expedition to Earth and Tales From the White Hart.  I still have those books; in fact, I’m looking at them right now.

But it was during this time when I discovered another Clarke novel, Childhood’s End, and it became obvious that science fiction was a lot more than ray guns and space ships.  I discovered that if a master of the genre were take the concept of “What if?” and jump into the pool of conscious thought as if they were performing an intellectual cannonball, then you had something that transcended simple story telling.  I discovered this with Childhood’s End, and when the “New Wave” of science fiction hit in the 1970′s I discovered this again, and once more during the Cyberpunk ’80′s.

Science fiction is all about ideas.  It can be about the big picture, but it can also be about the individual, the person standing at the center of the storm, and how they deal with events swirling about them.  Sandkings is one such story for me; I Am Legend is another.

There are so many layers to science fiction.  One of the things I’ve always tried to do is encourage people to expand their horizons and read as much of it as possible.  It’s not always easy:  a huge number of people I’ve met who are also into science fiction sometimes act as if the genre started in 1977–a fact that Winchell Chung of Project Rho has shown just ain’t so.  It can be tough going to convince them that there is something out there and it’s worthwhile to examine–

And then there are events that happen that seem to transcend time.

The other night I was chatting with someone and I was telling them about the then most current episode of Doctor Who, The Girl Who Waited.  As I told them about a central point of the story–varying time streams–they were like, “Gee, that’s really sort of wild.”  To me it was nothing, ’cause I’ve been watching Doctor Who for years–yes, I live near Chicago; yes, I’ve seen every episode shown on WTTW–so the concept of varying time streams is no big deal, particuarly (you know what I’m going to say next, don’t you?) if you view time from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, and then it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff.

So I was like, “Just hold on, let me show you something,” and with that I was off to YouTube to find the conversation between The Doctor and Sally Sparrow in Blink.  Not only is it incredibly well written, but in that scene you begin to understand that time isn’t all as it seems . . ..

And after they saw that and said it was pretty incredible, I said, “You wanna see some real paradoxes?  Hold on,” and with that I was off in search of a story I knew was on the Internet.  I found it and asked them to read.

An fifteen minutes later they were asking, “Did what I think just happened happen?”

They were blown away; they couldn’t believe that a story like this–one they’d never heard of until I mentioned it–existed.  The one comment they made that I won’t forget:  ”I can see how this speaks to you.”

I mean, when you want to see just how wibbly wobbly timey wimey can get, take a moment, read —All You Zombies— by Robert A. Heinlein, and wrap your mind around what’s happening inside the story–

And remember it was written in 1958 and published a year later–and it builds off his story By His Bootstraps, written years before in 1941.

This is what science fiction does: it takes what you think you know and it shows you a whole new way of seeing things.  Done right it turns everything on its head and forces you to consider other paths, other possibilities, other places.

It is indeed big ball of wibbly wobbly speculation that will force you to see the universe in a whole different light.

And if you feel the need to geek out, is there any better way than this?

I Say to Myself, What a Wonderful Gaming World

As this is Speak Out With Your Geek Out! Week, I’m going to spend part of the week blogging about things that gets my geek up, that brings out the geeky part of my personality, that has people turn in my direction, point at me and say, “Geek!”

And I wear this title proudly.

So let us start, shall we?  First up: Gaming and gamers.

Yes, it goes without saying I’m a gamer.  I have been there, so to speak, from the very beginning, for I remember the dark days of the 1970′s when if you were seen carrying a large book with the picture of a monster on it, there was something wrong with you.  If you conversed about stuff like “Armor Class”, you were speaking in tongues.  If you cared dice in a bag then you must be . . . one of them.

Them being gamers.

It seems everyone knows the sterotype: fat, sweaty guys who haven’t bathed in months, living in their parent’s basement, gathering with similar individual to eat Cheetos and drink Mountain Dew and slay imaginary imaginary creatures while never wondering if they will ever kiss a girl.

Ah, yes, it’s great fun.  All otaku get a similar rap, but if you are a gamer it seem you are destined to spend your life as if you’ve been consigned to a hereto unknown Circle of Hell.  You are a social outcast; you are unable to relate to “normal” people.

I am here to tell you, people, it’s time to understand the true nature of the universe.

First off, let me elaborate:  when I speak of gaming I speak of “table top RPGs”, wherein one sits with a group of like-minded people and work (more or less) with a Game Master in bringing their story together.  We are not talking Monopoly here, although if that floats your boat, it fine.  Most RPGs enjoy board and card games as well, but when I say “gaming” I’m referring to games like Dungeons & Dragons, or Cyberpunk, or Eclipse Phase . . . yes, I’m old school.

Gaming is, by it’s nature, social.  One has a very difficult time playing a game alone, so having three or more people present at a table when undergoing your imaginary trials and tribulations is the norm.  It involves the act of coming together and doing something.  In this way, it’s no different than watching the Super Bowl, or getting together for a cook out, or playing badminton, or watching a movie.  It’s an activity to be shared by all.

And it’s not just about getting out a character sheet and rolling the bones.  You spend enough time at gaming tables you’re gonna hear about the gaming session that went “off the rails” and turned into a full-time chat the might have been about gaming, but could have just as easily been about sports or movies or TV or . . . well, anything.  As a GM I’ve pulled my players astray many a time, and sometimes you need to do it: you need to talk about something only because you are all together and it’s easy to do.  Because as gamers you aren’t the shallow, socially inept and rather oddball individuals that “normal” people envision when talking about us–I’m looking at you, Rona Jaffe–but we’re really, truly complex and wonderful people.  No, really.

As someone who has GMed games since 1989, let me offer the following examples of people with whom I’ve gamed: my stepson and his wife.  One of my best friends and his wife, who was also a gamer before they met.  Another friend of mine and . . . his wife.  Another gamer who had to drop out of one of my games to get married.  Strange: for people who are so incapable of social interaction, seems like there’s a lot of marryin’ goin’ on.

And I’ve encountered the same thing at cons.  I’ve had no fewer than 4 married couples sit at my table when running a game, and I’m certain that one day, when I go to cons and run games again, I’ll encounter more married couples, or couples looking to get married, or just couples.  It happens because we are really are just like . . . you.

The most fascinating aspect of gaming is, to me, the creativity.  Gaming, particularly from the GMs standpoint, involves the telling of a story, the spinning of a tale.  In order to tell a tell a good story, one needs to be creative, and that creativity flows both ways, for a GM can only create part of the world in which their fellow gamers play: the players bring their characters into the mix, toss them in and hope that what percolates to the top will be epic in nature.

I got into RPGs back in the mid-1980′s because I wanted an outlet for what I felt was my creativity; I wanted to enjoy the sensation of being carried away to another world for a few hours.  Yes, it didn’t always happen; yes, I had some very bad experiences along the way, which was one of the reasons I became a GM.

But of late I’ve discovered that other people feel that storytelling and gaming go hand in hand.  Yesterday (the 11th) Rebecca Angel wrote on GeekMom of using RPGs to promote creativity in her kids.  I’ve spoken with a friend of mine about using Big Eyes Small Mouth–a RPG system based around all things anime–to bring out the creative nature of two of her children.  Of late I’ve used an online RPG to improve my writing and storytelling abilities . . . I could go on for hours, for being a gamer and being creative tend to go hand in hand.

And just to give you a little extra background: my first exposure to gaming didn’t come from RPGs–it came from Avalon Hill war games.  Why?  Because I loved history, and using Avalon Hill (and the late, great SPI) games to “redo” famous battles of the past just tickled me crazy.  It was that part of my mind that kept whispering, “What if this happened?” that drew me to war games, and later into RPGs.  And continue to draws me in to this day.

“But, Ray,” you might say, “those gaming geeks can be an unruly bunch, anti-social and just plain nasty at times.”  Yes, they can.  So can sport fans–ever hear of football riots?  So can people who gather at a bar.  So can friends at a cookout.  So can just about anyone.

I’ll admit: I’ve offered my fair share of rants about nasty gamers, about people who would stab you in the back for no reason simply because that’s how they roll.  But gamers are human, and humans come in all sort of shapes, sizes and attitudes.  But lets remember Sturgeon’s Revelation:  ”Ninety percent of everything is crud.”  While Harlan Ellison felt that average was higher for politicians and used car salesmen, I say it’s lower for gamers.

Over the years I’ve run close to 20 games at GenCon, and only once did I have an issue with someone sitting at my table–and that was because during the game he started pulling out a bunch of miniatures he bought and started fooling around with them, which became a distraction for the other players.  In all, I’ve ran games for over 100 people at GenCon (and maybe another couple of dozen at smaller cons) and they have all been wonderful people, usually full of energy, friendly, and really to have fun.

(And in case you’re wondering, Sturgeon’s Law–the real one–says “Nothing is always absolutely so”.  Really.)

There is nothing wrong with being a gamer, or a geek, or a geeky gamers if you swing that way.  I’ve been one for most my life, and these days . . . I see my daughter getting into anime and manga, and it’s only a matter of time before she starts looking at my gaming books shelves and starts to wonder–”Hey, Dad, can we do this?”  And I’m going to be right there guiding her, just as I did with my stepson, just like I’ve done with other friends–

As I said only a few days before, games take you to new worlds and can open your mind to new ideas.  It really, truly is a great way to open up and meet great people who share a common interest, and while gaming might not cause you totally geek out and rush out to buy a Companion Cube, you might just discover–

Being a gamer, even a geeky one, can be a lot of fun.

Geek Out, Baby!

For those people who actually read this blog (thank you, my pretties!), next week I will be participating in “Speak Out With Your Geek Out!” where those of us who have gone well into the territory where we so love what we do, geek-wise, that it is a way of life for us, want to tell those who might not understand the why of it the why of it.

It’s going to be fun, I tell you, fun.  Come find out what makes me a geek, why I love it, and how it could be something that you will enjoy as well.

Oh, and you’ll also find out that I have kissed girls.  No, really.

And when you have time, check out The Official Website as well as the Tumblr account.

See you next week!