Happy Geeky New Year!

Man have I been busy lately. I got to see all my college friends the Friday after Christmas, I spent the few days around New Years Day with Angie/Sue/Joe, on New Years Day Mike and I had a Call of Duty party with Justin and Andrew (squared), I worked overnight last night, and tonight I hung out with my friend Chris, a great friend whom I haven't seen in probably 2 years. *Phew* Oh plus I get to spend next week in sunny California.

I have many cute pictures to share, and that WILL happen...but first I have to explain my geekiness to my general reader population. I used to say "dork", but apparently a dork is someone who lacks social skills (aka Napoleon Dynamite) and a geek is someone who is overly obsessed with certain interests, i.e. computer geek, theatre geek, etc.

I never really thought of myself in the sci-fi/fantasy geek category. Definitely a movie trivia/history geek, but not a geek in the traditional sense. However, my interests naturally gravitated that way. It started with my obsession with Nintendo when I was 7. I played the Mario games, Zelda, and Mike Tyson's Punch Out pretty much every day. My favorite movies were Labyrinth and Batman Returns when I was about 9, in 5th grade I collected X-men cards, in middle school I watched every superhero cartoon I could, and in high school I loved playing Abe's Oddworld and watching The X-files.

When I started dating my last ex, Andrew, a whole new world was opened to me. The world of anime. I had already been watching a lot of Japanese/Hong Kong cinema by that time to fulfill my asiaphile tendancies, and this just made it all that much cooler. The first anime (besides Heavy Metal when I was 7, not that it counts) that we watched was an episode of Lain. That confused the hell out of me, but I still liked it. We then watched the whole series of Trigun and half of Hellsing. By that time I was hooked.

Ex Andrew had been going to school at RIT, and he was very in tune to the geek/goth culture. I found myself very interested in both. I would love to do gothier things because I think the look is sexy as hell, but I can't bring myself to do it. I'm way too unfashionable. But I did realize that I was way more into a geeky type guy than the jock I dated in college.

Enter Mike. When I started talking to him I didn't know anything about him. By the time I started actually dating him I realized what a geek he actually was. I can't describe everything, but if you've ever been to our apartment you would be able to see. Then I started watching things like Serenity/Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy/Angel, and playing all sorts of crazy video games.

And now I feel like I am kind of a magnet for those kind of people. Work Andrew (different than ex Andrew) and I have grown close over things like playing Streets of Rage at work and discussing metaphysicality. He is also very much into D&D (Dungeons and Dragons). Mike wouldn't really discuss his D&D past much with me, so I listened aptly as Andrew spoke of all of the interesting characters in the game he's running and what he plans to do with them all. He saw how interested I was and told me I should start playing. But Mike is done with that and I don't know anyone else (besides Andrew and my cousin Josh) who would play with me.

So...Andrew brought his books and things over to work a few times to get me acquainted with the process of D&D. I'm gonna try a very basic explanation for the non-initiated. Basically there are books you can look at to pick attributes out for a certain character. You can pick a race, political/religious affiliation, relative height/weight, a name, weapons, armor, skills, etc. You just have to follow the general rules provided, which are really just extremely logical. Then you roll certain die to see what happens in different situations. The character groups are just anything you can think of from fantasy, like elves, wizards, etc.

I spent like 3 hours making everything for my character. For John: she is a halfling ranger who hunts the undead (especially vampires) with a wolf (I thought that was poetic). She doesn't have a lot of intelligence, but she has a good amount of everything else. She wears leather armor and carries a scimitar and a kukri. I haven't yet done anything story-wise, because either our runs get cancelled or Andrew doesn't have his stuff with him. But I'm excited to do more with it. I won't get to do much, but he just wanted me to see generally how the game is played.

So besides my current love of playing multiplayer Call of Duty and Halo, this is where I'm at with my geekitude. We'll see where it goes from here.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Ooooh, I have a mysterious, sordid D&D past that I'm not talking about! Score!
john ok said…
halfling ranger. somewhat unorthodox. I went with a half elf ranger myself with a double edged longsword. light chain mail, fairly well balanced attributes intially maybe a little heavy on agility and intelligence.

anyway yay for geekyness!

Popular posts from this blog

The Deal with Kevin Spacey: Part 2

Silence is Golden