Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

Today I read a com­ment on slash­dot that inspired me to write on this sub­ject.  The com­ment was writ­ten on the Secret His­tory of Star Wars arti­cle and was given by Omestes and was as follows:

Oh god, the Nerd/Dork/Geek argu­ment. We always went with nerds being unwashed, anti­so­cial geniuses who small vaguely like cheese, and some­how man­age to ref­er­ence Yoda, and dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions in every utter­ance. Dorks are just like nerds, but dumber. And geeks are the swash­buck­ling gen­er­al­ists who get all the chicks (er…) because they have some mod­icum of social skills, while still know­ing their swal­lows apart.

By your jar­gon though, there still is a deep rela­tion between nerds and dorks, since both of them are “sys­tems” peo­ple. D&D is just another com­plex sys­tem to play with, just like math, code, and cir­cuits. As is, oddly, the var­i­ous nerd friendly mytholo­gies. Both groups, by your clas­si­fi­ca­tion, are equally likely to get the chicks… Not very. Nei­ther math nor D&D impress many of the chicks I know.

So where does argu­ing over the seman­tics of nerdery put one?

Now this has been writ­ten about hun­dreds of times (if you don’t believe check google), but wanted to stick my two cents into this dis­cus­sion.   Let’s go over my own defintions:

Pic­ture from here

Dork: A dork is an invid­ual that has an inter­est in some­thing in so far that they are sin­gled out and peo­ple believe because of some title given to them they are thought to be an expert.  In all actu­al­ity they are no bet­ter then a lay per­son and has the largest social anx­i­eties and prob­lems deal­ing with oth­ers.   They nor­mally think they are smarter then they are, but yet nor­mally lack in depth knowl­edge to move them up the dork/nerd/geek ladder.

How­ever there is a miss­ing fac­tor to this def­i­n­i­tion, that is the fact that a dork is more likely to be the one that non dorks/nerds/geeks are most com­fort­able around.   They are the ones that come off lov­able — like when your friends or sig­nif­i­cant other says “You big dork”.   While in some terms dork is an insult, when you prop­erly it is def­i­nitely the least offen­sive to the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion at large.

Pic­ture from here

Nerd: Nerds are the indi­vid­u­als that have an inter­est in things the goes so far that not only do they have to prove tehy are bet­ter then every­one on the sub­ject of inter­est, they also are so intensely inter­ested in there area of focus that social sit­u­a­tions really don’t bother them.   It’s a waste of time for them.  They don’t know why you don’t want to dig into repli­cat­ing a holo­gram in your microwave with tin foil and bak­ing soda, which they do daily for amusement.

Pic­ture from here

Geek: Geeks usu­ally can deal with soci­ety the best, but com­pletely zone out sim­i­lar to nerds to nerds, but are nor­mally capa­ble of human rela­tion­ships, though they took the holo­gram in the microwave and made a short film out of it to upload to youtube.   They are inter­ested in the obscure and bring­ing it into fruition.   Nor­mally geeks wear the term geek on them­selves with a badge of honor.

Me and my grand­par­ents — Years Ago (Years and Years)

I can say in cer­tain areas I’m all three, but I’m mostly a geek.   I’m nor­mally quite knowl­edgable in the things I have extreme inter­est in, and i’m capa­ble of zon­ing out.  Most of my fam­ily con­sid­ers me a nerd when it comes to social net­works (and I really am when it comes to cross­post­ing).  When it comes to cer­tain items and gad­gets I’m definetly a dork try­ing to be a geek.

Wait what am I say­ing I was a pimp, I don’t know why I’m stick­ing myself into any of these groups.  You don’t believe me?  Behold Creeva with a mul­let (once again many years ago):

So which do you iden­tify with and what is your definitions?