Geek Culture

On this blog my hopes are that the few people who may stumble upon it will be rich and pay me to write nonsense for them. That's not likely to happen but a man can dream. My other reason is that I hope I can make people think about issues rationally and present viewpoints that I think make sense. You don't have to agree with anything I say, but there needs to be logic and rationality behind an argument, not just passion and anger.

Emotions have their place, but not in a debate about delicate subjects. Sometimes logic and rationale are not going to have a place in a debate, especially one over ethics and morals, which can differ greatly between cultures and even within a culture. After all, people who follow Hinduism don't eat cows, Americans raise cows to be eaten. Americans (for the most part) don't eat dogs, yet some cultures within the Asian continent do. No one can win a debate about whether any one of those stances is right or wrong.

I'm getting too far from my point though, which is that in a debate one should strive to put logic and reason into their argument, thus strengthening their stance, and allowing the other side to evaluate their own stance. Debate is virtually meaningless though. A discussion can lead to solutions or action, whether they be good or bad, but a debate, in my mind, concerns an issue with varying stances on what is acceptable with enough people involved on each side to where none will give in, an exercise in futility. It has its place, but it's not for deciding anything.

I'm off track again, seeing as how the title of this post is Geek Culture. What I mean to say next will offend some, but I will explain my reasonsing to the best of my ability. Geeks are not rational when it comes to what they like, which can be films, anime, video games, pets, political issues, and whatnot. Now, this is not to say everyone else is exempt from it, but (American)football fans, for example, tend to get obssessive about real teams and real people. That can impact real life, and whether a player gets moved to a different team can have drastic effects on the season (and that may have just shown I know little about football). Geeks, on the other hand, get obssessive about whether or not the guy with ridiculous hair in a particular anime will end up with the perky and always smiling girl next door, or the action girl who wears leather and smirks when she isn't scowling. (By the way, if that sounds like any particular anime you know of, I swear that just came off the top of my head.)

They aren't real, and while there may be similarities between obsessions like that, real life will count more. Ok, to be fair, I do care more about relationships between animated people than I do about most real life celebrities, but then I don't go and make hate fics toward a character, killing them off or pushing them aside so I can write a story about the couple I like. I don't spend time patrolling forums and being an annoying prick to people who disagree with me, and worse, bully them for it. Because the internet provides anonymity, people can be just a big a dick as they want to, which means being the biggest dick in the world over whether or not the Star Wars prequels count as canon because they happen to be somewhat worse than the original trilogy. I'll have you know the first Star Wars movie I saw was Episode Three, and I liked it, enough to watch the other five movies

Nostalgia is a real villain when it comes to this crap. The internet proclaims that the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII were the single two greatest games of all time. I've played both of them somewhat, and not only do I think Twilight Princess is a superior Zelda game (heck, I like Windwaker more), but FFVII actually made me realize that I don't like Final Fantasy at all. And that's not to say I don't like any JRPG, because I've played some that I enjoyed quite a lot. But it's nostalgia that makes people blind to the truth that these things aren't new anymore, there have been improvements and some people will have differing opinions.

I can sum up my message to my fellow geeks in this sentence: Get over yourselves. You are not always right, your opinion matters no more than mine, just because you agree with a majority does not mean that you all are correct, nor does it mean the minority is. Stifiling opinions is facist and does not let the world grow, so if you claim someone is an idiot with no taste because he happens to like Super Mario Sunshine more than 64, or at all, you are being detrimental to society. So if you do engage in that kind of activity, don't be confused as to why the rest of humanity is so messed up.

Also, to online gamers, please stop being such bastards. Just because you spend a lot of time learning how to play a game to the equivalent of being a master of martial arts does not mean you should be a complete jack ass when a new player wants to try his hand playing online. But more on that sooner or later, with my message of accepting others, because boy do some people need that slapped into their brains.

-Subtle