The Sword and Laser discussion
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Necessary for true S&L geek cred
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Speaking of movies; John carpenter's Christine has the most seductive "lap-dance", the famous "show me" scene. Of course the movie is not as good as the book, but still...And who doesn't remember Icewind dale' heart of winter final boss... that darn ice dragoness...
If you remember the old turn-based 4x dos game Master Of Magic, you are a true geek and I salute you.
Bryan wrote: "If you remember the old turn-based 4x dos game Master Of Magic, you are a true geek and I salute you."Wow, I loved that game. I remember always choosing the dragon wizard so I could start in the mirror world and get a head start on the other wizards.
It was like Civilization, but with wizards. How could you not love that?
I'm going to throw Defender of the Crown out there. It was a great game back in the 286/C64 days that was sort of like Risk, but with arcade minigames where you got to joust, lay siege to a castle, or rescue a princess.I put hours and hours into that game on my C64. That and the Bard's Tale games, especially Bard's Tale 3. Gotta love using graph paper to make dungeon maps.
Wow, Josh wow. I'm impressed, both by that list and by you taking the time to type it all up nice and neat.Such a lot of things to explore. Maybe the one underlying factor of geekdom is that we all like to learn stuff. I mean geeking out is really about loving something and wanting to be immersed in it and to learn as much as we can about whatever things grab our imaginations. And then wanting to share those passions with others.
OK thanks to a good geek on here I found and watched Gamers 3: Hands of Fate and it was amazing kickstartered and made by "nobody's" and it was better than 75% of the hollywood blockbuster 100 million dollar movies I've seen and the running joke through that pays off with a Firefly tribute was worth it alone thanks man I saw the first 2 but didnt know the third was out so thank you for sharing.
Kamil wrote: "Speaking of movies; John carpenter's Christine has the most seductive "lap-dance", the famous "show me" scene. Of course the movie is not as good as the book, but still...And who doesn't remember ..."
The best "lap-Dance" scene ever is in Cabin in the Woods..hands down...every girl loves a moose :)
Owwww- wooooooooo!
Paul wrote: "OK thanks to a good geek on here I found and watched Gamers 3: Hands of Fate and it was amazing kickstartered and made by "nobody's" and it was better than 75% of the hollywood blockbuster 100 mill..."There is a deleted scene that they posted on YouTube that contains one of the best Firefly rants I've ever seen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8WLlD...
T.R. wrote: "There is a deleted scene that they posted on YouTube that contains one of the best Firefly rants I've ever seen.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8WLlD... "
Wow Thanks for that as well....
....No you just don't get over something like that :)
Seriously I want so badly to meet the person(s) responsible for the cancellation in a dark alley someday.
Do they know I wonder how reviled they are to this day? I've seen Tv shows, movies, books, comics, parody songs galore all rip on Fox for the stupidity of cancelling the greatest TV show ever created they should at least be aware of the dark geek karma that will follow them into their eternal oblivion.
On a Similar note I miss late night sessions of Cleopatra 2525.Coincidentally with a Firefly connection?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAbHqc...
I completely forgot about Cleopatra 2525. It seemed like there were a lot of great (sometimes bad, but still great) shows back then that only ran for a season or less.Jack of All Trades and the John DeLancie show Legend, anyone?
I think you need to add Exalted to the list of paper RPG games. One of my very favorite. Also made by White Wolf (makers of World of Darkness)
Bryan wrote: "If you remember the old turn-based 4x dos game Master Of Magic, you are a true geek and I salute you."Many, many years ago (before I had a computer of my own) my friends were going out of town for the weekend, so I came to their house to cat-sit. I got up on Saturday morning, fired up Masters of Magic, turned it off and went to bed. (Having left the computer about twice for nutritious meals of Hershey's Kisses or frozen pizza, and to let the cats in/out.)
For those of you in the US, The Goonies is about to be shown on ABC Family at 9am EST, which is 20 minutes from now.See what the fuss is about for free! (Well, provided you pay for basic cable.)
I'll second that, Dan. Growing up in the area and watching Goonies as a kid, it really felt like if we hunted the beaches long enough we could find treasure. Thinking about it now though I don't think there really were pirates on this coast... Weren't they mostly in the Atlantic and the Caribbean?
Ariel wrote: "I'll second that, Dan. Growing up in the area and watching Goonies as a kid, it really felt like if we hunted the beaches long enough we could find treasure."I don't know. I grew up in England, and not near to the coast, and we still formed a goonies style club, convinced we were going to stumble across hidden pirate treasure. I don't think geography has much place in a child's imagination.
Ruth wrote: "I don't think geography has much place in a child's imagination."
Nope; we used to look for it here on the beaches of Lake Ontario and occasionally in our neighborhood 6 miles inland on a good day :).
You have to have enjoyed "Big Trouble in Little China"; "Army of Darkness" and a big help if you played "Ultima 4" for way too long.
"Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."
Ayesha wrote: "The thing I hate about these "geek cred" convos is the idea that anyone should be the arbiter of "what is geek". Like the Kingdom of Geek must be guarded from the hoards of imposters.Fuck that. ..."
AMEN!
Trike wrote: ""Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."""All right, you primitive screw-heads, listen up! See this? This...is my BOOMSTICK!" (bonus geek points for those who can finish the quote)
Army of Darkness: up there with Blazing Saddles and Monty Python and the Holy Grail as one of the most quotable (and quoted) films of all time.
To the list, I would add a bunch of older films: The Warriors (laser), King Kong (1931, sword), The Thing (laser), The Sword and the Sorceror (what else? sword), Planet of the Apes (laser), Logan's Run (laser), Beastmaster (sword), Hawk the Slayer (sword), The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (laser, naturally), The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (sword, and you might also like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad for the "Doctor Who" connection), The Day the Earth Stood Still (laser), Jason and the Argonauts, Gojira (laser - at points literally, since they use laser cannons to fight the monster), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (laser), The Black Hole (laser), The Navigator (sort of both), Ice Pirates (laser), Clash of the Titans (1981, sword), Them! (laser), 20 Million Miles to Earth (laser), Let the Right One In (sword, as one of the best vampire movies ever made), The Lost Boys (sword, good contrast to the previous film), most of Hayao Miyazaki's films (a mix of sword and often steampunk-ish laser. All are good, but I have a personal preference for Nausicaä and Laputa).
Sheesh. When I started, I thought it'd be a short list. Note that many of those films are not good films, as such, but they are each of them widely referenced parts of the SF/F lexicon, at least in my area of the world. The emphasis on monster movies may be regional, with residents of the SF Bay Area of a certain age all growing up watching Bob Wilkins' "Creature Features."
For role-playing games (I have to qualify it that way, as geeks will assume "games" just means video games or RPGs, based on their respective ages. It's actually a good gauge of the age of a geek, which he/she assumes you mean when you say "games"), I have to add a few: Traveller (with two Ls! Infamous as the RPG where you can die during character creation! laser, naturally), Paranoia (quick, intuitive, and as much fun to read as to play: laser), Warhammer Fantasy Role-play (sword, with one of the best character improvement mechanisms I've ever seen), Rolemaster (sword, infamous for its excessively detailed random combat results tables, lampooned as "roll master"), Champions (the game that popularized the idea of taking disadvantages in order to get more points for beefing up other areas of your character. sword or laser, depending on where you think comic-book superheroes naturally lie), and Skyrealms of Jorune (no reason other than its a favorite of mine. mostly laser, played with a sword mindset). Role-playing geeks like to talk about which of the different published "Doctor Who" RPGs they've played over the years, earning points if they've played more than three different systems, more points if they've run those games, and even more points if they've created their own "Doctor Who" RPG (who hasn't?).
In general, if a person is dedicated enough to create their own work - fanvid, game system, video game, music track, edited version of a show/film, etc - then that person probably qualifies as a geek, simply because someone else could point and say "Sheesh! You are such a geek about that!"
But that's the nature of geekdom, isn't it? Geekiness is not self-determined. It is bestowed, as a judgment, by others. I can't say "I am a geek!" with any validity, unless someone else has rolled their eyes and groaned "You are such a geek!" when I've told them in excessive detail about some SF/F element that seems really important to me. Sadly (or happily, depending on your point-of-view), I am thus a geek many times over, in many areas.
Harold wrote: "Army of Darkness: up there with Blazing Saddles and Monty Python and the Holy Grail as one of the most quotable (and quoted) films of all time."I would also add Aliens to that. "That's it man! Game over! Game over, man!" "Somebody wake up Hicks." "Drake, we are LEAVING." "Get away from her, you bitch!"
Oh, and Ghostbusters: "Listen! Smell that?" "Don't cross the streams." "All right, let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown!"
And Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan: "I don't believe in the no-win scenario." "There she is! And not so wounded as we were led to believe!" "The good of the many outweighs the good of the few."
Oh! The Terminator!: "Come with me if you want to live!" "I'll be back."
Not to mention Conan the Barbarian, of course. And The Princess Bride. And of course, the awesome that is Big trouble in Little China.
...boy, we have a lot of mindspace taken up by awesome movie lines, don't we?
Harold wrote: "But that's the nature of geekdom, isn't it? Geekiness is not self-determined. It is bestowed, as a judgment, by others. I can't say "I am a geek!" with any validity, unless someone else has rolled their eyes and groaned "You are such a geek!" when I've told them in excessive detail about some SF/F element that seems really important to me. Sadly (or happily, depending on your point-of-view), I am thus a geek many times over, in many areas. "
In that case, I'm in on a number of topics. While on a car trip with three women, for some reason the topic of cars kept coming up and I was rattling off this or that tidbit ("The first Indy 500 winner was built in Dayton, Ohio!" "The gas indicator has a little arrow next to it showing which side of the car the fuel door is on.") and finally one of the women said, "Do you just memorize this trivia in case it comes up?" And another added, "Geeeek."
T.R. wrote: "I completely forgot about Cleopatra 2525. It seemed like there were a lot of great (sometimes bad, but still great) shows back then that only ran for a season or less.Jack of All Trades and the J..."
Speaking of bad late night TV, I recently picked up complete collections of 'Acapulco Heat' and 'Sheena'. The later is the one with Gena Lee Nolin, not the 1950's one.
I just erased the entire post I had typed out and am just going to leave you all with this (Will Wheaton's awesome speech about being a nerd): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_BtmV...
I couldn't agree more.
I couldn't agree more.
Quoting the Black Knight " let's call it a draw"
as for the whole geek cred thing: I think we should just be open to answer questions when people ask about things they've not heard of before, instead of laughing at them. I play video games but I'm very picky about what I play. I don't care much for games like Call of Duty, Halo, Grand Theft Auto. They bore me. I love RPGs and even though I prefer scifi rpgs which are rare enough, I do play fantasy RPGs as well because they are fun.
If something doesn't interest me, I'm not gonna bother with it. I don't like Dr. Who or Supernatural. I didn't watch Firefly or any of Joss Whedon's shows until two years ago or so for various reasons, and I have just recently learned to appreciate the quality of Buffy the Vampireslayer.
I never got into comic books, I've only played one P&P RP in my life, and I don't understand what's so fascinating about Manga.
What I know is that when Will says he got made fun of when he was young for liking this and that, I agree with him because that has happened to me too. But nowadays it feels the roles are reversed. People who used to be made fun of turn around and make fun of people who aren't part of this or that. And it often enough goes to the point of making people feel excluded from this huge group of "nerds" because now you have to "qualify" to be one, and if you haven't played this game, watched that show and so on, you aren't one. I think this sucks.
If something doesn't interest me, I'm not gonna bother with it. I don't like Dr. Who or Supernatural. I didn't watch Firefly or any of Joss Whedon's shows until two years ago or so for various reasons, and I have just recently learned to appreciate the quality of Buffy the Vampireslayer.
I never got into comic books, I've only played one P&P RP in my life, and I don't understand what's so fascinating about Manga.
What I know is that when Will says he got made fun of when he was young for liking this and that, I agree with him because that has happened to me too. But nowadays it feels the roles are reversed. People who used to be made fun of turn around and make fun of people who aren't part of this or that. And it often enough goes to the point of making people feel excluded from this huge group of "nerds" because now you have to "qualify" to be one, and if you haven't played this game, watched that show and so on, you aren't one. I think this sucks.
I love and hate this thread. Sharing what you really like is cool. Any implication that those things are necessary to being a member of the "club" is obviously not cool.People made fun of me for being a nerd, not for liking things that are considered nerdy or geeky these days. (For example, I got ridiculed just for bringing books to camp, not because they were SF books.)
To me, you can hate Star Trek and be a geek. You can find Joss Whedon wildly overrated and still be a nerd. You can even just mildly like those things and still be a geek. But, on the subjects that DO interest you, you have to be passionate and curious. Plenty of people like Monty Python but if you claim to be a Python-geek, you'd better know more than Holy Grail, Life of Brian and a parrot sketch. Geeks don't go for wafer-thin mints worth of the things they like.
And, that's where I think you get to the idea of Geek-cred -- it's not that I have to have read the Star Wars novels to be a geek (which I haven't) but I don't have any particular "geek-cred" about Star Wars just from having seen the movies and owned a light saber or two.
Y'know, Geek-cred isn't really ever about its absence. No one ever lacks geek-cred as a person just because they know nothing about some subject. There's too much for anyone to know everything. But geeks all have "geek-cred" about some subjects and fellow geeks recognize it when they hear it. An acquaintance of mine wouldn't gain geek-cred in my eyes from mentioning they've seen Conan the Barbarian but if they start talking about why they like it more than any other Oliver Stone script and about the scene where Subotai say that his god is mightier than Conan's god, I know I'm talking with a kindred spirit and someone who might know the movie better than me.
I'd say you qualify as a geek if you got that the term "Skin jobs" in Battlestar Galactica came from/ was a homage to Blade Runner.
Denisse wrote: "I'd say you qualify as a geek if you got that the term "Skin jobs" in Battlestar Galactica came from/ was a homage to Blade Runner."I still meet people who had no Idea that Rob Zombie's song More Human Than Human was from Bladerunner.
they get all "Whaaat?!" :)
Denisse wrote: "I'd say you qualify as a geek if you got that the term "Skin jobs" in Battlestar Galactica came from/ was a homage to Blade Runner."Well... that info might get you an invite to stand in line for the geek club, but it wouldn't get you in the door.
A geek would know the name "bladerunner" was coined by Alan Nourse for his book called The Bladerunner. William S. Burroughs, one of the Beat generation writers, was hired to adapt Nourse's book into a screenplay treatment and decided to split the word into two: "Blade Runner." And that, furthermore, Burroughs coined the phrase "heavy metal" a metaphor based on his outrageous drug-taking as a member of the Beats, which influenced French comic book artists calling themselves Les Humanoïdes Associés (United Humanoids) to create Metal Hurlant, aka Heavy Metal Magazine, whose design ethos influenced a certain film director named Ridley Scott. Scott hired famed futurist Syd Mead as the film's designer, who borrowed liberally from Moebius' work in Metal Hurlant, particularly the story "The Long Tomorrow", written by Dan O'Bannon. O'Bannon, of course, wrote Alien, which Scott directed
Now, if you can tie William S. Burroughs, Adam Ant and Robocop into a nice Celtic knot, you get to join the Illuminati. Wanna see my membership card?
Of course, a TRUE geek would know that Burroughs didn't "coin the phrase" heavy metal, he was simply the first (or one of the first, depending on who you talk to) to use the term in pop culture. Heavy metal had been used as a term in chemistry/metallurgy for quite some time prior to this.But don't worry Trike, I still think you're a geek.
There's an "as" missing there. It's the use of the words as metaphor that I'm focusing on. That's the usage he coined.
Rasnac wrote: "Babylon 5... Nuff said. :)"Never heard of it. Is that an anime or something?
Alicja wrote: "I think it takes a long lifetime and more to even begin to explore geekdom. We have mentioned so much here and yet it is just the tip of the iceberg. I consider anyone a geek if they spend a lifeti..."I just watched War Games for the first time on Netflix yesterday. I was surprised at how well it holds up--great movie! I remembered that it was referenced in Ready Player One and it was nice to finally see it. :-)
James wrote: "T.R. wrote: "James wrote: "How is it that no one has mentioned "The Gamers" or (even better) "The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising"? These may be the best gamer/sci-fi lovin'/geek-based movies out there (..."I definitely agree that Hands of Fate gets better with more views! Also, I can feel the need to play card games starting up...
The Elder Scrolls games
Might & Magic
Final Fantasy (technically any..."
The Star Wars D6 RPG. The old awesome one devoid of George Lucas input and written well before the cinematic crime that was the Prequel Trilogy.