![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Thinking....
So today I got involved in a dramafest (well, sparked off a dramafest) on a board I have an account on. I probably should have let it roll off of me. But it struck a nerve and I waded into it.
But that's not the story at hand, exactly. It sparked some thoughts. To quote Teahouse of the August Moon: "Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable."
One of the things of said drama was my choice of 'lifestyle' and what that means. I have generally immersed myself in geek/atypical subcultures, so I tend to forget that the majority of the country out there doesn't know what I am talking about, or disagree, or just outright find some of my choices as immoral and dangerous.
Then, today being 'Talk Like a Pirate Day', I looked up a little on it. I found it very amusing and sort of infectious (AR!). But then I found a comment on a blog about 'just another stupid internet fad'. That made me think. Yeah, I've been swept up in a number of internet fads (I have a copy of the 'All your base are belong to us' song on a CD, I use Wikis, I'm a big FireFly fan,etc.). And I wondered about it.
Geek culture has a distinct mythology, based off of the fictions we enjoy. We don't have Odysseus, or King Arthur. We have Jean-Luc Picard, Malcolm Reynolds and Harry Potter. This mythology, however, is incredibly dynamic. The geek mythos is under a constant transformation, as new bits of fiction are produced and enter into the collective geek consciousness. Our mythos is in a constant state of accelerated evolution. That includes the grassroots movements like the All Your Base and Pirate Days out there, too. In a way (to use a geek metaphor), our subculture is like a
I think that geeks are fascinated by learning things. They have a hunger for details and new ideas. I think that's responsible for the incredible rate at which we churn through fads. Maybe it's the fact that most of us grew up on stories of alternate possibilities and realities. It's an obsession with possibility.
Now for another tangent.
I was on a polyamory panel at Orycon several years ago. One of the things that came up was "Why is there a polyamory panel at a science fiction convention? What does it have to do with scifi?" Our response was that scifi conventions are about science fiction, and about science fiction fandom, and that since a noticeable number of people in fandom are poly. There was a similar discussion many years earlier at a Minicon (Minneapolis) I was at, that time about BDSM.
Why does there seem to be a noticeable crossover between these seemingly disparate subcultures - the geek saturated culture of gamers, fen, computer users, and the highly sexualized cultures of poly, bdsm, fetish? Is it the fact that all of the cultures are founded on the ideas of alternate realities, both alternate social realities of 'alternative lifestyles' and the fictional realities created by our books, games and movies? Or is it need for balance, for the cerebral of geek to be offset by the primal of kink? Maybe that also explains the noticeable pagan community in these areas. Not only the overlap of fantasy with paganism (which are often drawn from the same historical sources) but the complimenting of the intellectual with the more pastoral.
But that's not the story at hand, exactly. It sparked some thoughts. To quote Teahouse of the August Moon: "Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable."
One of the things of said drama was my choice of 'lifestyle' and what that means. I have generally immersed myself in geek/atypical subcultures, so I tend to forget that the majority of the country out there doesn't know what I am talking about, or disagree, or just outright find some of my choices as immoral and dangerous.
Then, today being 'Talk Like a Pirate Day', I looked up a little on it. I found it very amusing and sort of infectious (AR!). But then I found a comment on a blog about 'just another stupid internet fad'. That made me think. Yeah, I've been swept up in a number of internet fads (I have a copy of the 'All your base are belong to us' song on a CD, I use Wikis, I'm a big FireFly fan,etc.). And I wondered about it.
Geek culture has a distinct mythology, based off of the fictions we enjoy. We don't have Odysseus, or King Arthur. We have Jean-Luc Picard, Malcolm Reynolds and Harry Potter. This mythology, however, is incredibly dynamic. The geek mythos is under a constant transformation, as new bits of fiction are produced and enter into the collective geek consciousness. Our mythos is in a constant state of accelerated evolution. That includes the grassroots movements like the All Your Base and Pirate Days out there, too. In a way (to use a geek metaphor), our subculture is like a
I think that geeks are fascinated by learning things. They have a hunger for details and new ideas. I think that's responsible for the incredible rate at which we churn through fads. Maybe it's the fact that most of us grew up on stories of alternate possibilities and realities. It's an obsession with possibility.
Now for another tangent.
I was on a polyamory panel at Orycon several years ago. One of the things that came up was "Why is there a polyamory panel at a science fiction convention? What does it have to do with scifi?" Our response was that scifi conventions are about science fiction, and about science fiction fandom, and that since a noticeable number of people in fandom are poly. There was a similar discussion many years earlier at a Minicon (Minneapolis) I was at, that time about BDSM.
Why does there seem to be a noticeable crossover between these seemingly disparate subcultures - the geek saturated culture of gamers, fen, computer users, and the highly sexualized cultures of poly, bdsm, fetish? Is it the fact that all of the cultures are founded on the ideas of alternate realities, both alternate social realities of 'alternative lifestyles' and the fictional realities created by our books, games and movies? Or is it need for balance, for the cerebral of geek to be offset by the primal of kink? Maybe that also explains the noticeable pagan community in these areas. Not only the overlap of fantasy with paganism (which are often drawn from the same historical sources) but the complimenting of the intellectual with the more pastoral.