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Destroy Your Geek Cred!!


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So what's your dirty little geek secret? I imagine we all have one. Some iconic thing, beloved in geek culture, that we've never seen or read or done or been into. Maybe you've never read The Lord of the Rings. Maybe you didn't like The Lord of the Rings. Maybe you've never owned a comic book, or played D&D, or been to any kind of geeky convention. C'mon, 'fess up... It'll be good for your conscience. :winkgrin:

 

I'll go first...

 

 

I've never seen so much as a single episode of Doctor Who in any incarnation.

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Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!!

 

I think Tolkien's writing style is one of the most boring writing styles I've ever encountered and I used to read the dictionary for fun. I mean, come on! He goes on for a page and a half about the dew in the grass. I know this because that's as far as I can get every time I've tried to read Fellowship and I can never get past it. Ever. Horrible, horrible flow of story at that moment.

Also, I liked the Super Mario Bros. movie.

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Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!!

 

Would it be more or less Geek cred to say George Lucas is dead to me? After picking up the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD and effectively being forced to buy the digitally destroyed... err... remastered versions in the same case I've refused to put any more money towards the franchise and George Lucas. I admit I had a moment of weakness in seeing Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

 

Never forget.

Never again.

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Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!!

 

So what's your dirty little geek secret? I imagine we all have one. Some iconic thing' date=' beloved in geek culture, that we've never seen or read or done or been into. Maybe you've never read [i']The Lord of the Rings.[/i] Maybe you didn't like The Lord of the Rings. Maybe you've never owned a comic book, or played D&D, or been to any kind of geeky convention. C'mon, 'fess up... It'll be good for your conscience. :winkgrin:

 

I'll go first...

 

 

I've never seen so much as a single episode of Doctor Who in any incarnation.

You are dead to me.

 

 

 

 

Ok, I hate Star Wars. I used to like (but not love) it, but merchandising overexposure and prequels killed it completely for me.

 

As far as Tolkien goes, I agree that reading him can be tedious, but I think the worlds he created are worth the slogging.

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I thought 2001: A Space Odyssey was the most boring movie I've ever seen.

 

There, I said it.

 

D'accord. That is the first thing I thought of when reading the initial post.

 

I also think Dr Who is over-rated. Really, he's a wandering deus ex machina, looking for a place to show off.

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I consider the Hobbit far superior to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy under the "Brevity is the soul of wit" clause; "child book" or not. Mind you, I'm talking the books here. I liked the LotR movies far more than their print counterparts despite the changes made (or perhaps because of them?).

 

I never really cared for the Dragon Riders of Pern, couldn't get into them.

 

I've never read the Amber series. I keep meaning to, but something comes up.

 

I have no interest in watching Fight Club.

 

If it weren't for the rest of society moving along whether I like it or not, I would have been perfectly content with VHS tapes as opposed to the over protected over regulated and often over commercial ridden DVDs. Grog like fire, fire good for Grog's father, Fire good for Grog.

 

While at Gencon, I learned with some embarrasment that there are a LOT of sci fi writers who I have not read.

 

I love superheroes, but have yet to find a superhero MMORPG that really catches me....they always put in something that takes me out of the moment.

 

While I've seen many examples of utterly lovely women of East Asian descent, in general I just do NOT understand what all the fuss is about. For that matter, most Asian cultures are mild curiousities to me at most. I'm not even into manga/anime. More power to you that feel differently, but that's one area where I'm lacking as a geek I guess.

 

I found X-Files kind of dull after just a few episodes.

 

The 'new' Battlestar Galactica was so bitterly cynical, it had me thinking Mechanon was right.

 

Babylon 5 WAS good, but the first season was rather drab, where as Deep Space 9 was good from start to finish IMO; accusasions of rips offs aside.

 

more to come later perhaps

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Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!!

 

I think Tolkien's writing style is one of the most boring writing styles I've ever encountered and I used to read the dictionary for fun. I mean' date=' come on! He goes on for a page and a half about the dew in the grass. I know this because that's as far as I can get every time I've tried to read Fellowship and I can never get past it. Ever. Horrible, horrible flow of story at that moment.[/quote']

Ditto

Also, I liked the Super Mario Bros. movie.

Oh my god you poor tortured soul! ;)

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Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!!

 

I consider the Hobbit far superior to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy under the "Brevity is the soul of wit" clause; "child book" or not. Mind you, I'm talking the books here. I liked the LotR movies far more than their print counterparts despite the changes made (or perhaps because of them?).

 

I never really cared for the Dragon Riders of Pern, couldn't get into them.

 

Oddly enough, Pern is the only series of hers I could enjoy.

 

The 'new' Battlestar Galactica was so bitterly cynical, it had me thinking Mechanon was right.

 

Babylon 5 WAS good, but the first season was rather drab, where as Deep Space 9 was good from start to finish IMO; accusasions of rips offs aside.

 

Ah! I also rooted for the cylons! Please, please kill this bunch of idiots off, please? (That said, I still like the show, just not the characters).

 

I never saw B5, it wasn't available here, but I also think DS9 is the best of that franchise (the grating smug superiorty of the Feds ran up against a collection of other cultures who didn't worship the Federation ideals, and weren't particularly impressed with them).

 

My Not!Geek secret? I hated Star Wars ep 5. The entire waste of celluloid was nothing but an intro to the somewhat better but not worth waiting for ep 6. Even ep 1 (watchable only for Jar Jar Binks:nonp:) was a better watch than 5.

 

As far as Tolkien goes, I think it depends a lot on the reader's inner ear. Like Tolkien, Shakespeare bores me to tears. I've slogged through some of the plays, and sat through others (I fell asleep in Romeo and Juliet), but I have no trouble at all seeing the epic Tolkien describes.

 

How about a not!nerd cred? I was following the Gor series when it came out. Glad that somebody had finally staked Campbell's corpse and put it to rest, but LORD could Norman distroy a sex scene. :doi:

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I enjoyed the LotR movies, but couldn't make it through even half of one book.

 

Never read Pern, Amber, or indeed a number of other sci-fi/fantasy books.

 

Saw maybe 2 episodes of Babylon 5, had no desire to watch the new BSG after catching the pilot. Also had no desire to watch X-Files.

 

The entire fantasy genre leaves me feeling rather meh.

 

Anime and manga generally get on my nerves.

 

Like Hermit, I don't get the huge attraction of Asian women. Some are lovely, true, but IMO no more so than in other cultures.

 

I tried CoH for a while, but don't see what the huge draw is with MMORPGs.

 

And zombie movies generally don't do anything for me, but that could have something to do with my first exposure to them. When I was young, my step-mom had us kids all stay up to watch Night of the Living Dead... because the bulk of it was filmed at her uncle's farmhouse. It's kinda hard to get into the zombie-terror thing when your mom is saying things like, "Ooo! I remember playing on that bridge!" or "That mirror was right in the entryway, it was so pretty..."

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Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!!

 

I don't like Dr. Who.

I've never watched Babylon 5.

I didn't like the Battlestar reboot, although I loved the original.

I hate 2nd edition DnD.

I don't play console games.

I don't like The Game of Thrones.

I don't like Mountain Dew. Or Dr. Pepper (carbonated prune juice).

And I'm not done.

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I never watched "Heroes" after season one.

I'm not into Asian movies really although I do like "Shaolin Soccer".

I never watched the new Battlestar Galactica. I just caught a few drips in passing when OddHat was watching it.

I've only read a few fantasy books these past few years and no Sci-Fi books.

All the fantasy books were Dragonlance.

I never watch DVDs these days. Except recent Christmas ones.

I've never made my own Champions character.

Most shameful of all, I don't read Hero books much.

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I'm not a fan of Star Trek. I don't hate it, I just never got what the appeal was. I've only seen a handful of eps of any of the series (and none of Enterprise), and was just never impressed.

 

I don't care much for video games. I'll play them socially, when friends come over, but just firing up the console and playing a game by myself? No thanks.

 

I don't like card/board games. They bore me to tears. I've got an attention span of maybe half an hour; if the game goes any longer than that I have to fight to keep from wandering away from the table, and at that point I start playing to lose just so somebody will win and the stupid game can end.. Which is funny, because I can play an RPG for 6 or 8 hours and never be bored.

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Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!!

 

I thought 2001: A Space Odyssey was the most boring movie I've ever seen.

 

There, I said it.

 

The best comment on 2001 -- a movie I saw at age 13 or 14 in first run -- was in a review in a campus paper that was written 20 years later, by someone like me who had seen the movie as a kid. Its opening line, stripped of the experiential context, went something like, "I didn't understand a moment of it, but I knew from the outset that it was cool as s***." (Italics in original.) I don't think I've watched it since 1969 either, but that mirrors my impression. It helped (in watching that movie) that I had read the book first.

 

Now, to destroy my own geek cred.

 

Name a geek TV series since ST:TOS (which I saw two years of in first run), and I haven't watched it. Never saw a single episode of Babylon 5. Or X-Files. Or any of the Stargates. I think I've seen about two episodes of any of the subsequent Star Trek series, and I only saw three of the movies (I, II, and IV for those keeping score). And I walked out in the middle of watching the last Star Wars movie. The only Battlestar Galactica I watched was literally the original pilot (which was interrupted when Carter, Sadat, and Begin flew back from Camp David and they interrupted the show while it was clearly building toward blowing up the planet). I can't bring myself to sit through any of the Buffy series (my tolerance of TV-portrayed teenage angst is about 60 seconds shorter than the time interval between fights in that show), though Firefly and Serenity I like. Mind you, I have a very hard time these days staying the room when a TV is turned on anyway. I'll watch live sports events if the sound is muted, and I'll watch NOVA on PBS, and I can take the Weather Channel with heavy use of the mute button, but that's about it.

 

Oh, and Doctor Who ... :no:. Never been even remotely tempted to see any of them, and a couple of exposures to five-minute random bits reinforced that lack of attraction. It didn't help that the only Doctor Who fans I've known personally were airheads whose tastes in other things was appalling.

 

I don't do MMORPGs. In fact, I don't do online games of any sort.

 

My comic book roots are irretrievably frozen in the late Silver Age. I will make exceptions for a couple of true classics that are universally applauded by several people whose opinions I trust (these include the Dark Knight series, and Watchmen, and I am enjoying Girl Genius immensely, but I don't think anything else has made it to the list yet), but stuff that came out after about 1972 has been ... meh.

 

The only anime I can stand being in the same room with have been feature-movie length works by Hayao Miyazaki. The rest of it ... all of it ... has struck me as tripe devoid of any art, and I mean both literary art and (more especially) graphic art.

 

I did play the first Zelda on the original hardware console. I've played other console games with my kids on the N64, GameCube, and Wii, but without my kids I'd never have touched them. All those console games are DEX tests, and I avoid DEX tests as much as I can.

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I don't like Alex Ross' "art" (really, as artists go, he's a good photographer)

Joss Whedon's run on Xmen made me throw up a little in my mouth

I have only ever read the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the rings- I couldn't get any farther through LOTR

I've seen a little Dr. Who but could never really get into it

Never read a Potter book but saw all the movies

I think Geoff Johns should be beaten with a large pointy stick for bringing back Hal Jordan

Uh, that's all I have for now...

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In earnest, I don't really think my "geek cred" score is all that high. I am constantly missing references to even popular shows.

 

I have been able to slog through most of the Star Trek crap, but was never able to attach myself to DS-9. I couldn't care less about the rip-off rumors, but it was close enough to Babylon-5 that I consider them similarly themed. I preferred Babylon-5.

 

I hate the Song of Ice and Fire (or whatever the series is) from George R. R. Martin. I read fantasy for the purpose of seeing something larger than life. I don't need the same sort of cynical pessimism that exists in my own mind. In fact, I consider it a low mark that I forced my way through the first book. I should have given up around the time my favorite character was pushed from a tower.

 

Star Wars and Lord of the Rings were both highlights of my childhood that I consider ruined in my adulthood. Well, maybe not ruined, but I only cared for the Star Wars Prequels insomuch as they had visually impressive lightsaber battles.

 

As to LoTR, the biggest thing that turned me off was the completely pointless changing of attitudes, from Gandalf and Aragorn, and the wussification of Frodo. I didn't care much for Tom Bombadil from the books so I suffered zero heartache that he and the Barrow Downs were removed. Aragorn giving the ancient swords to the hobbits was the perfect way of explaining how they got them. The replacement of Glorfindel with Arwen also caused me no grief. The only way Glorfindel would have been relevant to modern audiences is if he took the place of occasional ally. Perhaps he could have taken Haldir's place (and not died), but otherwise it was okay to remove Glorfindel. Arwen was a good choice because of the importance she played later. But my single largest problem, with the LoTR, was that they took the Dead Men of Dunharrow and turned them into Scrubbing Bubbles. Not only was this horrible to the story, it was the lowest point in the movies visually; "Do you have an Orc infestation, get Scrubbing Spectres! Just pour into your city and watch how the patented Green Glowin' Foamin'™ action wipes them away. No scrubbing necessary! Just be sure to dismiss them when the job's done."

 

MMORPGS - Tried one (Champions Online). Hated it. The entire paradigm of how they are made would have to completely shift in order for me to ever try one again. I like to play alone. While I am willing to partner up with a friend, I don't want a game to force me to in order to beat a quest. As I see it, Champs Online was sort of like playing Diablo II except that I had a whole lot of people badgering me to either join up or duel. I wanted no part with either one. Thank all that is holy and righteous that I never paid any money for that experience. I personally like the idea of a persistent game world that changes and evolves. I would be willing to pay a monthly subscription fee only if the world kept evolving and that something like the Radiant Story from Skyrim was implemented. I do not want to have to beat up on the Purple Gang with every, single, f-ing character I play. I can almost see that, except that I turn around and look to watch some other guy just beat down the guy I just finished defeating. Total disconnect from the game world at that point. In fact, I would prefer to remove the MMO part of it away and pay a subscription fee just to have some sort of persistent world that evolves for me (not really as the same story would be given to everyone) and I don't turn around and watch somebody else beating up on people that I just put down.

 

As to many of the other things mentioned (or not) here, I could spend a whole lot of lines saying nothing. Here are a few points;

  • Pern - Read the first three books and have almost no recollection of the story.
  • Amber - I couldn't even name the author or a single character.
  • Michael Moorcock: Hated his writing style with a passion.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey - Slept right through on every occasion I tried to watch it.
  • Console gaming machines - If Stupid Fat Fingers™ can't type on a keyboard very well, those stupid little controllers are impossible. I use my PC with a lot of patience.
  • Battlestar Galactica remake - Good for only the space battle scenes. Hated every single character on that show. Every one.
  • Dr. Who - Always bored by it. Have a friend that loved it back in the day (especially Tom Baker) and I sort of was forced to watch it as he always had it on in the background. Cribbed a very few lines from it for gaming and that's about it. Have only watched one episode of the later series. Just as boring to me.
  • Anime is pretty blah for me. There have been the occasional times I've enjoyed it, but the artistic style is often at odds with what I consider pleasing.

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I don't read very much fantasy or sci-fi, at all. I prefer classic and contemporary literature(e.g., non-genre quality fiction). There's some fantasy and sci-fi writing of quality, but if I want profundity and eloquence, I'll pick up Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky or Kafka or Faulkner.

I like Star Trek well enough, but would rather jump in front of a moving train than sit through a Trek-a-thon. Too many platitudes, too many middle-management meetings(TNG and later series), too much cheesiness.

This probably is more geekier-than-thou than it is non-geeky, but I generally consider the artwork in Chinese comics to be far superior to that in most Japanese manga. The action sequences are more interesting as well. I like Dragonball Z, but can't stand Ghost in the Shell(I remember thinking "what is this boring, depressing crap?").

Cosplay and LARPing and Furries and SCA and RenFaire weird me out a bit.

I still occasionally get uncomfortable talking gaming or comics or tv on a crowded public train.

Wasn't really a huge Buffy fan. I can watch Dr. Who but sometimes I just want to see him punch someone's lights out or charge in guns blazing. You're elegantly British, I get it. Now go kick that guy's arse.

 

I like rap, football, boxing, and cooking on my outdoor grill. I don't have full cable anymore, just Netflix.

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Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!!

 

I have never watched Dr Who. Tried years ago and it bored me to tears.

I thought Buffy was boring - never watched Angel.

I like the TV mini of the Shining much more than the theatrical release.

2001 was boring.

I hate Song of fire and Ice, but I sort like the Wheel of Time.

I hate Swords and Sorcery in any form (don't like Howard's writing at all - I also don't like Lieber or Moorcock).

X-files was pretty boring - I couldn't get into it at all.

I like the Star Wars Prequels, I like the Matrix Sequels.

 

I have never played a console game online, nor a computer game online. My first MMO was only a month ago with CoH - a coworker talked me into it, and I don't play for the combat, I'm in a Roleplay Heavy supergroup - and as I can't make my normal weekly face to face game sessions this is an okay fill in until I can.

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