The internet made me much more of a scifi geek in my 30s than I ever was as a teenager. Do you older geeks find this to be the case for you as well?
For The Older Scifi Geeks
- Thread starter Starfleet Engineer
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I've always watched every bit of SciFi I could get my eyes on. Loved Battlestar Galactica, Logan's Run, Buck Rogers, etc as a kid.
I loved scifi just as much back then as I do now and watched all that stuff. I guess I'm referring to being more knowledgeable about it. For example, I thought knowing names of episodes of stuff was crazy. Why would anyone know that? But as I spent time here and elsewhere online I found myself knowing the names of episodes from all kinds of scifi series by memory, not from purposefully memorizing them but from having hundreds of conversations online about them. I just find it funny that the internet has made me a much more knowledgeable and involved geek in adulthood, when it's adulthood when most people fall away from it.
Geekdom does seem to have exploded in the last decade or so. Just look at Comicon. What used to be a little subculture has ballooned into sheer madness.
Ah, OK, my bad. Yea, that's almost certainly the Internet making those conversations more available to you. Heck, with American TV nowadays, the episode titles don't even appear on screen anymore, so, in order to know the titles, you gotta get them from Internet interaction/research.
I've been a hardcore genre nut since Uncle Mike gave me a copy of Fantastic Four back around 1965. 
See, I was doing that WAY before the internet. I remember being in Jr. High back in the 70s and having really intense discussions about ST:TOS with a friend in which both of us fully expected the other to know not only the titles of episodes but who wrote them and even, in some cases, the director.
So, no, I'm no bigger a SciFi geek now than I was then. But I think there are more of us now, thanks to the internet.
Ditto.
Nope I've always been this bad.
But the internet has made it quicker *cheaper* to keep track of things, and a lot easier to network. (clue's in the name on the last one, I guess)
Actually, what the Internet has done is give me the opportunity to share a common interest in SF&F.
No one in my family or circle of friends had any interest in either.
In addition, I get to meet up people from around the world when attending conventions, and meeting my favorite actors from SF&F.
Yep, same here.
In fact I'm still trying to get myself elected Lord of the Geeks. My goal is to start my own nation where we can all practice our geekery freely and without shame well into old age.
I would of course, but the uncontested ruler of this nation.
If you elect me, I promise that there will be no taxes whatsoever. But, you would all have to be me piles of vanilla ice cream.
My dad introduced me to the original Star Trek and the works of Heinlein years before I ever heard of the internet.
I don't attend conventions or get into the merchandise stuff, when I run into other scifi geeks in real life it can be fun to geek out a bit, but I do not seek other fans out.
As to the world of internet fandom, it annoys me sometimes because of how jaded and cynical it can get. I would never have enjoyed Star Trek, or Heinlein, or Asimov as much I did had I been on the internet first and exposed to people listing their best and worst episodes or lamenting Heinlein's fascism or Asimov's inability to write female characters.
I don't attend conventions or get into the merchandise stuff, when I run into other scifi geeks in real life it can be fun to geek out a bit, but I do not seek other fans out.
As to the world of internet fandom, it annoys me sometimes because of how jaded and cynical it can get. I would never have enjoyed Star Trek, or Heinlein, or Asimov as much I did had I been on the internet first and exposed to people listing their best and worst episodes or lamenting Heinlein's fascism or Asimov's inability to write female characters.
My SF/F geekdom predates the interwebs (circa 1973 when I discovered Heinlein in the Junior High School library). Once in high school I fell in with the computer geeks, who of course shared a large overlap withthe SF/F geeks. Many afternoons spent in the school computer lab enjoying the heat of the DEC PDP-8/E and arguing about dyson spheres, AI, Star Trek vs. Star Wars vs. Space: 1999 vs.Ringworld, etc.
If anything, the current state of interwebs fandom tends to annoy me just a little bit. There just seems to an over emphasis on teevee and movie sci fi/fantasy, and a lot less recognition of literary sci fi/fantasy that I seem to remember from the pre-net days. I might be wrong, but that's jsut my perspective.
If anything, the current state of interwebs fandom tends to annoy me just a little bit. There just seems to an over emphasis on teevee and movie sci fi/fantasy, and a lot less recognition of literary sci fi/fantasy that I seem to remember from the pre-net days. I might be wrong, but that's jsut my perspective.
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