Three Monkeys, Ten Minutes

Lore Sjoberg drew up a geek hierarchy:

http://www.brunching.com/geekhierarchy.html

Not sure it addresses your questions, but I have neurons apparently devoted to recalling the phrase "...like Kirk is an Ocelot or something..." at inappropriate moments.

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You found it! (and while I was typing, too) Except the simplified version leaves off filking, which is not good. And it forgets folk dancing. Surely dancing Bulgarian folk is geekish!

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The simplified version has a link to the extended version, and somewhere there's a FPQ that says, "If you're asking the question 'what about my interest?' it's safe to assume that you're pretty geeky."

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Seriously, I've seen a version with filking and morris dancing and folk stuff leading down from the folklore major strand. I can claim ubergeek status from that, having been thrown out of a morris side and all. On this version I am really pretty tame.

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Now that I've seen it, it is fairly narrow - missing the sort of thing you mention. It is more categories of nerdishness within one general nerd caregory.

I was thinking of a bigger picture. Are people obsessed with cultural phenomena, higher than say people obsessed with art (painting, sf), who are in turn higher than people obsessed with things (like trains)

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Wow - that page is blocked by our corporate decency filter. Just what filth are you directing me to?!

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Er. No comment.

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You can comment if you like, but it basically boils down to the fact that our web filter seems totally random.

(I'll look at the link when I get home.)

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I was going to say it was perfectly innocent, but then realised that I would need to explain the context of the phrase "...like Kirk is an ocelot or something..." and I'll wait until you get home for that.

I think brunching might have been blacklisted a while ago as a humour-and-thus-not-work site. They sometimes use bad words.

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We can access all sorts of sites which are in very dubious taste for language, nudity, humour etc. As I say its random or at least "peculiar.

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mundens.livejournal.com

Same here, they normally block based on the IP address, or domain name, as a whole though, so other than the fact that the document in question mentions furries, I don't think that particular link is particularly naughty.

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No, now that I've looked at it, clearly this page wasn't the one that got the site banned.

Except these ban lists are usually put together by organisations in the States that specialise in this type of thing. What if the person doing this was a furry or a fanfic writer.

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There is a table of all this. I don't agree with it (since I sem to appear at most levels on the table, which makes me rather mixed up) but it would be a good place to begin. It's less about the subject of the obsession than a hierarchy of groups eg filker, SF writer, morris dancer. I can't seem to find it, unfortunately.

I find people who know trains cool - I don't understand the food thing either.

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You can easily be a member of more than one group. The weather nerd who compiled the list was also a train spotter. But then he belonged to a family who thought that a fun weekend activity was for them to all work on building a more accurate electronic rain gauge.

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I grew up in a family like that,e xcept it was rock-oriented. We woudl stare at geological maps and wirk out where we could find a nice outcrop of granodiorite or we would test random samples of stone to prove they were limestone or sandstone. We claimed we were normal because sometiems rocks turned into jewellery (the gemmish ones, mostly). We also had a bunsen burner in the laundry for scientific experiments. A perfectly normal childhood...

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Oh, I would have so loved a bunsen burner at home. You were so lucky - I am quite sincerely jealous.

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I keep telling people about the bunsen burner because it is definitely jealous-making. I wish I had one now. I have no gas at all.

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I'd comment about the easy availability of portable gas bottles, but my inner 10 year old is screaming at me to be inappropriate, so I won't say any more.

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catsparx.livejournal.com

I hear ya, bro. I asked the very same question at high school -- why was it considered cool to be addicted to narcotics but uncool to have a thing for chocolate? Same difference, I thought. In both cases the user is out of control. But they all just looked at me funny.

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But didn't they look at you funny anyway for other geekish reasons? They looked at me funny. Still do come to that. But in deference to

dalekboy's wise words (http://dalekboy.livejournal.com/261414.html), I won't revel in it.

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catsparx.livejournal.com

yeah, probably.

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strangedave.livejournal.com

It used to be that geek was a job, nerd was a personality thing. Now it is more complicated, because geek is also a subculture, or a type of subculture. It is now common usage for geek to be a self-identification of subcultural identity.

And the hierarchy of snobbery is almost always relative, which comes across nicely in the geek hierarchy chart -- people know there is a top and a bottom, but most people think their interest is somewhere near the top. Why one obscure interest (say, Disney merchandising, as featured today on boing boing, whch Cory Doctorow obsesses over) is cooler than another (such as the byword for nerdy, trainspotting), I have no idea, and I think there is really nothing to it other than the reputation for taste of the people who are interested in it.

For example, train spotters may be nerdy, but plane spotters (a near identical hobby) helped break the details of the CIAs illegal extraordinary rendition story, and so ended up as minor heroes in the maelstrom of world politics, and clearly seem cooler. There is no rhyme or reason to it.

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I think there is really nothing to it other than the reputation for taste of the people who are interested in it.

Thats what I was getting at - more or less. Some things are considered more "tasteful" than others. There are broad trends in this tastefulness in society that shuffling around at the detail level does not change. So, for example, to be obsessed by matters artistic is more tasteful than being obsessed by the merely material. People who are obsessed by the brushwork of 17th century paintings find jobs in academia while trainspotters get laughed at in their anoraks.

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Indeed. The old high school dynamic:
- obsessed with sports - hero!
- obsessed with Star Trek - loser!

In either case, it's a bunch of people who seem fascinating from the outside, but you wouldn't want them in your living room, doing something that varies somewhat week-to-week but stays within the same basic parameters.

Not that I'm bitter.

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Good example.

Thing is, I was obsessed with sports and star trek at high school. Unfortunately I was crap at sports. Consider yourself lucky that I don't talk about cricket here.

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I've never really got sport.

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Its probably something you pick up early. My father was pretty passionate about it and it rubbed off.

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takeurchillpill.livejournal.com

I have a friend who is a weather nerd. His name is Benjamin. We call him "The man who smells the air". I'm not sure he qualifies as a nerd because he's just way too cool. How many times he predicted the weather just by looking up and two distinct whiffs, and got it right even when Weather Channel didn't. It's insane. Apparently his grandfather used to be a fisherman in Alaska and thought him every trick in the book.

By the way, I'm going to ask you something and this might come off offensive, so I apologize in advance.

I have no idea when or how I friended you. Or maybe you friended me, I don't know. I always come across your posts and I'm like, who was this guy again? But so far I've been a bit embarrassed to ask you. Well no more.

Usually I'm pretty involved with my f-list. I comment regularly and all that. So if you could do me a favor and give me a 5 sentence bio, or things I should know about your journal, it would be really swell.

If you want, I can do the same for you.

And again, I'm sorry if this was rude.

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