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Start a club to encourage people to come around to your way of thinking...I'm sure that will be a hit. And oooh, "build and upgrade a computer for the club"? A real working computer? I bet that will be the draw of the tri-state area.

Look, your enthusiasm is appreciated but you need to find another outlet for it. This is the time to stretch yourself. Look into the drama club (if there is one) or take a drama class (I had to after getting kicked out of the computer class...back in 19 and 81...it was great!). If you still have a burning need to be ostracized or need to be a super geek then check out the Society for Creative Anachronism. How about organizing a volunteer club where you work on community projects such as Habitat for Humanity? Or just volunteer...I did volunteer work in high school and college at local hospitals (yes, I was a candy striper, but at least the red and white striped polo shirt didn't look too gay). The possibilities are endless...don't pigeonhole yourself now - there will be plenty of time for others to do that for you.

Last christmas I asked my grandparents(who always want to spend about $300 on my christmas presents) to get me a go board and pieces. She came up empty handed. None of the stores she went to had even HEARD of the game. You might try looking at some SCA events.

Hazaa!! $#@! "Virtual Swordfighting". Go find you local SCA group and do ACTUAL SWORDFIGHTING. It may not be live steel, but it's a helluva lot cheaper than either live steel or buying one of these Virtual Swordfighting rigs, and it's largely international so there's always more people to fight nearby.

For the most part, in the SCA, heavy weapons combat is done with rattan sticks wrapped in duct tape, made to look like swords. Here are the armored combat rules. If you look at weapons standards, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Disclaimer: I am not a marshal, nor am I a stickjock. I'm just going to pennsic for the beer.

You can check out some of my favorite pictures of stuff going on here.

My boyfriend, Mr. Weird Ideas himself, has actually proposed doing this in the SCA where jousting on horseback for real against live opponents is very much against the rules (shucky-darn; pells are just not as much fun)...

Never mind that Segways are totally out of period for the SCA, and more hype than use anyway...

--shakes head-- Sighhh...

Sorry. I probably got the initials wrong on the second law, but that's ok. They'll change it's name the next go round anyway, so that some people won't notice it.

Here's how I remember the initials: take the heavy-handed tactics of Nazi SS Stormtroopers, and combine that with the outmoded lifestyles of the Sword Carrying *ssholes.
SS + SCA = SSSCA


Skevin

Office 2K/XP is the only MS product with accurate warnings during Setup: most of the packages tell me to "Run from My Computer".

personally i find first person games great fun, but rune is a bit of an exception in many ways. speaking as a sword fighter from the SCA,
http://www.sca.org
there's alot more to manuvering in melee combat than strafeing and attempting to duck behind a shield. for this reason i, personally, think that first person games with a melee base will not take off until another sort of interface is developed (or a revolutionary control set). anyway my two bits.

daniel
till then on with quake 3!!!

As a member of the SCA, I always have plenty of medieval clothing to wear. I admit that I'm being a bit lame--it's much like a Civil War re-enactor dressing up as an Confederate soldier; it's a great outfit, but it's not something I had to go out of my way to get ahold of.

Actually the statistics of how many people have a given name is rather interesting and can actually be somewhat useful in a historical sense. Anyone in the SCA knows the usefulness of census data that incorporates names as it gives you the ability to ascertain when a particular name came into common usage. While the government might not exactly have this in mind, it is a valid piece of data.

Damn.

Kean

The theatre was only about 1/2 full and this was opening weekend. That was the first sign of suckness. Then, I saw that about 95% of the audience was under 16, and they were giggling a lot before the movie even started. Second clue to suckness. Then, all of the previews were for teen movies. That was the third sign of suckness. (Side note: There was a preview of American Pie 2, which looks like a jolly good teen movie. Not all teen movies suck, just most.)

The movie is full of modern music and it is just plain stupid. AC/DC, Queen, and so on, just as Katz said. I can't believe he didn't completely trash this movie! What is wrong with him. It sucked.

The jousting is boring. It is the same thing again and again. The sword fights are much worse than any Society for Creative Anachronism fight I have evr seen. My backyard light saber fights as a kid were better done. The fighting sucked! Don't see this movie expecting any reasonable fighting.

Don't see this movie as a favor to your girlfriend or wife, or friends. Don't see it is a way to burn off extra time on the weekend. Don't see it because you are drunk or high. Don't see it. Please don't see it. It sucked so bad that it isn't even worthy of a MST3000 lampoon. It wasn't stupid or funny or interesting. Avoid the sucking beyond sucking! Avoid it like the plague!

Talk about how bad a Knight's Tale is right here! Tell other people about how bad the movie was. Share your story about the sucking beyond sucking. Prevent others from suffering through this crap stick of a movie....

I'll address the second issue first. Most geeks I know are well described by the word 'gentle'. I don't know if they'd be best pleased by that description, but I like it. They'd never knowingly hurt anyone. They're often shy around girls they don't know - which means, once a girl decides she's happy with one, she need not fear his eyes turning elsewhere. The tendency to faithfulness and the rarity of arsehole-hood combine well with the geekly earning potential.

Of course, this perception of mine might be entirely biased by the fact that the geeks I know are my friends; and I wouldn't stay friends with people who I thought were likely to be arseholes. Still, I think it does generalise. Many geeks are fundamentally nice people; perhaps a little vague, often not terribly worldly, but rarely actively nasty.

The most common geekly faults are, as ESR mentioned, an obliviousness to personal appearance, and a tendency to breathe computers. The first is relatively easily addressed; keep clean and wear clothes without holes. The second is a bit harder; you have to go out and acquire another interest, something else to talk about.

The 'additional conversation topic' is important. I spent years listening to geekly conversations. I got throughly bored; never learned enough to participate, often felt left-out. Most intelligent women like to be involved in conversations, oddly enough!

The Society for Creative Anachronism might be a good place to start, being (in my experience) inclined to welcome newcomers, encompassing a wide range of activities, most of which are accessible to non-experts, and containing a somewhat higher proportion of young women than of young men.

Is it worth it? Well - if you, like the person to whom I reply, think that spending time away from the computer isn't worth the rewards, then obviously it isn't. What would the 'right person' do for you? Sex in the evenings and fresh coffee (and other meals) during the day? Hmm, I wouldn't want to be that other person; if you'd rather spend your time with your computer than with your lover, you stay right there in front of your computer, and everyone will be happier that way!

My love gets it. I'm a good cook and a good masseur. I can contribute something towards discussions of algorithms, and code in two languages myself. He's a reasonable cook and a good masseur, and will try new things and encourage me to try new things. We do spend quite a bit of time in front of computers (often playing (different) games side by side), but we spend just as much time doing other things together. It doesn't seem to occur to my partner to regret that the time is not spent in front of the computer; we're (usually) having fun.

Which is probably something most geeks should be trying to do: have fun while not using computers. Especially while on a date; enjoy the activity for itself, and the company, and anything else that may come of it is a bonus.

Rachel

[complaint mode] Ok, this subscription mode thing is great -- for those of you who live in the US. Go ahead, pay your $30 to Salon. I might do it, too, except for one thing. That $30 is $50 for me. And $50 is a piece of change to be reckoned with in my current circumstances.

It's the same reason why I'm not a card-carrying member of my social club, The Society for Creative Anachronism. Milpitas, in its infinite wisdom, has decreed that there shall be no Canadian membership office (even though there's an Australian one), so we wind up paying $100 (at the current ROE) for what costs Statesians $45/year.

And considering, as I've said before, that when you're talking about in-country monetary transactions, buying power, and cost of living, that $100 is a month's worth of groceries to me, or a month's transit pass and dinner out for two people, or a whole $hxtload of used books, or...or...or...even if it only buys people in Milpitas (or anywhere else in the USA) $45 worth of stuff. In other words, thanks to the moneymongerers, we are getting scrod.

So I won't do it, at least not until it's fair to the consumer, regardless of exchange rate.

This just might bring back chain mail. Just think -- all those SCA people have something. Perhaps we'll see more people making their own metal clothes?

Or, to save yourself the trouble... don't be a troublemaker. Consume. Obey. Conform.

Yeah, right.

NERO is the worst piece of crap I've ever played. It's wannabe swordfighting combined with wannabe roleplaying, and it does neither effectively. Those pansies couldn't use a sword to save their lives. You want real sword fighting without some twink throwing bags-of-sand-that-are-supposed-to-be-spells at you? Try the SCA or one of the other many great sword fighting or rapier deuling groups in this world. Pussy gnome.

I would like to think that someone could die without the discussion degerating into a flamewar on Slashdot. But I am not that naive.

Marion Zimmer Bradley stood out. Maybe she wasn't J.R.R. Tolkien or Issac Asimov, but she was a damn sight better then a lot of the other sci-fi/fantasy authors out there.

She was one of the early women in sci-fi/fantasy. Not only in being a writter, but what she wrote. Women usually figured strongly in her books, and could always think for themselves. That was not that common in sci-fi when she began Darkover in the early 1960s.

Mists of Avalon and its sequel was a unique take on the King Arthur legends.

She was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, including naming the organization.

In her Darkover books, she created a fantasy world where technology met medieval society. It was a world that was not limited to one or two books, but was a continuing, evolving story. Furthermore, she was quite willing to let other authors play in her worlds -- something that is quite rare these days. She may not have been the first to do this, but she stood out by it.

And obviously, "quite a number" of Slashdot readers thought the item newsworthy.

I know that I, for one, think she will be dearly missed.

For more information, check out Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine.

> How many of us would be able to create steel from iron ore? Given a
> crisis so bad there's no electricity so you can't look it up on the Web!

Call your local chapter of the SCA. It reminds me of a Spider Robinson quote (from Telempath, where society has broken down and scattered, cities gone, technology completely unreliable: "Don't like hippies? Fine, next time you're hungry, call a cop."

I've never really considered 2600 to be a magazine in the traditional sense of the word. Maybe a large scale zine, but it's always had that "straight outta the basement" feel to it, despite the glossy covers.

Besides, if I want cheezy BASIC programs to do XOR encryption and obsolete VMS hacks, I can find 'em faster on the internet. Like any magazine, publishing lag is a killer, but they seem to throw in stuff that's been useless for years. Reading articles by 15 year olds who argue about great crackers of the 70s is mildly entertaining, but I certainly wouldn't call most of what the magazine presents a vision of the future.

In a strange way, the 2600 crowd (yes, I'm throwing the magazine readers, alt.2600, and #2600 into the same boat -- damn me to hell) seems to have a lot in common with the SCA. They spend a lot of time and energy romanticizing a version of the past that never really existed. They enjoy it, but the rest of the world looks at them with a mixture of amusement and pity.