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Tokyo's Geek Ghetto
anaesthetica writes "The Washington Post is running a story on Tokyo's "Geek Ghetto" which has arisen in the city's electronics retail district, "Electric Town." From the article: "We have been discriminated against for being different, but now we have come together and turned this neighborhood into a place of our own.... In Akihabara, we don't need to be ashamed of who we are and what we like.... We can feel comfortable because here, we outnumber everyone else." There are concerns, however, that the total immersion in escapist culture may be causing social problems, including a growing number of shut-ins." I've gone to Tokyo 3x and visited Akihabara all three times. Highly recommended for anime fans and techies.
In the states, we geeks are confined to our parents' basements
Tokyo has been destroyed so many times in anime that it makes me wonder if akihabara should relocate to some other city.
Who is John Galt?
This gettho will die out in... like... one generation ;)
since when do shut-ins cause social problems? other than those rare occasions when they do come out and have forgotten to bathe? Now they are gonna need shut-ins support groups to help them deal with being social problems. I wonder if they would have to meet at large dressing rooms where they could each have their own small closed room.
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Two floors above, an alarm went off. Taco opened his eyes. Then, realising what was going on, he jumped out of the bed, yelling: "Hey, Roland, wake up and go get the gun! We're being robbed!"
Thirty seconds later, they tumbled down the stairs. A door went open and a light was turned on. Then Roland clicked the safety back on and stuffed the gun into the pocket of his silk night gown.
"What ze fuck," he said. "Zere's noone here."
But Taco was already unwrapping the large sheet of paper around the brick lying on the floor. He almost tore it open, then froze and dropped the brick on his foot.
Roland rushed to him and grabbed the paper, while Taco was screaming with pain and anger. His face slowly turned red and then blue as he read: "These were not noodles."
I wish you hadn't of said that phrase...
"....Now the time has come for geek persecution to end...."
"Nerd!"
"Nerd!"
"Nerd!"
Ahh Revenge of the Nerds. Can a quote be anymore pathetic? =)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
We have an intruder on /.
Fake geek sighted.
He exercises, reproduces, touches non-processed plant material, shows signs of growing up.
He even LEAVES HIS COMPUTER ALONE! (Poor thing. Probably crashes in lonliness.)
Quick, somone hijack the space laser and fill his house with popcorn before he infects us.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I hear that Lambda Lambda Lambda is looking at houses in the area.
It's called a Star Trek convention in the U.S.
a polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate change.
I'm always cautious whenever I go into a neighbourhood with an Electronic Boutique, Best Buy, or other computer stores. There's usually two or three geeks hanging out in the alley. You know the ones: pale-skinned nerds with Vendorwear t-shirts from 1999, utility belts with PDAs, pagers, and cell phones. I always try to avoid these alleys, for fear that I will be beset with geeky talk about overclocking, case modifications, or World Of Warcraft debates.
Geek Of The Day, "A geeky place for geeky faces."
1-way ticket to tokyo(expedia.com) - $700
new laptop - $2500
Finding home at last.. - Priceless
--cros13
Tetsu Ishihara, 34, a computer programmer whose three-room apartment in west Tokyo is filled from floor to ceiling with comic books, does not want to be associated with such charges. Ishihara maintains a growing collection of 130 life-size pillows of female anime characters -- both purchased and self-designed. His favorite is Mio-chan, a female character from a love-simulation computer game in which a high school boy builds up the courage to ask a girl for a first date.
"There are some people who do lose their grip on reality, but that is not me -- or most of us," said Ishihara, a chubby man with glasses who this year started dating a woman steadily for the first time.
What exactly constitutes loosing grip on reality, brother?
As an IT professional - this is the LAST place girls in bikinis want you to go.
The purpose of a vacation is to ESCAPE - the last thing they want to see is technology and be surrounded by GEEKS.
...says "I'm huge in Japan"
Read the post again! He "plays his son"... it's probably another geek trying to get out of The Sims
I guess leotard-clad devil-women are more attractive than fat chicks in penguin costumes.
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Face it, if you like to masturbate to hentai wearing a furry sea otter costume then you're going to be ostracized.
I was on a flight recently where I was unfortunately in the middle seat. There was a nice-looking gal to my right who I managed to strike up a conversation with. I have enough charisma where this is not unusual, BUT... All was well until the guy to my left whipped out a laptop and started playing some game. I asked him about it and next thing I knew, we were discussing World of Warcraft (I currently have a lvl53 character in that game).
The woman to my right never spoke to me again for the rest of the flight.
So I didn't get laid, but I did get tips on completing my last 2 quests in Zul'Farrak, in particular, that one where about 100 NPC's storm the stairs and you have to defend the high ground. Fun stuff for a party with people who don't bail early...
It is for this reason that I feel I have to maintain "secret likes", which often includes anything IT or game-related, to the point where I find it difficult to even describe my job as it's pretty geeky and I'd rather just say I'm a "consultant". Unfortunately, to my horror I recently discovered that if I google my full name (which is uncommon), it becomes far too obvious what my really geeky likes are, despite my efforts to remove all traces of my full name from Internet sites. See, the gals I date are usually cute and best described as "geek-compatible", not "geeky"...
Why
do
you
write
like
that?
If by geek sex, you mean sitting in a restaurant looking at pretty waitresses wearing maid outfits.
And since that's the farthest they're ever gonna go, I suppose that's totally valid.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Okay, everybody pitch in $10 to fund my new restauraunt: "Otaku Here". It'll be a men's lounge where all the female servers are dressed in the most skimpy of Anime costumes. Send checks to...
Ya know, this would really work!
A good friend of mine who works with many anime cons across the country and is now a translator for ADV and freelances for Geneon told me once that there are so many definitions for the word "otaku" its hard to translate it literally. One particularly funny one was that is roughly translates into "house" because of something to do with being "shut-ins" I find that hillarious to say to anime newbies.
"I am such a super-otaku!"
"What, your a super-house?"
Not drop dead hillarious, but it causes them to stop and think, which is an improvement from waiving "Will hug for Pocky" signs.