Geek@... Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture

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I happened on this article, it's promoting a book but it sort of cool...

http://www.neatorama.com/2011/08/10/geek-wisdom-the-sacred-teachings-of-nerd-culture/

Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd CultureBy

in

Book

& Literature on Aug 10, 2011 at 5:13 am

If the Industrial Age was ruled by industrialists and the Atomic Age was

epitomized by nuclear scientists working in secret government

installations, then the Information Age we live in today is surely the

era of the geek.

Just take a look at the titans of industries (computer nerds), Hollywood

blockbusters (comic book superheroes), and pop culture (Interweb memes) -

they're all geeky! But in order to live under the reign of our new geek

overlords, one must learn to speak like one.

H. Segal

(no, not that

one) is our guide in learning geekspeak. He has compiled and edited

some 200 of the most powerful and oft-cited quotes from geek culture. His

book, Geek Wisdom:

The Sacred Teaching of Nerd Culture by

Quirk Books, is not only an

invaluable guide into geekdom (or is it geekhood? Help me out here,

nerds!), it's also indispensable if you have to go undercover and

penetrate a secret geek society.

For example:

" Fear leads to anger; Anger leads to hate; Hate leads to

suffering. " - Yoda, The Phantom Menace

Yoda was paraphrasing the first great African American geek,

Washington Carver, who said a century ago: " Fear of something is at

the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the

hater. "

Carver, a scientist plying his trade in a time when the intellectual

inferiority of black people was simply assumed, knew something about

suffering. Born into slavery, kidnapped as an infant, threatened

repeatedly with lynching throughout his life, and rejected from school

after school due to his race, Carver eventually went on to become one of

the best-known American researchers in the biological and agricultural

sciences.

Widely rumored to be gay, Carver spent his life confronting and

overcoming the fears of others, earning an iconic place in geek history.

Yoda might be the fictional guru we like to quote, but Carver is the real

one whose life reverberates through our culture.

" The spice must flow. " - Dune

Economic systems are bigger than people. That's why distribution of the

precious mind-expanding spice, mélange, that is the lifeblood of galactic

society in Herbert's Dune must continue unimpeded. That's

why, when Atreides - the young nobleman who finds himself hailed as

a prophesied savior - asserts his messianic will over the

hitherto-powerless throngs of poor wretches living amid the spice mines

of Arrakis, he causes commerce to grind to a standstill across a thousand

planets, bringing the entire universe to heel.

Just as the spice is Herbert's thinly veiled stand-in for oil, gold, or

any commodity that greases the wheels of earthly progress, its necessity

highlights the inherent danger of linking any one such commodity

with the maintenance of a particular status quo - whether cheap gas for

our cars or cheap clothes at Wal-Mart.

" He who controls the spice controls the universe, " says the

evil Baron Harkonnen elsewhere in Herbert's epic, and it's a lesson that

takes to heart, bringing an entire monolithic structure of ingrained

corruption down on the heads of those whose only real job was maintaining

it.

Economic systems are bigger than people ... except when they're

not.

" This is an imaginary story. But then, aren't they all? "

- Alan , Superman: Whatever Happened To The Man of

Tomorrow?

From the 1950s through the 1980s, DC Comics would occasionally

publish Superman stories based on offbeat scenarios that weren't part of

the ongoing continuity of the regular monthly serial. The editors

distinguished these fun hypothetical tales (President Superman!

Superman's bratty kid! Superman and Batman as adopted brothers!) by

noting on the cover: " An Imaginary Story " - as opposed to the

" Real " continuing saga of the familiar Superman.

Yet this terminology begs the obvious question, which DC finally allowed

postmodern comics pioneer Alan to pose in the introduction to

Superman #423. Yes, indeed, they are all imaginary stories

- a fact that can get lost sometimes by the devoted fan of any serial set

in a long-running, carefully consistent fictional world.

DC, its rival Marvel Comics, the Star Trek franchise: all these

massive narrative constructs created fans who frequently loved cataloging

and cross-referencing the details of the world as much as they loved the

characters themselves. That's one big reason why geeks often get so upset

at the news that their favorite fictional property is going to be

" rebooted " for a new audience.

But the thing is, that's precisely how a legend grows and endures - by

being retold again and again. Would anyone remember Hercules today if the

Greek storyteller who first spun his tale insisted on maintaining

creative control? If the fifteenth-century balladeer who sang rhymes

about Robin Hood had been able to force all those who came after him to

refrain from spinning their own variations, would Maid n or

the Lionheart have ever shown up?

As hard as it may be to look at a long-running quasi-epic and admit,

" You know, this was awesome, but I'm bored - let's start over and do

it differently, " there's probably no better way to take a regular

old good story and elevate it to the realm of timeless myth.

" I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. " -

Ripley, Aliens

Movie logic frustrates most geeks. It just doesn't make sense for the

people in a horror film to go one by one to investigate that strange

noise in the dark - that didn't work out so well for the last five

people, did it? It's stupid for the evil overlord to capture the

intrepid hero and then leave him alone in a room full of convenient

tools; any overlord with a brain would just kill the guy right off. All

too often, Hollywood characters choose the more dramatic path through

hardship rather than the smart one.

This was why the Alien films were such a breath of fresh air.

Ripley, faced with a planetary colony full to overflowing with

unstoppably murderous alien beasts, actually understood what she was up

against. Never mind tryinng to safely capture an alien - it wasn't

going to happen. Ripley pushed instead for the Occam's Razor method

of problem-solving: simple, overwhelming, effective.

Thus " take off and nuke the site from orbit " has become geek

shorthand for putting a decisive end to any dangerously messy problem.

Overkill? Maybe. But sometimes you just have to be sure.

" A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. "

- , War Games

There is a word, a concept, in Zen Buddhism that doesn't quite

translate perfectly into the English language: Mu.

Mu is the response given by a Zen monk to a question that cannot be

meaningfully answered. It suggest that the question's premises are not

real, that there is a state of emptiness that lies beyond yes and no,

that the asker should unask the question - indeed, that anyone who would

ask such a question in the first place might well to question his entire

perspective on life.

Though the word was never uttered in the 1984's seminal

teen-computer-hacker-political-thriller War Games, the idea lies

at the heart of the conflict that fuels the movie: a new Pentagon

supercomputer that controls the nation's nuclear codes is caught up in a

relentless war-game simulation trying to answer the question, " How

can the United States win a nuclear war? "

We all know it's a flawed question - the whole point of the Cold

War arms-race theory of " mutual assured destruction " was that,

in a world of opposing superpowers, the sheer volume of weaponry is meant

to deter the use of any nukes at all. But back in 1984, when

computer networks were new and exotic, it seemed entirely reasonable to

worry that an artificial intelligence might start firing missiles based

on the inhuman outcome of an algorithm. Of course, the computer finally

found its Zen.

What about you - can you tell when it's time to remove yourself

from a defective board game?

Geek Wisdom: The

Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture, edited by H. Segal, is

painstakingly gathered and interpreted by a diverse team of hardcore

nerds who've spent years poring over the most beloved texts of the

modern-day imagination. Beginning with some 200 of the most powerful and

oft-cited quotes from movies ( " Do, or do not - there is no

'try' " ), television ( " The truth is out there " ), comics

( " With great power comes great responsibility " ), science, the

Internet, and more, Geek Wisdom offers illuminating insights into

the eternal truths to be found therein. Yes, this collection of

mini-essays is by, for, and about geeks - but it's just so surprisingly

profound, the rest of us would have to be dorks not to read it.

H. Segal is

the Hugo Award winning senior contributing editor to Weird Tales, the

world's oldest fantasy/sci-fi/horror magazine, and an editor at Quirk

Books. His geek portfolio includes work for Tor Books, Viz Media, WQED

Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Melon. A native of Atlantic City, he lives in

Philadelphia.