NYT Op-Ed: Geek Love

An amusing Op-Ed column by a senior editor at Wired about the death of Gary Gygax, and growing up as a geek.

Gary Gygax died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

...

Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of “Star Wars” from memory.

Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.

However, the real reason I'm bothering to blog about it is that there was a delightful flowchart on growing-up-geek, nailing many of the memes and experiences (although, I am proud to say, I've never been to a Con. Especially not a furry Con. Ew ew ew ew.)



To give credit where it is due: graphic by Sam Potts.

The thing that cinched it for me was that the image at the top of the article was just a closeup of the top corner of the flowchart. When you clicked to get the full image, at the bottom of the flowchart was:

DOUBTING THE TECHNICAL ACCURACY OF THIS DIAGRAM

and

BLOGGING ABOUT DIAGRAMS

Yeah. Busted. I just had to, at that point.