How to bluff your way through Geekdom
When I joined unisfa as a fresher, I was unprepared for the sheer number and variety of geeks the world contained.
Up until then the only other geeks I'd hung around with were girly bookish types like myself. While these new geeks were nice, they made me very confused, and raised all sorts of unaswerable questions.
Is rolling for strength some sort of exercise?(1)
What were these shells, and why were they bashing them?(2)
Out of the kindness of my heart I'm going to share some of the helpful rules I've picked up which mean that even if I still don't have a clue what the other geeks are talking about, I avoid their scorn. Well, until they read this article...
- a VAX is a computer, not a vacuum cleaner.
- AD&D is a roleplaying system, not a recognised psycological dysorder. Paranoia is both.
- RAM means the amount of memory a computer has. So does harddrive space. These are NOT he same thing.
- A gigabyte isn't as big as it sounds.
- Scripting means programming in a language whose name is a noun in capitals.
- Even if they hate the course, never go to lecture, and despise most of their co-students,
engineering students react surprisingly badly to anti engineering comments from non-engineers.
- Statistics is not maths. You will offend statistitians and mathematitians by saying it is.
- A LART is a large heavy object theoretically (but not actually) used to hit idiots.
(An example being the "VAX slat", though how these connect to a computer (or vacuum cleaner) is beyond me)
- A LARP is where the idiots hit each other.
- David Eddings is not High Fantasy (4)
- Do not be arrogant, lest the Elder Gods of Geekdom smite you with their superior intellect, infinite knowedge and boundless bile.
- Cosplay does not mean playing with lettuce. It might mean dressing up as one though.(5)
- Never say "Star Trek, Star Wars, same diff".
- Nobody is impressed by:
- visual basic prowess
- "homicidal" tendencies
- A large collection of Magic:The Gathering cards
- No.
- A shell is the process that runs the terminal(3) windows in Unix/Linux. A bash shell is ...a shell...with...a funny name.
- The ones with a cursor.
- I have been accused here of using a geek term my readers may not understand, defeating the whole purpose of the article. Pfah! But to placate the philistines with a metaphor:
High Fantasy (like Tolkein, say) is the Bible, while Eddings, Feist etc are "The Idiots guide to Scientology".
- If anyone finds me anime about lettuce I might consider it.
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