When I was in middle school I couldn’t stand my Arts teacher, she as the shrink-type teacher who tries to find a psychological answer to everything, even to my inability to draw a connection curve between two curves by hand without errors (hey, I can’t draw even today!). Once she dedicated an entire two hours lesson to stereotypes and why it’s bad to even consider them reality.
I’m still not convinced of most of her arguments, especially since what we learn to consider a stereotype, often it’s near enough to reality to be just as good. We have the perfect example by looking at developers: a good deal of them are the perfect instance of a «Geek» stereotype. A stereotype that evolves of course; while in the ‘70s and even in the ‘80s the Nerds and the Geeks were always fan of Star Trek (less often Star Wars), nowadays Anime are taking that place.
I’m not saying that every developer is a geek and that every geek watches anime, but there are enough of them to make the stereotype good enough to be considered the average geek. It might not be exactly politically correct, it might be offensive, but, well, it’s difficult to prove the contrary, or not?
Anyway, what have stereotypes to do with my blog? I don’t usually write about these things that are far from anything I work on… well, I was just going to say that I probably am quite a lot near the average geek nowadays. And sometimes, it’s funny to see how near even to the caricatures of a geek.
You can’t actually say to be a WebComic reader unless you read at least once MegaTokyo; I’ve been reading it again lately, and I found quite funny to read again this particular comic .
I find this funny because lately I’ve been a bit tortured with myself about an opportunity I don’t want to miss.. but that requires me to take an airplane, and I’m terrified by the whole concept of airplane; and I’m trying to watch Nodame Cantabile to see how the protagonist (who also suffer from this problem) will get over it. Pathetic, I know.
I wonder how much of MegaTokyo and other WebComics who makes satire out of geeks (some of which happens to be the authors of the comics themselves) is exaggeration and how much is actually truth we try not to admit on a daily basis, to avoid finding ourselves very pathetic.
And for those who will certainly tell me not to be afraid, that a lot of people takes planes every day, that they get less incidents on planes that on cars and trains, well, I can’t really give you a rational answer. My fear of flying is deriving from my acrophobia, it’s not rational, it’s not something I can control mentally, maybe I could have some time ago but I cannot anymore… if it was rational it wouldn’t have been a phobia now, would it? 🙂
