Defining Down "Geek"

or

It Can't Be Serious If Gurrrrls Are Doing It

     The headline looked kewl, "Women embrace 'geekdom' as gender roles shift."

     The story was anything but.  I clicked over, thinking I'd be reading about engineers, computer programmers, a team building Rube Goldberg machines--  What I got was a puff piece about women admitting to playing D&D or WoW.

     Um, "Hooray?"   Also, "This is new?"  --I'm no fan of such games but I got that way the same way some B_____-R______ employees dislike ice cream: I wasted much of my time in college at a crummy terminal, playing "Star Trek" or the various online offerings of the PLATO system instead of in class.

     That was in the Dark Ages, before there was 3-D television or even Amazon, and while geeky wimmin were a distinct minority, we did exist.

     Back then, real geeks did real things in the real world; an awful lot of 'em were gamers too, but for many, the real game was hacking code or designing and building wild and far-out things (and./or model railroad layouts).  I guess that kind of thing is simply not on the mental map of TV newsies; they never ran with the geeks and all they remember is the eruption of multi-sided dice when the jocks knocked over their table in the high school cafeteria.