Oooookaaaaay, so….

Anyone who didn’t see the triumphant return of South Park really ought to do so; then you need to locate the subsequent episode and erase it from your DVR before it harshes your South Park buzz. Man, what a turkey!

Anywho, the season premiere aping World of Warcraft was just fabulous, but as one might expect, the WoW community has banded together to denounce the inaccuracies contained therein. Here is one such missive.

This alone would be bizarre enough to set me off, but it comes on the heels of Thursday night’s nerdscapade, in which Shawn came upstairs to say to Margaret, “I’ve been poring over the Harry Potter books again, and I think I’ve decided that Dumbledore is really dead, no matter what my family says. I also think that Dumbledore’s brother is really the blah blah blah blip bloople blatch bliderp blingity blorp.” Or whatever; my ears folded up and pulled themselves protectively into my skull shortly after the phrase “Harry Potter” hit them. It was like listening to the ruminations of Kennedy assasination conspiracy nuts. I wanted to ask, “So, do you believe that Lee Harvey Voldemort was acting alone, or was there a Second Wandman?”

Shawn accuses me of having no imagination, but really, I have serious trouble seeing the difference between being obsessed with a series of children’s books and being obsessed with an MMORPG. At least the WoWsters are holed up in their bedrooms and offices, jabbering to each other over their headsets, instead of conversing in my kitchen, making my eyes glaze over and my brain start to smolder.

*Sigh* This is my problem, I’ll deal with it. There are just some variants of genus Geek that grate on me more than others. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve suffered the junior-high-schoolish impulse to give someone a serious Native American burn, but reading the above, I can feel my hands curling into claws, itching for some spindly, pasty white, RSI-weakened WoW nerd arm flesh. I know better, I celebrate other people’s diversity, but Man oh Man, how much Poindextrose can one community secrete before the members’ keyboards get too sticky to type?

It’s quite possible that I’m guilty of similar eccentricities, but honestly, none come to mind. I mean, I work with computers and run my own Web server, but I didn’t write a long online manifesto about the practical innacuracies of, oh, say, The Matrix. (Though I must admit that I, like many, was tickled to note that Reloaded featured a real live exploit called nMap. I did not, it must be noted, email everyone I knew upon discovering this fact, and am only posting information about it online some years after the fact. I think that should count for something.) I enjoy playing Unreal Tournament and even host a game server myself, but I don’t spend days at a time on the virtual field of honor, or post to UT message boards lauding my l33t skillz to all that may choose to read. Hell, I don’t even play that often any more. Try as I might, I can’t think of anything I do that I do to that level of obsessive involvement.

Does that mean I’m not a geek? Hardly. Does it mean I’m more grounded than my housemates or those who choose to lambast Comedy Central? Mmmmmmmaybe, I’m not sure. I certainly don’t entertain the notion that I’m a better person than any of them. It may very well be a simple question of degree of focus. Maybe I’m not a real geek at all, but some kind of sub-par hybrid, a Dilbertian dilettante, so to speak.

All’s I really know is that, for whatever reason, whatever peculiar twist of fate that might have meant the difference between being the Andrew I am and the kind of Andrew who would send letters of correction to the producers of TV comedies, I am totally, eternally grateful. 😉