I've been playing video games and watching anime (DBZ, Pokemon, etc) since I was six or seven, so there was no big moment when I realized I really liked video games. As for everything else, I can trace that back to a few years ago when I went to this Summer Institute for the Gifted camp in Massachusetts. It was awesome. I was twelve and most of my friends there were fourteen-fifteen. They turned me onto stuff like indie music (like the Unicorns) and comics (like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac). They also showed me cool stuff on the internet, which I had used rarely and only for school work up until that point. Then, when I got back from summer camp, I started getting comics and music from the local library. They had an awesome selection, and I would usually wind up ordering random and obscure albums and comics from their online catalog. I would read through and listen to everything, absorbing it all, and then choosing things I liked and finding more of it. Sometimes I would find gems and fall in love with them. I remember getting comics like Watchmen and Blankets and just being amazed by the fact that they existed yet I had never heard of them.
Eventually, I received a 30 gig iPod with video as a birthday present or something. It had a "podcast" section which was entirely empty, so I decided to see what that was all about. I wound up searching for my interests in the directory on there, and finding GeekNights, Dave and Joel, Anime World Order, Ninja Consultants and some other, shittier ones. Soon after, I dropped all but the first three. Those three podcasts turned me onto to other podcasts like Movies You Should See, some NPR stuff, The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, and This American Life. Movies You Should See, in particular, got me into watching awesome shit, and GeekNights taught me about torrenting that awesome shit. I was amazed by how awesome films like Reservoir Dogs, Children of Men, and Pulp Fiction were, yet I had never heard of them before I started listening to podcasts.
So now, thanks mostly to podcasts, I listen to awesome music, watch awesome films, and listen to kick ass music. Long post is long, sorry.
My dad is and always have been a Sci-fi fan, I remember watching the Star Trek movies while little, and the day I saw Star Wars was the day I knew I was in too. As a kid I loved video games and computers, my uncles had an old Atari 2600 and my dad had an old 286 PC, those were my introduction to both of my biggest interests, and both were played with a lot by my younger self. In school I was the only kid who liked science classes and read more than the rest. So I guess I always had it in me.
It all mostly started back when I was around 8 years old...I got a GBC, and around that time was when me and my friends were getting into Pokemon (card game, TV show, pokemon Gold and Silver). Then later (6th grade or so), me and my friends got into Yu-gi-oh (card game, TV show, and the pretty awful video games).
After that, kids started moving away from those types of shows into watching crap like MTV. Me (and the people who I'm best friends with now) stuck with stuff that looked like yu-gi-oh and pokemon- anime (duh).
Oh, and all throughout that time, I've been playing my fair share of videogames. I think my first RPG I played (not counting Pokemon) was FFTA, which I bought since I was looking for something akin to Advance Wars. Then as more and more RPGs started coming out for the GBA, I began to love the genre.
Then freshmen year in high school I went out to get some manga, since I knew that most of the anime I've been watching has a manga, too. And I just wanted to read some.
Then at the end of freshmen year in high school me and my friends went to our first anime con.
Then just last year or so, when I was sick and staying home from school, I was browsing around the interwebs looking for Firefox extensions. That led me into a huge realm of techie blogs.
Oh, and around last Christmas is when I started listening to podcasts (I think I found an anime related podcast when running a serch in the iTunes store, then started listening to it).
So yeah, it's been gradual...but even since I started my geeky habits with Pokemon, I stuck out as a bigger geek than the rest of my group of friends (putting in 250+ hours into Gold compared to my friends' 50ish hours, spending lots of time making a good yu-gi-oh deck, and stuff like that), until now, where my friends and I are about all equally geeky.
Let's see. Father is a kendo instructor and mother was an assistant professor in liberal arts (I think it was sewing). I turned to books and video games because my mind wasn't challenged by school or the neighborhood churls, but I yet lacked the experience and mental development necessary to understand and converse with my dad about the intricacies of martial arts. I didn't really start getting into role playing games, or even video games, until college.
I grew up in a Japanese household; anime and period dramas were pretty much all I watched.
My older brother was a geek, so I just followed after him. The only problem is that I never became a big time geek for two reasons. Firstly, I don't read, secondly, I'm not allowed to have any game systems. So although i am a complete geek, I'm pretty low on the scale. However, I do redeem myself in that I have converted many of my friends, who, since they read, have surpassed me long ago. It may seem like a sad life, but I'm happy nonetheless.
My older brother was a geek, so I just followed after him. The only problem is that I never became a big time geek for two reasons. Firstly, I don't read, secondly, I'm not allowed to have any game systems. So although i am a complete geek, I'm pretty low on the scale. However, I do redeem myself in that I have converted many of my friends, who, since they read, have surpassed me long ago. It may seem like a sad life, but I'm happy nonetheless.
Read a book, read a book! Read a motherfucking book!
My older brother was really into comic books and video games when we were kids. Since I did everything he did back then, I fell into it pretty hard. I discovered Anime around the same time we got an internet connection, and it was pretty much over when I finally combined the two.
During elementary school, I was a pretty big nerd as far as schoolwork went. I can probably correlate the decline of my interest in school around the time my interest in geekery grew. While I stiil got good grades for the most part, I cared a lot less about getting them.
My older brother was a geek, so I just followed after him. The only problem is that I never became a big time geek for two reasons. Firstly, I don't read, secondly, I'm not allowed to have any game systems. So although i am a complete geek, I'm pretty low on the scale. However, I do redeem myself in that I have converted many of my friends, who, since they read, have surpassed me long ago. It may seem like a sad life, but I'm happy nonetheless.
Read a book, read a book! Read a motherfucking book!
I started pretty young. As a kid I never really liked hanging out with other kids that much, even though I used to get along with them really well and was constantly invited to "go out and play" I used to find reasons not to go, I used to like staying inside after school (and whenever they'd let me for recess) and draw (I can't draw and never could, but it was fun as shit), make "turn to page 20" adventure books and I also had a nerdy friend and we had these two games where he or I would draw a 2D map and then give each other a limited amount of lemmings to complete it with. It was basically lemmings on paper. The second game was also a 2D map, but from above and we used to draw out little squads (mostly colored circles) on top of the 2D map with tracing paper and try to be all tactical, there was no way for us to lose... but we loved it.
From there I found the internet, PC gaming (and modding), anime, webcomics etc. and I never really cared about what other people thought of me (to a certain extent), from a young kid till now, which is a good thing since as a kid I was never peer pressured into anything. Never smoked, never done drugs and just drink with the friends I have no occasionally, but I'm no drinker... okay, I'm a light-weight, whatever!
Hmmm. Went to grade school with a bunch of asshats. Lots of pasty Irish kids who thought they were hard. Ended up getting into computers more and more, never really liked playing with other people. Kids would come over to my house and I'd just end up playing on the computer as if they weren't there (Zoombinis FTW). Built my own computer at some point in time, and tried to use linux on it back with Fedora Core 1. I was using SATA, and an ATI card, so that didn't go very well. Went to high school, became friends with a gamer, installed XP and started playing Battlefield 1942 (BF Pirates mod).
I recently got my old computer going with Gutsy, and now I'm attempting a Mythbuntu box for my science research project. Having some problems with Unichrome Pro Drivers right now with that one.
Heh, I wasn't really into comics or anime until this year when someone told me to watch Cowboy Bebop. Also, I just played D&D for the first time about a month ago. So, I wasn't really into many of the traditional geek activities until recently.
My parents (my dad mostly) have a great interest in comic books, they read 2000ad mostly. They started helping me read them at a young age (they were my Dr. Seuss) and Judge Dredd has always been my hero. I started getting into science fiction, reading, watching and drawing stuff all the time. I watched the SciFi channel all the time and when they started showing anime I was there watching it. Vampire Hunter D was cool, but Akira excited me so much. I loved it. I was always on the lookout for something similar and after seeing Ghost in the Shell I had a brief understanding of what anime was.
In high school there were many clubs and I joined the film club. It should probably have been called the anime club because most of the time that was all we watched, and on the day that we watched Akira the atmosphere was amazing.
So, it was my parents that introduced me to geekdom and they are awesome.
I have grown up around computers my entire life due to my dad's job.
So basically here's how it went. My dad, like most, wanted sons but ended up with three girls. Around when I was in first and second grade my dad had gotten my older sister and me Duke Nukem and Commander Keen. Then, when I was in third grade my dad got us the N64 and Doom for Christmas. A little while after that I got the Gameboy Pocket, pokemon games, and Super mario Land. I grew up on the Gameboy and N64. Then when I finally got my own computer I saved up my own money and bought games like Roller Coaster Tycoon. Dad bought us the Command and Conquer and Age of Empires games and I got hooked on RTSs. Then I met my friends in high school and got hooked on Valve and games like F.E.A.R. as well.
When I was a little kid, probably 6 or 7, My mother had an old grey IBM laptop that ran dos 7.1 . I remember playing on it and my grandpas IBM desktop mucking . In elementary school I was already trying to figure out why Macintosh diskettes wouldn't work in powerspec PC back home. During middle school, I was always showing off the latest music I downloaded from the internet using Napster and using ftp to copy book reports from my home computer to my school. I was using the command prompts ftp thing and got in trouble with the teachers because they thought I was hacking.
So now I'm a big computer geek that watches anime and lives in a neighborhood where the closest anyone gets to playing D&D is walking past it in the local comic book shop.
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Eventually, I received a 30 gig iPod with video as a birthday present or something. It had a "podcast" section which was entirely empty, so I decided to see what that was all about. I wound up searching for my interests in the directory on there, and finding GeekNights, Dave and Joel, Anime World Order, Ninja Consultants and some other, shittier ones. Soon after, I dropped all but the first three. Those three podcasts turned me onto to other podcasts like Movies You Should See, some NPR stuff, The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, and This American Life. Movies You Should See, in particular, got me into watching awesome shit, and GeekNights taught me about torrenting that awesome shit. I was amazed by how awesome films like Reservoir Dogs, Children of Men, and Pulp Fiction were, yet I had never heard of them before I started listening to podcasts.
So now, thanks mostly to podcasts, I listen to awesome music, watch awesome films, and listen to kick ass music. Long post is long, sorry.
Then later (6th grade or so), me and my friends got into Yu-gi-oh (card game, TV show, and the pretty awful video games).
After that, kids started moving away from those types of shows into watching crap like MTV. Me (and the people who I'm best friends with now) stuck with stuff that looked like yu-gi-oh and pokemon- anime (duh).
Oh, and all throughout that time, I've been playing my fair share of videogames. I think my first RPG I played (not counting Pokemon) was FFTA, which I bought since I was looking for something akin to Advance Wars. Then as more and more RPGs started coming out for the GBA, I began to love the genre.
Then freshmen year in high school I went out to get some manga, since I knew that most of the anime I've been watching has a manga, too. And I just wanted to read some.
Then at the end of freshmen year in high school me and my friends went to our first anime con.
Then just last year or so, when I was sick and staying home from school, I was browsing around the interwebs looking for Firefox extensions. That led me into a huge realm of techie blogs.
Oh, and around last Christmas is when I started listening to podcasts (I think I found an anime related podcast when running a serch in the iTunes store, then started listening to it).
So yeah, it's been gradual...but even since I started my geeky habits with Pokemon, I stuck out as a bigger geek than the rest of my group of friends (putting in 250+ hours into Gold compared to my friends' 50ish hours, spending lots of time making a good yu-gi-oh deck, and stuff like that), until now, where my friends and I are about all equally geeky.
I grew up in a Japanese household; anime and period dramas were pretty much all I watched.
During elementary school, I was a pretty big nerd as far as schoolwork went. I can probably correlate the decline of my interest in school around the time my interest in geekery grew. While I stiil got good grades for the most part, I cared a lot less about getting them.
From there I found the internet, PC gaming (and modding), anime, webcomics etc. and I never really cared about what other people thought of me (to a certain extent), from a young kid till now, which is a good thing since as a kid I was never peer pressured into anything. Never smoked, never done drugs and just drink with the friends I have no occasionally, but I'm no drinker... okay, I'm a light-weight, whatever!
I recently got my old computer going with Gutsy, and now I'm attempting a Mythbuntu box for my science research project. Having some problems with Unichrome Pro Drivers right now with that one.
Heh, I wasn't really into comics or anime until this year when someone told me to watch Cowboy Bebop. Also, I just played D&D for the first time about a month ago. So, I wasn't really into many of the traditional geek activities until recently.
In high school there were many clubs and I joined the film club. It should probably have been called the anime club because most of the time that was all we watched, and on the day that we watched Akira the atmosphere was amazing.
So, it was my parents that introduced me to geekdom and they are awesome.
So basically here's how it went. My dad, like most, wanted sons but ended up with three girls. Around when I was in first and second grade my dad had gotten my older sister and me Duke Nukem and Commander Keen. Then, when I was in third grade my dad got us the N64 and Doom for Christmas. A little while after that I got the Gameboy Pocket, pokemon games, and Super mario Land. I grew up on the Gameboy and N64. Then when I finally got my own computer I saved up my own money and bought games like Roller Coaster Tycoon. Dad bought us the Command and Conquer and Age of Empires games and I got hooked on RTSs. Then I met my friends in high school and got hooked on Valve and games like F.E.A.R. as well.
I've been a geek since birth. =D
So now I'm a big computer geek that watches anime and lives in a neighborhood where the closest anyone gets to playing D&D is walking past it in the local comic book shop.