Geeky hobbies
February 18th, 2007 at 03:05
I must admit, I’ve got some nerdy interests. This might come as a bit of a shock to you, given that you may have previously thought I was one of the cool kids. After all, I do like popular music and casual swearing.
But even wearing sunglasses at night can’t disguise the fact that I like some really geeky things.
For example, I’m quite an avid follower of ‘TV Pres’. For those out of the loop, that’s an interest in the graphics used on TV programmes. Those bits between programmes of the hippos, or the “4″ being formed out of pylons, people take an interest in that sort of thing. Seriously.
I think this weird interest is just a side effect of a slightly less tragic interest in the media, broadcasting and branding (this is my excellent excuse). I bloody love branding- nothing annoys me more than when logos don’t exactly line up, or the spines on a series of books don’t follow a common template. I actually wrote a whole blog entry about my love of branding, and included photos of good and bad branding for evidence – I decided not to post it though when I realised that it was the most tedious thing ever written. It was a more boring read than the European Parliament if it were turned into ASCII art and printed in a book.
I also run a Pokémon website, log the amount of Coke I drink, and spend hours on Wikipedia, to the point where I get what I’m going to coin a “Wikipedia headache”, after reading too much about the Ottoman empire, or Spiderman episode guides, or whatever.
Despite these things, I like to think though that I’m quite high up on the geek hierarchy, and sit in that zone of acceptability somewhere between World of Warcraft on one side and beatboxing street vagrant on the other. I mean, I think that some geeky hobbies are cool, like space exploration, for instance. Even the people who make websites about motorway service areas are cool – I like the fact that someone, somewhere is cataloguing that sort of thing.
But there’s some hobbies I’ll never understand. Train spotting, for example… trains travel on a predictable path and it is pre-announced where they’ll be before they get there. “Fuck me! It’s a train!” is a phrase you will never hear. Why can’t they pick something trickier to spot? Like their self respect. (Ziiiiiiing.)
And wrestling is always confusing. As far as I can tell, it’s just repressed homosexuals watching men not wearing many clothes jumping all over each other in a pre-scripted routine. Basically ballet with less clothes and an energetic commentator explaining what is going on at a mile a minute. Wrestling fans will usually admit that their, cough, “sport” is fake, but then go on to justify their interest by saying that the, cough, athletes, still train hard and have to fall from a long way up and get hit by chairs and so on… so wrestling fans admit they just like watching muscled, oiled men parade themselves in front of thousands of rednecks without even the illusion of a competitive element?
There’s also a darker side to the TV Pres world- I wouldn’t like to associate with everyone who is interested in it. On a forum I read, there seems to be a sort of social hierarchy. At the very bottom, you’ve got people who post-fantasy news programme presenter rotas, and debate the finer points of which presenters work better together… I wish I was making this up, as it gets a bit weird. Next up the acceptibility ladder are the people who stay up until the early hours to watch (and video tape) Pages from Ceefax when BBC Two closes down – they’ll talk about the CDs of library music used and stuff. I steer clear of these – same goes for the people who tape the test card whenever it (rarely) appears.
The top social group in the TV Pres world, aside from the lurkers like myself, are the people who don’t engage in any of that weird stuff, and just stick to discussing, er, the tickers, straps and astons that appear on News 24, and the positioning of the clock, and “safe areas”.
Actually, reading this back, TV Pres sounds even weirder, maybe even wrong. Do any of you readers have geeky hobbies? Explain in the comments to make me feel better.
(Incidentally, today’s a big day in the TV Pres calendar: BBC Two are launching some new idents. I’m not one of the people getting up early to watch them launch.)
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