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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1444760" data-attributes="member: 10201">What, you can't tease them about their football-watching, karaoke night, or NASCAR habit? It has to be an intellectual or strategic activity to be mock-worthy? It seems to me that, if you want to, there isn't a hobby out there that isn't worthy of ridicule, and easily mocked. If you want to. Or you could just accept that people have differing interests and habits, some of which won't make any sense to you, and let them have their fun. [I'll never understand watching sports on TV.  Playing for fun? Yep. Competing? Yep. Training to get better? Yep. Professional athlete? Yep. Watching live, as a participatory experience? Yep. Watching a better athlete to pick up new techniques for your own competitions? Yep. But watching a sport you don't actively play, for the entertainment value alone? Nope, just don't get it. But millions of people do it every night, and the ads aren't the only reason the Super Bowl is one of the most-watched TV broadcasts. And you can't tell me that even a significant %age of those viewers are regular football players themselves, trying to pick up new moves.]I'd say getting drunk off your ass is a pretty strange thing for a grown person to do.  Getting into a fight because someone favors a different sports team seems pretty strange for a supposedly-adult person to do. Hell, identifying preferentially with a particular sports team that you have nothing beyond geography (if even that) in common with--and most of the players aren't from whereever the team is HQed, anyway--seems pretty strange. Getting dressed up in faux-military gear and running aronud in the woods with paintball guns pretending to kill each other strikes me as pretty strange.  And, given the abundance of food in our society, freezing your ass off sitting in a tree for a weekend, pissing in a jar, just to shoot a deer with the latest high-tech equipment, seems downright bizarre. So, what are "normal" things for adults to do? How do you decide? Or do you just accept that anything that a group of adults wants to do, that isn't psychologically or physically harmful, is "not strange"?Balance? Yes. But what does "limiting your geek activities" have to do with it? Are you really saying that if you discovered you had a taste for Anime, you'd have to give up, say, D&D, to pursue it? As opposed to , say, giving up the bowling league? I mean, obviously, there're only so many hours in a week, and you can only pursue so many hobbies. Of whatever stripe. And i can see wanting some balance in your life, in terms of having active and intellectual, social and solitary, indoor and outdoor activities. But i just don't see how "geeky" is one of those things that needs to be limited or balanced, at least no more than you want it to be. If you don't want to be a geek--well, then, don't be one. But if you *are* a geek [and happy, and all that], it ain't gonna change just because you "limit yourself". Would you tell someone who has a very active social life, and is happy, that they need to balance things by adopting some solitary activities? No--only when someone is unhappy with their life do you suggest that they change it. That goes for geek-ness, too. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.Now, if someone who was an archetypal geek was complaining about their life, especially if the complaints revolved around their geekness [as opposed to others mocking them for their geekness], *then* i'd suggest that "balance", i.e., broadening their activities/experiences to include less-geeky ones, might be a solution. But not just because they're a geek.</blockquote>

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