Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Quote of the Day: Bruce Sterling, GEEK!


Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "Woo the muse of the odd." . . . You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized.

Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge.

Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. . . .

Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.

Bruce Sterling, speech on The Wonderful Power of Storystelling to the Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991

3 comments:

M Big Mistake said...

well on my way without even trying

Rev J D said...

Thanks for the reassurance E. Spikes, yeah.

Rev J D said...

And where on Earth did you get that comic? Beautiful.

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." Ralph Waldo Emerson