Tuesday, January 20, 2009

What Being a Geek Means To Me

Greetings, fellow internet travelers! I've decided to funnel my personal interludes into even posts with relatively little actual content since so many of you seem to enjoy them. (Yay! You like me! You really like me...and all my circular ramblings!)

Having sufficiently recovered from eating some tainted chicken yesterday at work (I don't recommend this - it kind of sucks - but if you're going to eat tainted chicken, definitely do it the day before a really historic presidential inauguration so you can take the day off without guilt but not be so ill that you can't enjoy watching the the new president get sworn in and give a really great speech), I sat down this evening with the intention of writing an e-mail to someone about a book exchange I'm taking part in. Pretty basic - a little "hey, how you doing? I'm sending this book to X person." Instead of just getting to the point I rambled on somewhat humorously (I hope) for several paragraphs. Having done that, I thought, "Hey, I can't let all this verbosity (is that a word? I think it's a word...spellchecker?) go to waste. I should go blog so I can afflict people with it semi-publicly." So, I trundled myself over to the new Weekly Geeks site, where a group of people have picked up where Dewey left off. It's good to see that people have really stepped up to continue it, and I look forward to continuing to participate.

Anyhow, here's this week's question...


For those who have been with the group, either from the start or joined within recent months, what does being a member mean to you? What do you enjoy about the group? What are some of your more memorable Weekly Geeks that we might could do again? What could be improved as we continue the legacy that Dewey gave us?

I've been geeking since the very beginning. I wasn't going to sign up initially, but then I thought, hey I only really have to do it when I feel like it, and hey, this is Dewey - it can't help but be cool. So, sign up I did, and I've been at it on and off ever since.

To me, as to many others it seems, Weekly Geeks is about community. I think that I was a particularly big fan of the weeks when we were asked to go out and visit some Geeks we hadn't seen before either to comb their archives or to find something we had in common or just to leave a comment to say "hey, I've been here" and post the links to our travels in our Weekly Geeks post. The very first week, I remember, was like this, and I "met" a bunch of people whose blogs I still read mostly faithfully, if quietly, today. It's always fun getting out and "discovering" some new faces since it seems like even more great book bloggers are being added to our ranks every day. Between the Weekly Geeks and the 24 Hour Read-a-thon, there are an immense number of bloggers I've come to love because of Dewey's efforts at building up our community with both events.

Obviously, those sorts of make new friends "assignments" stuck out the most for me, but I also rather enjoyed being told to catch up on my reviews or organize my challenges and all those sorts of things that gave me just that little bit of needed motivation to get moving on some things that prove all to easy to put off.

If I had to suggest but one improvement, and I think it's been suggested already, I would like to see the weekly post spotlighting some peoples' response to the previous week's post. As much as I'd like to, I don't always get to visit as many people on the Mr. Linky as I'd like to, so it's kind of nice to have that spotlight so I'll at least go out and visit a few - or a few more.

Thanks to everybody who is working hard to continue this great thing that Dewey gave us. I'm sure we all greatly appreciate your efforts.

9 comments:

  1. Bleh, tainted chicken. Hope you're feeling better now.

    We'll see what we can do about the round-up posts, thanks for the suggestion. It still amazes me that Dewey did all this and more, by herself!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well at least food poisoning let you see the inauguration! :D

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey there's an upside to everything! Happy Weekly Geeks!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am glad you are feeling better, Megan. You're the second person who has mentioned being poisoned by food recently.

    I definitely think the Weekly Geek events have been a great community builder. I don't often participate in the activities, but I do check them out each week.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Tainted chicken sounds very untasty. Watch out for the tainted peanut butter that was recently in the news. Happy Weekly Geek!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I really like you indeed :D

    I'm sorry to hear you weren't feeling well! I hope you're completely recovered now.

    And about WG, my feelings are very similar to yours. I loved the "visit the archives of a fellow Geek" task too, even though I didn't get around to participating that week. And like you, I miss the weekly round-up posts! So that's a great suggestion.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Well, of course we like you...what's not to like?!!

    Hope you're feeling better now, Megan...but I am glad you got to see his speech. Didn't you just love it?!!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Well said. I joined Geeks for mostly the same reasons... It's nice to have them put into words. :)

    ReplyDelete
  9. Tainted anything sucks...

    And I've nominated you over at My Spiritual Journey:

    http://msjcj.blogspot.com/

    Drop on by for the details.

    cjh

    ReplyDelete