idwraith

Im 32 years old. I started playing D&D at age 8 with my father in 1988. He started me on 1st edition, and then moved me up to AD&D and 2nd edition, because he wanted me to have a better understanding of the game. By age 14 I had gotten a job at our church mowing lawns and shoveling off their walks before masses so that I could afford to keep purchasing the new books in the Dragonlance collection. The entire time I was growing up though, I had to deal with a problem. I liked to read. Some people might not think it was a problem, but when you went to the schools I did, it became one. Since my Dad was in the Navy we moved around a lot and I attended several different schools, in all of them I had similar problems, but it didnt get too bad until we settled down and I hit High School. It apparently was not cool to read, not at all. This lack of cool was made worse by the fact that I was naturally good at most of my classes, so I didnt have to work hard. I slacked and read instead and it pissed off the jocks, the rednecks, the cool girls and such, some of whom got better grades than I did. But something about my sitting back and reading a book about dragons just pissed em right the hell off. They made this clear. They mocked my glasses, my reading etc. They made it very clear that nobody was interested in the stuff I did. When my friend and I played Magic: The Gathering (well before Ice Age, Mirage was the newest deck I ever got) we actually had kids steal our cards and HIDE them because they got so angry we were having fun doing an uncool thing.
So whats my point?
I went to Gen Con this year (2012) for the first time and I saw 40K people, just as geeky as me. I saw cute girls in Cosplay Outfits who make a living pretending to be the characters from our fiction because they know it appeals to a wide audience, a huge audience. I saw people who defined the stereotype, massively overweight, foul smelling and incredibly obsessed about certain areas of the genres; and I saw costumed families walking around with their kids in Cosplay outfits telling them all about the cool characters they saw. It was something of a revelation. The entire childhood experience I had, growing up alone and abused for my passions, was shared by many of the people in the crowd. These were my people, and, some showers and deodorant pending, I would gladly claim them all.
Yet I noticed one thing. The older geeks, men and women my age and higher, had a collectively different attitude. Im not sure I could define it. For the younger men and women there, being a geek was a proud, miraculous thing that they could claim and rejoice in. It was no big thing. There was a Geek Culture and they were proud members of it. But the look I saw on a lot of the older geeks face was more like an old soldier coming into shelter at last. They were having an almost religious moment, part of a community that embraced them. Seeing that look touched me deeply, for it was how I felt being among the other geeks. Like all the crap I put up with growing up was WORTH IT, because I was a part of this.