Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Our next guest is Mikki Halpin, author of The Geek Handbook. Mikki is
the former editor-in-chief of the brilliant, ahead-of-its-time webzine
Stim, which featured the hilarious and strange contributions of many
Well writers. She co-founded the seminal 'zine Ben Is Dead and has
written for many cool publications, in print and online. She's also a
former senior editor at the Oxygen network. But most importantly for our
purposes, she wrote the classic essay "A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys,"
which you have probably received in email, without attribution, 4,812
times, in between cookie recipes and pleas for business cards for the
leukemia kid. The essay now appears on over 300 web sites, in 5
languages. We will discuss it.

She is being interviewed by Marjorie Ingall, former senior writer at
Sassy magazine, who was a huge fan of Ben is Dead. When Marjorie first
met Mikki in the early 90s, she was terrified that Mikki was so
punk-rock and cool, she would scorn Marjorie for being a sellout
co-opter of youth culture. Yet Mikki was nice, and hilarious, and shared
cat-related wisdom, and impressed Marjorie as being quite possibly a
genius. Many years later, when Marjorie married a geek, Mikki became an
indispensible translator of geek language and behavior, thereby saving
Marjorie's marriage.

So: What is a geek? Why have geeks been historically so feared and
ostracized? How has their position in society changed in recent years?
How can non-geeks gain understanding of the geeks in their lives,
thereby increasing harmony and tolerance and a better world for all? The
Geek Handbook provides the answers. 

Please join me in welcoming Mikki and Marjorie to inkwell!  And don't
forget, if you have questions or comments about geeks for Mikki, send them
to inkwell-hosts@well.com.
  

    
hello, people!

i am thrilled to interview miss mikki halpin, as i believe she is a
comedic genius. "the geek handbook" is "timely, funny, genuinely
useful...I laughed out loud." (that's what noted geek expert jon katz
said, but i say it too.) cleverly written in the style of a user manual,
the geek handbook tells you everything you need to know about geek
maintenance, programming and comprehension. 

mikki, are you there? can you tell us WHY a geek handbook, and why now? 
  

    

"The Geek Handbook" was given to all the guests at a geek wedding a couple of
months ago.  I read it that very night, and I laughed out loud many times.

I'm a big fan of both Markorie and Mikki, and I'm delighted to see the two of
them here in the Inkwell!
  

    

Will post more thoughtful answer later!

Why, and why now: now, with more and more geeks coming out as geeks, and
more and more people having computers, and therefore geeks in their lives, I
felt it was my duty to write this handbook and bring my geek-related wisdom
to the world.

in my first job I worked with a geek who was a SUPER geek. if I had only had
this handbook then.
  

    
geeks have gotten a LOT of bad press lately. one only has to read thru
other conversations in this very conference to realize that there is a lot
of animosity toward geeks (or to be precise, a lot of people now associate
geeks with dot-com assholes). how has the image of geeks changed in recent
years...and are geeks themselves any diff, or is this merely a prob of
perception? 

(i am reminded of discussions about feminism, actually, where people use
the term to mean almost anything they want...and almost everything they
loathe.)
  

    

I'm old enough to remember when the sort of person known as a geek today was
revered (and feared) as a "wizard."  I was sort of a junior assistant
geek/wizard for a while in my youth, and the guys who knew how to make those
machines do stuff were regarded with awe.  This was before Apple and
Microsoft, when disk drives were the size of dishwashers and desktop com-
puters were eight bits wide and you had to build 'em from kits.
  

    <scribbled by tnf Fri 11 Aug 00 13:09>
  

    

From a web reader named sara:


 Here's my question for mikki ha:

 I have a soft spot for geek boys. How can I meet one and convince him to be
 my boyfriend? Where do they hang out?
  

    
Science fiction conventions, Society for Creative Anacronism, your
local juggling/unicycle club.

(I suppose I qualify as a geek/wizard, even though I started
programming when disk drives were the size of a restaurant refrigerator
and we impressed our girlfriends by showing them how you checked the
oil in the core memory.)
  

    

If the book is written like a manual, is there a system requirements
section and an installation and configuration section?  What about error
messages?  If so, what do they say?
  

    
Spoken like a true geek!
  

    

marjorie, I think your point about feminism, "where people use
 the term to mean almost anything they want...and almost everything they
 loathe," is a very good one. it's the way a backlash works. (when I was
studying art history and post modernism was in vogue, the term "modernist"
began to have a similar loathesome elasticity)

I was struck when the "I love you " virus came along (not struck by the
virus! hah! struck by social phenom Im about to mention) when I heard
several commentators weirdly blame it on geeks. one guy on npr said
something like "it spread all over and crippled us because love-starved
geeks all clicked on it and therefore passed it on." which is so ridic of
course, because it was nongeeks who spread it.

another moment of geek backlash: when I was in san francisco doing a radio
show to promote the book, the uh, jocks at the radio station were
encouraging listeners to call in and say if they were geeks or not. Then the
jocks would kind of jeer at the callers and say "you're a geek! You're a
loser!" this really surprised me, in San Francisco of all places, until I
thought about how these jocks probably feel left out of the dot-com thing
and the way it has changed culture, most especially culture in san
francisco.

Anyway, yes I think there are signs of backlash. If anything dramatic
happens in the stock market, or if more people begin to feel disenchanted or
disenfranchised, I think it will grow. I'm not sure if geeks have the self-
awareness as a group to combat it.

First question : a downer!
  

    

dear "sara,"

I will direct you to the article on which The Geek Handbook is based, as it
directly addresses non-geek girls dating geek boys. It's a bit out of date
now, but still useful.

http://www.bunnyhop.com/BH5/geekguys.html

please report back.
  

    

castle, the handbook doesnt have the specific sections you mention, tho it
addresses those issues. it does have diagnostics, bug fixes, and upgrade
instructions.  I feel that "installing" or "configuring" a geek are terms
somehow inorganic and didnt use them. I realize this makes no sense, but
there it is.
  

    
I demand an upgrade!
  

    
I think manual installation of patches is the only humane way to go.
  

    

I've never been called a geek before!  Anywhere, here's some questions
from a fan on the Internet:

From farklempt@home.com Thu Aug 10 19:03:06 2000
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 20:32:48 -0400
From: farklempt@home.com
To: inkwell-hosts@well.com
Subject: Question for Mikki Halpin

Dear Mikki:

Marjorie says that you edited a seminal magazine. Have you also 
written with ink?
-- 

OI!!  I'M ALL FARKLEMPT!!!
  

    

From farklempt@home.com Thu Aug 10 19:03:15 2000
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 20:33:24 -0400
From: farklempt@home.com
To: inkwell-hosts@well.com
Subject: Question for Mikki Halpin

Dear Mikki:

Am I a geek? Please be gentle.
-- 

OI!!  I'M ALL FARKLEMPT!!!
  

    
that would be my father, who is enchantingly insane. he has the good sense
to be very fond of mikki, tho. 

everyone who wants to know the genesis of the book should go read that
seminal (or ovoid) "girl's guide to geek guys," on bunnyhop's web
site. like the early work of brecht and shakespeare, it reflects in its
youthful exuberance the themes that the mature artist later explored to
the fullest. 

basically, the bunnyhop article was really a kind of early "geeks
rule!" shout-out to girls, alerting them that geekboys are good to
date. (i agree. but this was a radical notion a few years ago, when
"geek" did not have the cachet it seems to have now.) the book is not just
for girls, tho--there are sections about your geek child, your geek
parent, your geek boss, your geek coworker, your geek neighbor. 

is that why you wrote the book, mikki--to explicate all kinds of geekdom
for the nongeek? why is this an important service? why does this book have
such broad appeal? (broad like WIDE, not like CHICK, har har.)
  

    
Dumb question department: is there an upper age limit on geeks? When they
get too ripe do they turn into something else?
  

    

I like the idea that geeks ripen!
  

    
I'm not sure that they ripen. Sometimes they wisen. Sometimes they
sour.
  

    
I do think the whole money mania has change geek culture for good and
bad... however you define geek culture.
  

    
Is geek culture even definable any more? I mean, now that computers
are pretty much ubiquitous, there are so many kinds of geeks that they
can't all have something in common, can they?
  

    
Right - does it mean something different to each of us? I admit I probably
am thinking of stereotypes and not real people, except a couple of real
people, one of whom is both THE most geeky guy I know but then I think he
goes for homo leather bars, so that doesn't really totally fit in...
  

    
Check out
http://www.brittanica.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=geek

"a person often of an intellectual bent who is disapproved of"