I was reading +Chuck Thorin ‘s blog post about Fantastic Heroes & Witchery earlier today (great post by the way) and a term I have seen around various OSR, OD&D, etc. communities popped up; “FLAILSNAILS”. I have no idea of what a flailsnail is and it took a quick google search to discover the meaning of the term and why some people use it almost like a curse.
This of course got me thinking that I am horrible at any in-community terminology that isn’t the norm of my Western Culture of choice (That being Generalized American Geek). For instance despite being a tabletop gamer for going on 15 years now, I had no knowledge of what a Munchkin was until last year. This of course expands outward into videogaming as well.
It was quite a common joke on “Sisters of Elune” back when I played WoW that if someone was looking for a dungeon instance party in general for my character to pip in with “what the hell is that?” This still happens in LotRO (Which I also call Lot-ro and get yelled at for).
In the end I am saying I’m not a very good geek, I don’t get the terminology of my own sub-culture. However, I can tell you how preciously a holodeck works, why CNA and bio-tech lifeforms are better concepts for Transformers than pure robotic forms and give a detailed (my wife has clocked me at 2 hours) description of the Phoenix Force. Only problem is if someone asked me to talk about TPF I’d have no idea.
Okay, now that I’m done a generalized ranting, I got myself a preview of +Shane Ward ‘s new adventrue which I hope to shout out and praise tomorrow. And if my daughter’s tablet finishes charging before work the long-awaited second part of +Venger Satanis‘s LotDS will be posted.
Note for everyone out there never, ever write a post on a tablet in the tablet’s generic word processor. Bad things happens.
Also, go watch “Rise of the Predacons” it is a much better ending to a Transformers series than anything Bay has done.
3 thoughts on “Quick Note – This author is oblivious to all in-culture terminology.”
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Did you mean oblivious, in place of obvious in the title?
hahaha, yes I did. Thank you, I will correct now. This is what happens when my wife makes me drink decaf.
I think our geek sub-culture is so fractured that one geek of a certain stripe cannot easily relate to another. For instance, I could talk about vintage Doctor Who, AD&D, or the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft all day long, but would have trouble conversing about World of Warcraft or the Star Gate tv show with my fellow geeks. There's too much stuff!