• Lab Work: I’m still working in the Lab, having just finished my fifth week there. The project is going really well. We’re starting to get mountains of data back from our GC runs. There are two weeks left on the project, most of which will be spent hydrolysing my esters so that we can identify the acids and alcohols present. Then, time and circumstances permitting we’re going to head over to SUERC in East Kilbride to take a look at Stable Carbon isotopes.
• Girvan Trip: Me, Emma and Emma’s mate John went on a short day trip down the coast between Ballantrae and Girvan (will be more on this later).
• Reading: I’ve got a fair bit of reading done, mostly about Zooplankton. But I also got to re-read one of my favourite books: Anathem by Neal Stephenson, and I’m currently cracking my way through The Code Book by Simon Singh.
• Gaming: Somehow we’ve spontaneously formed a new gaming group, which has let me get back into playing RPGs. We’ve had two massive gaming sessions so far; a D&D Scenario run by Chris and a WFRP game run by yours truly. We’re probably going to spin both of these off into full campaigns.
• Various Internet Nonsense: I’ve moved all my RSS feeds from Thunderbird to Google Reader, with broadly positive results. It saves a lot of time reading stuff on my iPhone while on the subway rather than sitting down to catch up on the days events in a oner. I’ve also started using Mendeley today. I haven’t really used the networking aspect of it at all (I think I prefer LinkedIn still at this point), but the desktop application is fantastic for organising the alarmingly large number of papers I need to read. Highly recommend checking it out.

So yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to. A full post on our Girvan excursion will follow in a couple of days, and a wrap up post about working in the lab will appear in a couple of weeks.

My initial take on this is one of annoyance; now that being a geek is ‘cool’, the label which we, the oddballs, have defined ourselves by has been appropriated by the mainstream. As Wil Wheaton said:

we know what at least some of those things are, and Cool Kids have teased us for it our whole lives. It feels to me like those same people are now trying to take our culture away from us and make a quick buck off of exploiting it, and us.

What Wil said there about our culture originating from a place where we were outsiders is repeated by Z:

This enduring “geek chic” that the mainstream media has become so fixated upon is key to spreading our message of hope, but it can also prove a destructive element if we lose site of the fact that we are all but defined by some of our most unsavory experiences and inclinations. Whether geek or nerd, we each spent a lengthy season being abused, neglected, isolated. We know what it’s like to be bullied and to be made to feel insignificant. We know what it’s like to be outsiders. But while this pain is certainly not ours alone, it is also a defining force that we must not lose sight of.

This is, to me, what is is to be a geek. Being part of a group of people who’ve passed through rough experiences because of their interests, their attitudes and even their appearances. I’ll be the first to admit that we might have issues with people who’ve never experienced that kind of thing and claim they’re a geek because they use twitter and have a blog.

Yet on the flip side, these things becoming mainstream takes the heat off. We might have a new generation of geeks; who program, or play D&D, or magic, or maybe just love science; and are able to go through high school being respected rather than mocked. However, is that what’s happening lately? I don’t think it is, Science continues to be dismissed and misunderstood by the media and mainstream culture – someone who works as a physicist is still not as ‘cool’ as a football player or actor, yet the actor is a ‘geek’ who uses twitter.

I’ll keep my Nerdcore; my DVDs of genre shows; my slashdot account; my RSS reader filled with geoblogs; my shelves stacked with sci-fi, fantasy, RPG and science textbooks; hell, I’ll keep my glasses. You can even keep sneering at those of us who play D&D. I’ll be happy regardless, because I’m part of a culture where diversity, intelligence and being different is a good thing. I fit in with them because I don’t fit in – and I like it that way. Join in if you like, but don’t claim to be one of us, and dismiss those of us who’re into the weirder bits of our culture at the same time (except for LARPers, even we mock them ;)).