Not a Logical Geek

Please welcome our newest ambassador, Tahani Nelson! For The Geek Embassy, she’ll be writing about comics, anime, dungeons and dragons, and fantasy.  Please welcome her to the site and enjoy the glimpse into her future articles! ~Isabela

Hi, there. My name’s Tahani Nelson and I’m incredibly excited to be part of things here at Geek Embassy. For what it’s worth, I’m more of a Jack-of-All-Trades-Master-of-None sort of Geek—I’ve dabbled in almost everything to some degree, though there’s no particular thing that I know about more than anyone else. I actually prefer it this way, because there’s always something more to learn.

My favorite geeky pursuits are definitely D&D and video games. It is… probably unhealthy how much time I’ve spent on those two pursuits. The video games I play lean towards science fiction, fantasy, and psychological horror, but I’ll play anything with a deep storyline and interesting characters. My D&D characters vary depending on the backstory I come up with upon creation, but I can definitely say that I’m never much of a magic user.

Besides those things, I’ve been a fan of DC comic books since I was a child, but have to admit that I prefer the Marvel movies. I’ve been watching Star Trek since I was born – I even met George Takei once – but I also enjoy the Star Wars universe as well (possibly because the video games are better).  I read large amounts of fantasy (I just published my first fantasy novel in October) and I think I’ve watched every fantasy/sci-fi movie available on Netflix. I don’t often watch TV shows, with a few exceptions, but I do enjoy putting movies on in the background while I do other things. Musicals tend to be my go-to, and thus I have most of the songs memorized. I do NOT have to be in the shower to start randomly singing.

While most of my geekiness involves things I can do alone, I do try to hang out with like-minded people as often as possible. For example, I look for absolutely ANY reason to dress up in Renaissance clothing, and love to attend faires and cons. I watch anime twice a week with a few friends and we’re always looking for new things to try. I’m not a huge fan of LARPing (despite loving to dress up for it), but will definitely listen to you tell me about it. Oh. And I hate Magic: The Gathering, and cannot for the life of me figure out why. A friend taught me how to play it once in college. I learned the game, built a deck with some of his old cards, and we went to play with his group. I won all eight games, said “that was fun” and never picked my deck up again. Which is weird, because I LOVE playing Gwent in The Witcher games.

I never said I was a logical geek. (Ha. Were you wondering about that title?)

Going forward, I’m not sure I can tell you what to expect from me. I have a very feministic viewpoint about all the above points (probably because I’m, you know, female) but most of that could probably be covered in one article and I’m already bored with talking about it because that seems to be what everyone wants to ask about after they find out that I play video games while simultaneously having a vagina (or everyone who doesn’t play with me or view me as a regular human on a daily basis). So let’s skip that for now, because there are other things to deal with that are way bigger than the breasts guys like to ogle on my Twitch feed: ideas. Wonderful, exciting, geeky ideas I can pick apart and repurpose.

There are so many amazing creators out there who have given us a plethora of truly wonderful things, but it never seems to be enough, does it? You just can’t dig into an idea with only two hours or four boss fights on your hands, and the truly awesome brain-children of geeks have so much more potential than they’re initially offered. That’s where I come in. Let’s look at some of the greatest and most revolutionary ideas in geekdom, and then look at it a little differently. Tweak the idea, apply it to our world, change one pivotal moment in the storyline and discuss where that could have gone. Or, in the rare event that someone has created something perfect, let’s discuss why they succeeded so phenomenally while others have failed. The minute the Geeky Greats released their creations to the world, those creations became ours to play with. And we’re going to do that.

Probably in the least logical way possible.

Header image: Alex Chambers