Geek Party Tonight

"Relief! Without geek parties, we'd never see anybody but OURSELVES, day in, day out."

Tacos will start us off and Halo will probably finish us. There will be no happy ending, unless of course shotgun blasts make you weak in the knees. This will actually be a good order of events since my appetite for tacos as of late has made me into a homicidal beast craving only blood. Mexican blood. But only if it tastes like salsa.

It should be fun, not as huge as usual, and I'm not hosting, Scott is. This makes me very happy, about both the size and not having to clean up.

I will be lugging the usual geek goodie bag with me, complete with gaming consoles and various other things that keep us tethered to the magic box.

All in all, I can't wait. I hope to get some gaming in since at my own parties I'm too busy running around to actually enjoy what the party is about, gaming.

Bone's gonna keep me company on the ride up and I fully expect we'll be listening to anime soundtracks booming out of my new car speakers. With light conversation about why Halo drools and why Timesplitters rules. The usual fair.

Oh, and I'm bringing the camera too. Gotta record the event, it's for posterity.

Here's a little excerpt from Microserfs regarding geek parties and geeks in general. Yeah, sue me, it's one of my favorites okay...
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"The party: It was in San Francisco (the "sit-tay," as now cooler- than-us-by-virtue-of-living-there Bug and Susan call it), in Noe Valley at Ann and Jorge's. Jorge's with Sun Microsystems and Ann's with 3DO. There were LARGE quantities of delicious, snobby San Francisco food, great liquor, industry gossip, and TVs displaying earthquake damage all over the apartment. Since us Oopsters are all broke, we saved pots of money by not eating all day before the party. We never eat before geek parties.

In the moneyed world of Silicon Valley, nothing is uncooler than being broke. Karla and I were both curious to see how Ann and Jorge live. When we arrived, I was overwhelmed by the hipness factor. And where are the GEEKS? Everyone was dressed . . . like real people. Where were the ironic fridge magnets? The futons? The IKEA furniture? The Nerf products? The house looked as though it had been made over by Martha Stewart. There were REAL couches, obviously purchased NEW, in red velvet with gold and silver silk throw pillows; Matisse-derived area rugs; little candles everywhere; a REAL dining table with SIX chairs around it in its OWN ROOM with vases and bowls full of pine cones on the mantel. These people were like ADULTS . . . seamless!

Susan said they've merely disguised their evidence of not having a life: "I mean, it's like you go to somebody's house for Thanksgiving and they've spent eighteen hours covering the rooms with little orange squashes and quinces and crepe paper, and the meal is like Henry the Eighth, and you can't eat because you get this creepy sick feeling that the person who did the dinner has nothing else to do with their life. It's the dark side of Martha Stewart's Living."

Ethan said Susan still felt guilty for putting too much work and money into our gift baskets at Christmas.

I can't stop marveling at how together geeks are in the Valley. At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award. Easy.

Here, it's so much more complicated -- you're supposed to have an exciting, value-adding job that utilizes your creativity, a wardrobe from Nordstrom's or at the very least Banana Republic, a $400,000 house, a cool European or Japanese car, the perfect relationship with someone as ambitious, smart, and well-dressed as yourself, and extra money to throw parties so that the whole world can observe what a life you have, indeed. It makes me miss Redmond, but at the same time, it is kind of inspiring. I feel conflicted.

Even Michael noticed, with a rare lapse into pop culture: "Perhaps David Byrne was talking about the geeks inheriting the earth in that Talking Heads song, `This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! My God! How did I get here?'"

Many geeks don't really have a sexuality -- they just have work. I think the sequence is that they get jobs at Microsoft or wherever right out of school, and they're so excited to have this "real" job and money that they figure that the relationships will naturally happen, but then they wake up and they're thirty and they haven't had sex in eight years. There are these flings at conferences and trade shows, and everyone brags about them, but nothing seems to emerge from them and life goes back to the primary relationship: Geek and Machine.

It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault."