A Question of Geekiness

Look at this.

It’s a link to a short list of eight things that “happen when geeks have children.” However, only half of the photos, to my mind, actually qualify as examples of geekiness applied to (inflicted upon?) children--and in some cases they qualify only barely. Shall we run through them?

1. The D&D baby. Giving your child character stats for the granddaddy of all roleplaying games, which are still the hallmark of geeks and nerds everywhere. Sheer geekiness. Our winner.


2. iPood. Baby-based parody of a popular mainstream electronic device. No geekery at all.


3. Cthulhu baby. Dressing your child up as one of the chief alien gods from a series of cult horror stories penned by an obscure (nowadays semi-obscure) New England writer at the turn of the 20th century. Definite geekiness.


4. Robot child. WTF? Making a robot costume for your child out of boxes and foil? Robots aren’t geeky. My halloween costume at that age—a walking personal computer, complete with 5.25” floppy disk and disk drive, was geeky. A Robby the Robot costume would have been geeky. But a mere generic robot? Cute, sure. But not geeky.


5. Mario and Luigi. Cute, admittedly. And the detail is pretty neat. But the Mario Bros. have been popular video game icons since the late 1980s, starring in millions of sequels and spinoffs. Putting your kids in costume as them hardly squeaks off the ground. But we’ll give points for effort. Inching toward geekiness.


6. Ninja baby. I know ninjas are all the rage now, and the ninja vs. pirate meme that got passed around among certain crowds several years ago was definitely geeky—but ninjas and other eastern martial artists have held our collective fascination since before Bruce Lee—through movies, TV shows, stories, etc. Dressing your child up as a ninja for halloween is as mundane as serving cereal for breakfast (in American culture). Just ask my parents about taking me to a martial arts supply store when I was in 1st grade to buy a genuine ninjitsu outfit for the end of October. Not geeky.


7. iPod baby. Okay, the baby’s expression is cutely disturbing. And actually clothing your baby as an iPod is a little bit on the geeky side. But it’s still a popular mainstream electronic device, and I would bet that this baby jumper can be bought easily and by many online—and was tailored for exactly that. So: borderline geeky.


8. Princess Leia. Fine, fine, you win on this one. Star Wars fanatics (old-school ones, especially, and not young kids these days) rank as high as Trekkies on the geekometer. So this one counts. But every time Lucas clones a sequel (excuse me, prequel) or a spinoff, it gets less geeky.