“Pendantic” is not a real word.

To clarify, it was said by Chad at 12:43.

I busted his balls for that in a previous episode, though I don’t recall which one. He said something like, “I hate it when people are pendantic.” To which I dryly replied (complete with over-enunciation, “You mean PEH-dantic.”

If we geeks are good at nothing else, it’s pedantry and dry wit. ;)

lol, that does sound like a Dan witticism. Although, are you sure you didn’t say PENN dn tick

When we record — just like any conversation — it’s inevitable that someone will mispronounce or slur words. Depending on where they fall, I may or may not be able to correct it during editing. You are absolutely correct that Chad flubbed and said “pendantic” on this recording. But I recall a prior episode where that same flub became the butt of a joke, with me pedantically correcting him on the pronunciation of “pedantic”.

On the discussion of culture being hostile towards the things they love, I think you guys are missing the point. There is an innate difference between bitching about something you love and whining about things [i]related[/i] to something you love.

The point here is that while sports fans have flame wars over the quality of several players, the fairness of referees, the legality of certain goals, which equipment brand is best, which tournament was the best, what team to root for and which of the spots are superior; soccer fans will rarely stand up and say “This game is a joke, the rules are bullshit, the game should be 60 minutes long instead of 90, the number of players should be reduced to 9 from 11 and the game should only be played in a covered stadium so neither team has an advantage or disadvantage due to the position of the sun.”

The best example I can think of is geeks raging against the thing they love is with the game Starcraft II. Fans of the game do all of the above: they discuss the quality of certain players, will debate whether a win was corrrectly awarded to one player after a disconnect at a tournament, what mice or keyboard to buy, which tournament was the greatest and which teams are the best. However…
If you look around the official SC2 forums or those of the TeamLiquid community website, there will be hundreds upon hundreds of post of people crying and complaining about the game itself.
A new ladder seasons is released with a package of new maps to play on: hundreds of posts appear with people saying “These maps are shit. Blizzard doesn’t care about competitive gaming. Why don’t they use our community maps? This game is a joke.”
A new patch is released with several balance changes; people go to the forums and say “Wait what? Why did they buff unit X, omg this is so overpowered. I think I’ll stop playing race Y now and start playing race Z because this is bullshit. This game is ridiculous, I’m quitting.”
A new feature is released where different ladder regions are linked together, people storm the Blizzard headquarters saying “If we’re not linked with the Korean servers, this change means nothing. Omg Blizzard why are you wasting time on this crap? Why don’t I have Lan play yet and where is my f*cking D&D? Battle.net 2.0 is a joke and Blizzard only cares about single-player.” and make pictures like this one:

http://imgur.com/SzjDT

The first difference here, I think, is that with may geek activities (games, books, movies, comics, etcetera) content is – often continuously – created that people enjoy and the subject often evolves and changes as time goes on. The second differnce is that the activity is often cerebral moreso than physical and this makes it easier for a lot of people to become experts on the subject. Every expert then has their own opinion of how things [i]should[/i] be. Coming back to the first difference, whenever they come into contact with something that contradicts their own experience (which often stems from the content creator) or vision, they will zealously defend their position and heavily criticise the other. Many attempt to shape the activity to their liking by making themselves heard as loudly as they can, hoping the developers/writers/artists/directors will take notice and change things. How often are writers confronted by small inconsitencies on obscure facts of the setting by geeks that are more knowledgable on the subject than they themselves?

With the dawn of internet and modern-era ways of communication, this has only grown as it becomes easier and easier to exchange ideas and start discussions, and it becomes easier and easier for the content producers to incorporate feedback. Case in point: tournament organisers for Starcraft II (mainly MLG) listened to community feedback and have drastically improved the quality of their tournaments; some of Blizzard’s balance changes actually do come from community feedback; the trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2 had several shots of Voldemore shouting “Nooooooooo”, which were cut from the movie due to a massive negative backlash from the community.

Ugh. My gaming group tried juggling campaigns for a while. We agreed we will no longer do it.

The situation was, we had a GM running a D&D campaign, but he was getting burned out and needed a break. Another guy in our group offered to start up a campaign to give him a break. So we started playing a second D&D campaign for a while. But then the first GM wanted to resume, so we played each campaign on alternating weeks.

This was problematic, as you might imagine. Keeping each game separate wasn’t too big of a deal, though it did present issues at times. The bigger issue was feeling any sort of coherence or accomplishment to the campaigns when we only played each one twice a month. It gave the stories a feeling of a glacial pace. On top of that, each GM had a character in the other’s campaign. That doesn’t seem too bad, but often times the decision as to who was running each week was decided by who was even available to play. GM #1 can’t make it? GM #2 runs this week. Except we didn’t really have any way to “excuse” those party members from the activities, so often those characters were simply run by another player. It really puts a wet blanket on the roleplaying when one of the characters can’t be truly interacted with or can’t react appropriately to things.

What made things worse was when we started to get burned out on D&D and one of the GMs was experiencing intermittent absences; we introduced a THIRD campaign (Star Wars, this time) to the mix, further muddling things.

Like I said, we’ve decided at this point not to do that again. One campaign at a time, and we’ll break out the video games or board games when necessary.

Do geeks have an unusual habit of raging against the things they love the most, simply out of perfectionist zeal?

I disagree that this is somehow isolated or inherent only in “Geek” community. In fact I know that my wife would “Strongly” disagree with you as to the sports discussion as my brother-in-law and myself will talk/complain non-stop about the NFL and how they are ruining the game we love. I mean we talk for days, a whole week straight when we are together at the beach on our summer vacation to the point that my wife has to say “Really? are you still talking Football?” This is the middle of the summer and we will debate as to why the NFL is still using replay and when are they going to admit that the ground can indeed cause a fumble! The same sorts of discussions we will have about new movies and books. I should state at this point that I am from the Northeast and I believe ‘Surly’ by nature, but I don’t think thats it.

I put forth this argument, Music. Have you ever had a discussion with a passionate music fan? The Metallica fans I went to high school with were anything but ‘Geeks” but they will passionately debate the merits of individual albums, songs and solos. Sell-Out gets tossed, or How dare they…I won’t buy that next album, screw them! or ask a Van Halen fan if they enjoy Van Hagar? New or Old Aerosmith? My friends and I will go on for hours about this stuff.

Interesting topic guys!

thanks for the podacst! (I have been listening for about a year and have never seriously role-played)

-Chuck

I have done both juggling campaigns, and done the same campaign for two different groups. Neither work out well. In one of the current groups I’m in, we have gone through three or four games already, sometimes saying, “We will come back to it.”

The same campaign for two different groups was interesting. I was running one group in 2nd ed. D&D and the other 3.5. I even had them meet each other and fight. Yeah, that didn’t go over well either.

Love the podcast guys. Keep it up.