Geek Travel

This could be a great website and it really was an eye-opener to me. “Wanderlust for Geeks” – what a great tagline!.
Planning my vacation is not in my system, and I’m happy to have a significant other who is doing all the work and drags me away from my computer screen now and then – and proves to me that the Real World still has enough interesting places to be.
However, Geek Travel’s Edward Alfert dives straight in the centre of the subject when he states:

I believe that the correct sequence of steps to follow when planning a vacation are to:
(1) choose what you want to do,
(2) find where you can find such activities,
(3) find out when is the best time to participate,
(4) and then find out where to stay.

I agree.
A few years ago I bought “The Geek Atlas” for this purpose. The less time I waste on anything not related to nerddom (I prefer to treat “geek” and “nerd” as having the same denotation, with only slightly different connotations), the better. Now Alfert has a longer list of destinations, but since the maintenance of his website is currently on hold – being a Geek Alfert has obviously too many projects to maintain – he fills his website with articles on Geekdom. Like this one, where he offers a more complicated Venn diagram of the art of Geekiness than published two years ago:

I like this definition of a geek:

“A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who passionately pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.”

Even more interesting – because entirely new to me – is his Venn-diagram on Geekdoms: the World or Sphere of Geeks.

I planned my next vacation already and of course it is jam-packed with museum-visiting; but just in case there will be some spare time left to ponder the Gentle Art of Geekiness and the places to be, I’ll definitely check out Geek Travel.

(Comments are closed)
  • The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge

    Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.

    – David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993

  • Geek Attitude

    The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
    Definitely the only way to travel.
    Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.