12.12.2004 20:37 - Love the Music, Hate the Fans
Following on from the previous piece, I\'ve decided to write down my feelings on fans. I\'ve met quite a few fans of various things in the past, and been a fan to the point of total geekhood of a number of things. However, and I must stress this, it was a phase I went through.
Someone has written on geekhood and that being a fan of something that is considered somewhat \"uncool\" may be an advantage : the question he asks is how many geeks have beaten their wives because they didn\'t like the end of a Star Trek season. Well, to counter that, I ask, how many relationships have broken up because of a geek obsession? I bet quite a few.
My first real encounter with a mass of fans was the fan club for the TV Series \"The Prisoner\". These fans weren\'t so bad, but there was a definite geeky element in there, and, like most clubs, they tended to attract the occasional individual who had a somewhat tenuous grasp on reality. Fine. I just kept out of their way. It was when I got into some other types of fanclub - music for example - I found that, if anything, the fans of the \'less geeky\' stuff were even more geeky, to the point of obsession.
It got to the point where I recently went to a fan meeting for a 60\'s group I\'m fond of. I suddenly realised about half-way through that a lot of these people had nothing else in their lives. When they weren\'t working, they filled their remaining hours with minutae and trivia, to the point of losing sight of the subject. It got to be a geek competition - \"I\'m a bigger fan than you are\" - something that has been christened a \"Dickwar\" on usenet. A lot of fanclubs go that way.
And that\'s why I lost interest in them, really. I don\'t care how big a fan anyone is, and I\'m not prepared to listen to anyone telling me how big a fan they are. That\'s why they get labelled as boring.
So I left.
