Geeks in the US as opposed to Portugal

I mentioned in the previous post that one of the reasons I created a new blog for posting about “geeky” subjects was that the otherwise most appropriate possibility was my personal blog, which is in Portuguese, and I wanted these posts to be in English. But why is that, you may ask?

There’s a funny difference between “geekdom” in my native country, Portugal, and the USA. In America, being a geek is associated with stuff such as science fiction (especially, but not only, Star Trek and Star Wars), fantasy, role-playing games (RPGs), board games, video games, and so on. All that in addition to technology and computers.

In Portugal? A typical “geek” is interested in technology and computers. That’s it.

Considering that all of the above are among my interests, you can see how I have much more in common with American geeks than with Portuguese ones. It’s not that there aren’t people in Portugal interested in Trek, Tolkien, D&D or strategy games with 200-page manuals, but they are comparatively very rare… and they’ll all understand English perfectly, anyway. 🙂 So, as I wanted to reach the largest possible audience… English it is.