Countdown To Geek Pride Day

Read how the VPS tech team will be celebrating Geek Pride Day this weekend…

The word geek has had a renaissance in the past decade. It’s gone from being a taunt to a status symbol of a nickname. These days, geeks have a calendar full of ways to celebrate their geekdom. There was Pi Day, on March 14, there was Star Wars Day on May the Fourth, and there’ll be Programmers Day on September 13. This Sunday, however it’s Geek Pride Day. And some of the techies behind VPS are throwing a party in recognition of it.

“Identifying myself as a geek is incredibly important to me for many reasons,” says Cody Erekson, party organiser. “Basically, if you like something, anything, enough that you aren’t ashamed to let everyone know how passionate you are about that, you’re a geek.

“Most people think of a geek as the kind of reserved and shy computer programmer who spends all of his time in a basement surrounded by empty pizza boxes and soda cans, lit only in the glow of half a dozen computer monitors. That is an old stereotype that is quickly being done away with.

“Geeks are the people who get so excited about learning how to make a rocket fly that we end up putting a man on the moon! Geeks are the people who can’t stop thinking for even a moment about the best way to send information between two people on opposites sides of the planet, and end up inventing the internet! Geeks are the people who have an idea for a great love story and write it down and sell it to a movie company and create a classic like Gone With The Wind.”

On Sunday, Cody’s Geek Pride Day won’t be done by halves. The activities list includes competitions on old school video game consoles like Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. There’ll be contests on classics like Mortal Kombat and Donkey Kong Country, among others. Light saber duels will feature in the day, along with geek-based trivia quizzes.

Even the food and drink will be geek themed. The menu will feature the likes of Mountain Dew cupcakes and a green drink dubbed Slurm after the drink in Futureama. But the piece de resistance of the event will be the Wookie Cookies, made according to a recipe from dessert.food.com, but with special Wookie decorations on the top.

The cherry on top of the Geek Pride Day cake will be the raffle, in which party-goers have the chance to win trinkets like a Rubix cube, whoppee cushions and alien slime, as well as the top prize of a Raspberry Pi.

Tell us how you’ll be celebrating Geek Pride Day and come back to the blog next week for all the gossip from the day…