The Modeling Industry.

My friends are geeks.

I understand nerds in an intrinsic way, but geeks are another mess altogether.

A nerd (at least according to my rather broad interpretation) is someone who embraces their guilty pleasures without the feeling of guilt. Think about it. Deep down, people generally like some pretty silly stuff. Only when they are unafraid to speak about them without any sort of prefabricated disclaimer at the ready, are they considered "uncool" to some extent. Let's be honest here, the term "cool" as we know it today seems to indicate a sense of overall quietude, or even aloofness in an individual, which is exactly what you would get if you took away any ability to speak about those guilty pleasures openly.

Geeks just enjoy lame stuff. They also get far too excited and obsessive about this stuff. I'm not trying to incite a class war, so to speak, but some of my friends are now geeks in my book.

They have started playing Warhammer 40,000 on a regular basis.

There are four guilty parties (who will remain anonymous, they know who they are) so far. They have all the rule books, they have constructed a large gaming table in my basement, they have spent large sums of money on tiny models and paints, they exhaust long hours painstakingly assembling and detailing these models, they discuss "technique", they have played numerous campaigns against one another and they talk "shop" around the house when they aren't readily engaged in tabletop warfare. I've even heard them recount the details of a game that they had just finished playing. This is worse than discussing a movie immediately after viewing it (I think one of my readers will understand this). These were "cool" people once. It happened almost overnight.

I assembled and primed my first unit tonight, and I eagerly anticipate the primary stages of painting him tomorrow. So long, "cool". It was fun while it lasted. I'll always look back on you fondly, but there are wars to be won.