Word: geek
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Much Furby hype originated with the geek-chic set. The magazine you're reading is partly responsible. After Toy Fair '98, TIME ran a Techwatch item mentioning them. USA Today also noticed, and after an electronics fair in May, CBS This Morning did a segment. That ginned up interest last summer, even though Furby's complicated innards meant it wouldn't be ready for stores until fall...
...those who haven't read Raymond's excellent New Hacker's Dictionary, is geek for "fear, uncertainty and doubt"--a trick invented by IBM and perfected by Microsoft for scaring people away from a competitor's product...
...last date with Beck Hansen, his smash album Odelay, was one of those classic affairs in which everything seemed to go perfectly. God knows we weren't expecting it. Last time we checked, he had been merely a folksy geek with the catchphrase of consummate apathy: "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill...
...first album, Mellow Gold, introduced his sound: blending rural rockabilly and urban jangle into a casual aesthetic of sloppy cool. Mixing old school rap styling with twangy roots rock sounds, and fusing it all to an lo-fi punk philosophy, Beck wandered into the limelight as the ultimate slacker geek, announcing his own cheerful uselessness. His clueless sound had a certain novelty appeal, but he seemed less like a suave rock star than like a rock star's whiny younger brother, whose upstart nonsense was original, but couldn't be taken too seriously...
...does it feel to be an idol? Torvalds shyly dips his head and averts his gaze. "It's not like I have 15-year-old girls throwing their underwear at me," he says, with a small laugh. "I think the 15-year-old geek inside me is still disappointed about that...