Once Upon A Geek – Growing Up Geeky: A Teen Girl’s Opinion

ONCE UPON A TEENAGE GIRL! 

Shag and his 16 year old daughter discuss growing up geeky in today's world! Curious what a teenage girl things about being a geek? Listen to this episode to find out!

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12 responses to “Once Upon A Geek – Growing Up Geeky: A Teen Girl’s Opinion

  1. Such a great show!

    Yes, I had the privilege of meeting the two of you last year and it was great.

    I have three Supergirls of my own and made sure I exposed them all to my nonsense. They have a working education of comics and sci-fi! I also read books to my kids nightly and used different voices. This was especially fun when I read The Hobbit to my second child.

    I don’t know how much of all of it stuck. They like the Marvel movies but so does everyone. But they do all seem to have a love of film that I do and often talk about the technical stuff in films to me, which makes me smile.

    Hope to run into the whole fam again sometime!

    And if a move to New England happens, I’m up here.

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  2. Great show, Shag and Princess! I have multiple geeky daughters, also. I’m not sure how many; they never stand still in the same room long enough for me to count. The objects of their fandom are many and varied, but a character named “Taylor Swift” is one locus they share — some kind of speedster, I speculate. When this Swift person comes up — and anything can make that happen — it’s as if they switch languages. There is also a fashion movement called “Hairy Styles,” which I do not understand.

    Regardless, I share enough obsessions with them that there is always common ground for discussion, for which I am grateful. They are a lot of work and trouble, but they can also be vastly entertaining and quite educational, to boot!

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  3. Hmmm … let me see. My daughter is a Twitch streamer, a YouTube content creator, reads Western & Japanese comics, loves Anime, and makes her own cosplay outfits.

    Yeah, she might be a LITTLE geeky. 😉

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  4. This is just what I needed to hear today. Thank you, Matthews Darth and Leia. You brought a tear to my eye, and I am now going to wear my FIND YOUR JOY t-shirt tomorrow and try to have a better day!
    Hope to see you both again soon!

    And yes, my daughter is a geek whose favorite character is Martian Manhunter, and my grand-daughter loves Aquaman and all the super-heroes. So we’re doing something right. 🙂

  5. Well I listened to this today when out for my run and it was an eye opener, Mainly because my twin 11 year old girls are also super geeky and I suspect that’s mostly due to their parents! The parallels to Shag’s actions are interesting.

    My wife and I read the girls Harry Potter over the course of about 6 years. We’d start off a book at Christmas and read it to them a few pages a night then around the summer we’d let them watch the movie version of that film. We started when they were 5 and a half I think. We read a book a year until we took a break before Book 5 – both my wife and i thought there is a big step change between 4 and 5 and the girls needed a bit more maturity to follow it. Then a Christmas this year we started book 6 and we decided to just keep going to finish Book 7 as well, as time evolved I ended up doing most of the reading, mainly because I tried to put a bit of acting into it and of course I could do some of the voices (I lost my Snape voice in the gap year and never got it back) including of course Professor McGonigal.

    For the Lotr and hobbit films while I had read The Hobbit to them, I had found it difficult to read aloud. Tolkien’s prose can be tricky to get in to when it’s not just in your head, But my wife had taken the lead on the Films. We are discussing if they are ready for Rings of Power.

    Doctor Who we power watched through Covid – there are massive arguments about who is the best Doctor (To be clear it’s Capaldi, Smith, Tennant, Baker (T), McCoy, Whittaker, Pertwee, Troughton, Eccelston, Davison, Baker (C) Hartnell ) and one of the twins is OBSESSED with the show at the moment and is trying to recruit all of her friends to it. Thankfully it’s free to catch up on iplayer over here.

    The other twin who is more in to Hobbits had me help her build a LEGO Elf / Rivendell display for one of the LEGO shows I run. She is also into Ghostbusters and demanded a Ghostbusters Calendar.

    Beyond that both of them are also Minecraft players and often have Youtube videos on the TV watching the actions of players.

    However the biggest failure I have found is that Despite the pair of them being named after Superheroes while they love Teen Titans Go! and DC Superhero girls – they aren’t that interested in the other DC Comic universes and there isn’t a clamouring for catching up with the Marvel Movies either.

    I honestly think there is an issue for kids today of TOO much geekery being available to choose from. Not only is there so much new stuff going out there (All of the Arrowverse, Marvel Movies and shows, Star Wars films and TV, Rings of Power etc) there is so much classic stuff to catch up with. I know Geeks seem to have won the box-office and the streamers. But seriously I fear that there is a fragmentation in kids attention spans these days – They might be hard core fans of things but those phases are getting shorter and shorter as new waves of things arrive. I think Shag’s daughter has been lucky to be at the front edge of the wave to not be pulled in too many directions. While our girls aren’t teenagers yet I fear I might not be able to keep up with their geeky interests! I can barely keep up with mine!

    Anyway enough about my world, back to the excellent podcast which was a fascinating listen and I barely noticed I’d managed 25 minutes of jogging in the cold damp rain of Scotland so Kudos to both of you.

    Now the only pressing question I have is… Was the Ice Cream bribe for Shag’s daughter from Publix and if so what flavour 🙂

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    1. Publix, that’s torn it!

      Hello to Zatanna* and Miss Martian.

      * You can bet that if someone did try to name their daughter after Zee it would turn out as ZaNtanna….

  6. This was fantastic and brought all the feels. As a parent of two young boys (13 and 10), this show brought to mind so many parallels to my own life.

    It’s interesting to see what a geek is today is much different than it was when I was a kid. Like the Princess said, most kids don’t really care what you are into these days. You can find someone, somewhere that will share your interest, geeky or not, which is awesome! Whereas, when I was a kid, if you liked a geeky thing, like comic books, and other kids found out about it you would get beat up! AND you had to happy with shows like the Incredible Hulk TV movies because that’s all you were getting for geeky media! Ahhhh, those were the days……

    It’s so lovely to hear how your daughter can share so many geeky pursuits with you, Shag. What a great way to bond with your kids. For myself, I definitely have exposed my kids to all my geeky obsessions. Starting with reading superhero board books to them as babies to showing them all my favourite movies now that they are old enough to understand some of that language from the ’80’s doesn’t age that well.

    I’m looking forward to the next episode and hear the exploits of my national superhero team, eh! This was such a delight and will be great to hear if this Shag can get another appearance on another podcast! Keep up the great work, Princess!

  7. This was a wonderful episode. I listened to it as I was driving back home from the Baltimore Comic-Con (after meeting my internet friend Shawn for the first time!) and imagining my own sons (ages 28 and 24) and daughter (who is now 20) when they were younger. Brought a tear to my eye, recalling how I read all 11 Archive editions of the JLA to them over the years when they were younger. But my kids never let me do the voices – they said it was too scary! They are all adults (mostly, lol) now, and each have their own geeky interests, from Lego to D&D to video games to Twitch streaming to comics of course. But the most touching part of the episode was the discussion about passing on the love of reading in general. That really struck a chord with me. Thanks Shag for doing this episode.

  8. Okay, let’s see what I can remember from the drive home.

    My partner Pakita Trotamundos was a huge Harry Potter fan as well, especially the Jim Dale audiobooks. She’s a Ravenclaw who identifies as a Slytherin, and loves Severus above all. I held a halfhearted intent to try to visit ol’Shaggg when we did the Orlando Universal Studios Tour, but she was so invested that we never made the time. We also did the J. K. Rowling tour in Edinburgh back when her main problems were oversharing on Pottersmore and fear-mongering against Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, that trek coupled with the Harry Potter Studio Tour in London was a sort of exorcism of her fandom, and she more or less disowns it now. Still an awful lot of artifacts of it in our household, however. She’s done a hard pivot into D&D and online gaming.

    I watched Gilmore Girls sometime into the first season and caught up during initial reruns. Lorelai reminded me of a near miss romance, so I lived vicariously through Max Medina. Spoilers: that didn’t turn out so hot. I adored that first season, and never quite forgive the forced trajectory change early in season 2, but held on to view each successive season in first run. Many argue that the show never recovered from Amy Sherman-Palladino’s departure in the penultimate season, but for me personally, I never recovered from the Season 4 finale. It’s still one of my all-time favorite shows, but across the seasons my affection for Lorelai and Rory dims to a very low ebb, and if you haven’t already, do not watch Netflix’s A Year In The Life. Emily and Paris remain Queens, thankfully.

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  9. As a fellow father of a geeky teen girl, I really enjoyed this episode, and found myself nodding along with so much of what the two of you said. I just wanted to share a brief exchange that my daughter had with some of her friends, which made me so proud.

    Friend #1: What’s your favorite subject in school?
    My Daughter: Math.
    Friend #1: You are such a nerd.
    Friend #2 (and fellow proud geek): She’s wearing a Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt! Of course, she’s a nerd!

    That’s my girl. (Also, profound apologies to my wife for turning our daughter to the darkside).

  10. Gilmore Girls

    I do apologise, this episode must have dropped when I was over on Earth 2, menacing the JSA. What a treat to finally find it, the Matthews Family is so lovely, like the Bradys without Cousin Oliver. I enjoyed hearing Young Ms M’s experience of teen geeks enormously, helped by her natural knack for podcasting… where did that come from?

    It’s great that you, Shagg, helped instil a love of reading – it helps if you have an intellectually curious child. What a great range of books you enjoyed together.

    And now the Gilmore Girls, what a treat (well, until Rory starts hanging out with the wrong crowd…).

    I echo Siskoid, can a solo show for the Princess of Podcasting be far behind?

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