Minnesota Renaissance Festival Downgraded to a Category 1 Geekicane
Minnesota Renaissance Festival Downgraded to a Category 1 Geekicane
The Minnesota Renaissance Festival, an annual re-enactment of 16th century European culture, has been downgraded from a category 2 to a category 1 geekicane, the National Institute of Geek Culture (NIGC) said in a report released over the weekend. Geekicanes, or “geekstorms”, as they are sometimes called, are unusually strong disturbances centered on a specific facet of human culture, drawing geeks to the eye of the geekicane from hundreds, or even thousands of miles away. While geekicanes pose few threats to society at large, stronger storms can cause critical draw-downs in local supplies of caffeinated sodas, available internet bandwidth, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards.
“We based our re-assessment of the Minnesota renfest on the sharp percentage drop in geeks wearing renaissance-period dress,” said Stewart Nelson, director of the Ren-Fest Department of the NIGC. “Alas, the number of squires wearing both a tunic and Ye Olde Denime Trousers has gone sharply up as well,” he said, shaking his head sadly while dressed as a 16th century friar, speaking with an atrocious pseudo-english accent.
A category 2 geekicane requires the percentage of costumed attendees to be above 30 percent. Nelson explained that the influx of average Minnesotans seeking to consume large quantities of beer while oogling the breasts of women popping out of overly tight corsets, coupled with a huge increase in the number of suburban families attempting to cope with Harry Potter mania, has nearly overwhelmed the hard-core renfest goers. “Not even having a booth with costume rentals has helped,” bemoaned Nelson.
Nelson warned Minnesotans to look out for new renfest geekicanes to appear in the next couple of years. “Many geeks are wary of jocks, and are uncomfortable with the increase in renfest commercialism. I mean, there used to be more shows than shoppes, and now look,” he said, becoming visibly agitated. “It’s only a matter of time before the real renfest goers split off and do their own thing. The entire Midwest region is and will be on a renfest geekicane watch for the forseeable future.”
But Nelson cautioned that cosplayers or geeks wearing some form of period dress are not the only signs of an impending geekicane. “It is a common misconception that geekicanes require a high number of cosplayers or attendees in ‘period’ dress,” Nelson said. “This rule of thumb only applies to geekicanes centered around facets of popular geek culture which lend themselves to easy costume creation. But just look at what happened to Los Angeles,” Nelson said, referring to the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, a devastating category 5 geekicane which flooded the city with Microsoft computer programmers a week and a half ago.
The downgrade of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival comes as a relief to those worried about the threats to US culture posed by the string of recent geekicanes. Southern residents are still picking up the pieces after Dragon*Con 2005, a vicious category 4 geekicane which slammed Atlanta Georgia in early September.
Scientists remain unsure what is causing this nation-wide uptick in geekicanes; however, recent research appears to prove that the increase is unrelated to the decline in the overall number of Gothquakes.
How Geekicanes Are Categorized:
It can be difficult to categorize geekicanes because so many of the various facets of popular geek culture (whether Japanese or otherwise) are vastly different from one another. The NIGC takes into account several quantifiable metrics for assessing the strength of a geekicane, including the percentage of eventgoers who choose to attend in costume and the Celibacy Index (CI) [1]. Note that these metrics are only rough guidelines; the ferocity of geeky devotion is a subjective measure but a critical one: PDC 2005 was rated a category 5 geekicane on this measure alone.
Category 1: 10 - 25 percent of event attendees are in some form of costume (which may or may not relate to the event at hand), with a CI for the geekicane up to 10.
Category 2: 25-50 percent of attendees are in costume, with a CI between 10 and 20.
Category 3: 50 - 70 percent of attendees are in costume, with a CI between 20 and 30.
Category 4: 70 - 90 percent of attendees are in period dress or costume, with a CI somewhere between 30 and 50, and with at least 10 percent of all adult attendees still residing at their parent’s address.
Category 5: Greater than 90 percent of attendees are in period dress or costume, with a CI greater than 50, and a full one third of all adult attendees still living at home with their parents. (Note that all Furry Conventions fall into this category, regardless of CI, the actual number of costumed attendees, or their living at home status.)
[1]: While the percentage-based metrics are fairly straightforward, The Celibacy Index (CI) may require some explanation. A 0 (zero) on the CI corresponds to the average number of sexual acts requiring a partner engaged in by an average person in the general population in the previous year. If a subculture has a CI of zero, then any given member of that subculture is having the same amount of sex (on average) as an average person in the general population. Conversely, a subculture with a CI of 100 would indicate that all the members of that subculture have performed zero sex acts in the previous year, total. As such, the CI is inversely proportional to the average amount of sex which a given subculture gets in a year.
In other words, a subculture with a CI of 20 would mean that the average member of the subculture is having 20 percent less sex per year than an average member of the general population.
Note that it is possible for a subculture to have a negative CI (actors in the adult film industry, for example.) Note also that while in theory there are no lower bounds on a subculture’s CI, there are practical limits, including, in extreme cases, the physical laws of time and space.