Who: I'm Lauren. I'm in my late 20s and have been a geek/nerd/what have you in one way or another for as long as I can remember. My best friend and I played at being X-wing pilots and reenacted scenes from Star Wars when we were kids one day, and played at being paleontologists and riding dinosaurs the next. (If paleontologists actually got to ride dinosaurs, I think I would have paid a little more attention in my anatomy classes and pulled a higher grade, but that's besides the point.)
Why: I, like many geek girls, am not happy with the way that we're so often overlooked. It's only in recent years that it seems that any effort has been made to change this, despite female fans of the geeky persuasion being around way back when women were active members of Star Trek fandom in its initial days and before. There's a tremendous gap in the number of female to male protagonists in science fiction and fantasy. The wonderful site Her Universe was started after Ashley Eckstein, voice of Ahsoka Tano on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, saw how little there was specifically marketed for the large number of female fans that were coming up to her at Star Wars conventions. People like Amy Ratcliffe and Bonnie Burton have been bringing some attention to female fans, and it's a start.
And then came Ginia Bellafante's review of HBO's "A Game of Thrones" where passed off my favorite book series ever as "boy fiction" with sex "tossed in as a little something for the ladies." It was pretty much the last straw for me.
What: So what will this blog be? It's not to tear down people who don't like stuff I don't like. It's to show that geek girls do exist, and we like geeky things. Mostly, it's a place for me to praise stuff that I like in little drips and drabs. A single issue of a comic, a single book of a series, an episode of a TV show, that sort of thing. Yeah, the occasional stand-alone movie or book or complete graphic novel will undoubtedly make its way in, but I'm mostly seeing this as a way to get a small taste of the whole experience.
Why Geekacabra? Yeah, this is pretty silly. Right after the review that annoyed me, I tried starting a Twitter hashtag revolution, #notaunicorn, claiming that if geek girls were supposed to be mythical creatures then I wanted to be a chupacabra. No, I don't believe I'm actually a chupacabra--I'm Mexican-American, and since the urban legend first started making waves in 1995 it's held a weird fascination for me. And I like the name. Goat-sucker. It's hilarious. Throw in a bad portmanteau, and here we are.
(Fun fact, the original chupacabra appearance can probably be attributed to the first eyewitness' viewing of the movie Species. Thanks, Benjamin Radford!)
