Honestly ? While french media tend downplay a lot of that’s going on, US media seem to be blowing it out of proportions. My biggest problem in the last two weeks while attending school, was with lack of public transportation, and that this is quickly resorbing.
I’d say you don’t risk any more than a loss of your time, and that’s why you should avoid universities’ vicinities if you choose to come.

Of course things can still deteriorate till the end of the month, but given how much ridiculous and senseless all this has become, I think things are bound to get better. Our President is already asking officials/people not to enforce/use a law that has been promulgated ! If this was happening in any other country it’d end classified a new banana-republic (we may already be there, I haven’t check today’s foreign newspapers yet). :)
Seriously, though unless things change drastically, you’re not taking much more risks coming here than celebrating St. Patrick's Day in a pub.

How are things in Paris these days? My paranoid relatives keep telling me it’s no place for a foreign student at the moment, but I doubt it’s really all that bad. If the stories I hear in America are any indication, I’d be more afraid of the police than the student “rioters”…

Well, if you’re not afraid of being stumbled upon by the unholy result of an experience in mixing a depressive Beatles without pot with an 70’s existentialist fanboy without the tobacco, and a failed early 80’s rocker without glam, I’ll start looking around.
Beware the little grey hood, though.

Also, I love a man who can use “geek” as a verb. Let’s go geeking. Oh yes, let’s! I’m not exactly sure what it would entail, but I imagine something like cow-tipping. And maybe a light saber. Use your imagination.

I heard in Korea they have reality TV shows about video gamers.
Ah Korea, a land of wonder. What I want to know is, well, more… I understand the extreme wired-ness of their current situation, but I want to learn about the culture conditions that pushed this forward, or, specifically, how they differ from other Asian societies. Any thoughts?

Geez, Bonnie, do you not read the magazine you work for?
I try, but after I finish soaking them all in a whole other issue comes along! That one though I hadn’t read. Thanks!

It seems like Final Fantasy in particular is perfectly acceptable in the mainstream in America.
I hear you, but still, if you walked up to the “cool kids” at a high school, and started a conversation about Final Fantasy, would that go over? For most of us, it’s fine, but it still doesn’t jive with the ideal image of cool America.

But this begs the question, what happens when the geeks are cool?
Enter the twilight zone… Well, I suppose new things would become geeky. I would bet they’ve already popped up. What’s really uncool these days? Let us know so we can jump on the bandwagon early.

I'd say may more be linked to class perception than anything.
Hmm, so gaming is seen as low class? Or middle class, because of the expense? Do tell…

Also, MD^2, speaking of the cool-ness of France, I’ll be back in grand ole Paris at the end of this month. So keep a look out for a redhead who can’t pronounce her French r’s and runs around the city rambling about the nature of game (because that’s definitely how I just spend the last few days in Wales :-).

It seems to me, at least from here, that geek culture in America as been “becoming cool” for quite some time now. It’s only that things are speeding up.

The definition of geekness varies a lot from country to country. In Japan, from what I could see, games are mainstream. The otakus are not shunned because of their activities, but because of the extreme nature of their devotion to it (as a japanese friend of mine explained me: playing Final Fantasy’s cool, having your room filled with FF swag is weird… but then I noticed owning only one piece of it can throw their sensors offshores).

In France, we’ve had our anti-video game movement, but they’ve never enjoyed as much popular support as, say, the anti-tabletop RPG movement, and they were limited to far-right traditionalists. As far as I remember video-games have always been accepted as a past time as legitimate as any other. When I was a child, my 40 year-old, father of two, neighbour was a real video game buff, he owned several arcade cabinets and computers and he wasn’t considered weird by the neighbourhood. Quite the contrary.
Also, you don’t see here that strange divide that seem to permeate american fiction: the video-game-playing geek versus the assertive male dominator sport buff. Whether it’s from childhood memories or from experience with the kids I teach to, I’ve never seen that divide here ( in life or local fiction… it’s mostly an imported meme). Those who want to play, play. Most of the time games are a good bonding tool for kids (and later on, adults) which might otherwise have nothing in common. So, yeah, I don’t think geekiness and video games are linked here. Actually, thinking of how the way they’re presented/used in popular medias, I’d say may more be linked to class perception than anything.

But then my personal experiences may have been off the map.

Can’t really help for the rest of Europe. Sorry.

Intreseting comparison between video games and wine drinking… makes me want to dig a bit.

Dig it.