I never did buy the concept of "fake geek". Stripped of gender idiocy it makes no sense. There are novices and there are masters (and all shades in between) at various subjects. it's hard to tell which is which. Mastery of one subject may not be mastery of another. of course I'm thinking mostly about programming languages, where expert C++ gives you nothing more helpful than a toolkit with which to begin to learn Erlang. This works for comics too, right? Knowing all about Batman gives you a toolkit for understanding X-men, nothing more, right?

Telling masters that they're novices is insulting. Presuming to know the difference between novice and master at a glance is arrogant. Telling anyone (novice or master) that they're "fake" and shouldn't try is insulting.