I'm going to let you in on a secret. There is no thin line between geek culture and pop culture. There's a big, thick wall between the two. Every so often, someone fires a harpoon through that wall. A comic book movie becomes popular, or a video game makes waves in the media, or a Web site becomes the newest craze, and the harpoon hooked onto a nice chunk of geek culture and pulls it through to the pop culture side.

Then the wall is spackled over and the geek culture on the pop culture side is eaten up and forgotten about. Then, ironically, the wall is covered with posters like ads for G4's Attack of the Show, proclaiming oxymoronically "pop culture geeks unite!" and announcements from CNN that geek culture is now a big part of pop culture.

No matter how hard media outlets try to make the concept catch on, no matter how many studios try to capitalize on the cultural waves of comic book movies and million-selling video games, there is no such thing as pop culture geekdom. There is only the small amount of bleed-through that happens when that harpoon punches through the wall.

Last December, comedian Patton Oswalt wrote in Wired a treatise on the decay and necessary death of geek culture. He wrote that geek culture has become diluted, co-opted, and bastardized, and that if it wants to flourish again as a sub-culture, it needs to die and come back.

I sympathize with him, but I also completely disagree. Geek culture isn't dead. It's just hidden behind that huge wall.

Geek culture is defined by both depth and obscurity of the subject. Do you play Dungeons and Dragons? You're starting at being a geek. Do you have a bookshelf full of D20 system manuals? You're a pretty solid geek. Do you play Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu, and Paranoia on top of D&D? Now we're reaching some really respectable geek levels. Meanwhile, all any non-geeks know about role-playing games is D&D. For some, it's the stereotypical impression of the pastime. For others, it's the gateway activity that leads to deeper, stranger, geekier activities. We're not in danger (or hope) of the non-geek masses suddenly cracking jokes about ultraviolent clearance and serving The Computer. Nor do I really expect anyone reading this to get that reference.

Role-playing games aren't exactly accessible to many, so let's look at comic book movies, a sub-genre of film that has experienced a surprising resurgence over the last few years, even when the comic book industry itself has been shaky. Everyone saw Iron Man and 300. Many people saw V for Vendetta. Plenty of people saw Watchmen. Not nearly enough people saw Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Of all those people, how many do you think even realize that 300 and V for Vendetta are based on comic books? Or that Batman Begins is based partly on Frank Miller (300)'s Batman: Year One? How many readers went on to explore the works of Neil Gaiman, or Warren Ellis, or Garth Ennis?

Going the slightest bit beyond the direct source materials of these movies, mass interest in comics drops like a stone. Viewers of V for Vendetta and Watchmen didn't exactly clamor to read all the Alan Moore material they could find, based on the movies. For the vast majority, V for Vendetta and Watchmen, both seminal graphic novels and literary works of the 80s, started and stopped at the silver screen. Few, if any, searched for Moore's other work, like Swamp Thing, or Tom Strong, or Top Ten, or (god forbid) The Lost Girls. Granted, it didn't help that Moore distanced himself from all cinematic adaptations of his work (and after League of Extraordinary Gentleman, no one on the planet can blame him), but it probably wouldn't have changed the fleeting interest in the material, and not the source and context of the material. Like Dungeons & Dragons, these popular comic book movies are a flicker of geek culture across the face of popular culture, like a light shining briefly through a hole in a wall.

Even video games, now a huge part of popular entertainment, are not immune from the massive barrier between geek culture and pop culture. When most people think about video games, they think about a handful of big names, either new and super-popular series like Call of Duty, Madden, and Halo, or decades-old and archetypical properties like Mario and Sonic. Most gaming publications make a distinction between "casual gamers" (fans of easily accessible, readily available games like Bejeweled and Farmville) and "hardcore gamers," (fans of games that actually come on discs and cost $60 a pop), but they ignore the distinction between "hardcore gamers" and "bro gamers."

Bro gamers aren't geeks, because their knowledge of video games start and end at Madden and Halo. There is little interest for old-school games, retro games, imported games, or even just genre games. Bro gamers (the video game equivalent of "pop culture geeks" ignore 90% of the shelves at Gamestop or the listings on Amazon but get wicked stoked at the newest Grand Theft Auto. Few of them have tried Saint's Row 2, never mind different-genre games like Dead Space, Fallout: New Vegas, or Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3. Fortunately, video games have become so popular as an industry that it's one of the few cases where even obscure titles have gained legitimacy and some form of "post-geek" status. Comic book and role-playing game stores retain the stigma of geek, but Gamestop is a corner-store brand now, thanks to video games' growth into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Of course, if you start talking about how much you love the latest SMT game or whinge about how Mother 3 won't come to the US, you'll still probably get reactions similar to the face a dog makes when you show him a card trick.

Finally, let's look at the PC in PCMag.com: computers. It's arguably the biggest case of the "un-geeking" of a subject, and yet it perfectly shows how it remains the case. Computer use has grown from a niche activity among math nerds and engineers into something everyone does as a simple aspect of modern life. However, even computer use is only embraced on the surface for the vast majority of people. These days anyone can get online, chat with friends, Tweet, use Facebook, and perform many other activities on their computers. How many of those people could tell you what the different components are if they cracked open the cases of those computers? How many could replace their CPU, or graphics card, or even build a new computer from scratch? Of those, how many go to the extra trouble of setting up bay busses, water blocks, SLI graphics card setups, and CPU overclocking? Everyone knows how to use a computer on a basic level, but only a few out of every hundred or thousand really understand its inner workings, or care to learn. And there is the line between a computer user and a geek, just as thick and obvious as the line between a pop culture fan and a geek.

Geek culture requires not just enthusiasm, but depth and scope. Those latter two characteristics are why geekdom will never be truly co-opted by popular culture. Every media, every activity, ever genre and sub-genre and sub-sub-genre has so much variety and depth that you just can't cover it in a news report, or a water-cooler chat, or even a two-hour show on G4. You can scrape off the shiniest bits and pretend they represent the entire thing, but in the end, you're still just getting a tiny speck of what geek culture is. As long as there are small stores, small presses, and boundless enthusiasm for the most specific things, geek culture will remain both safe and alienating.

On the bright side, we have the Internet now, so even if your local friends don't care about your hobbies of collecting Generation One Transformers or the works of Takashi Miike, you can safely assume that there are at least half a dozen message boards and Web sites populated with thousands of fans. And those people, my friends, are true geeks. And yes, I am one of them.