Sfdebris.net

Given clearspira's definition that a nerd are those who face social alienation from others for their interests, and how that used to be sci-fi, it got me to thinking. As a huge anime fan in the 1990s, I realize the anime market in America during that time could also be considered the last bastion of "nerd" community. I mean, at the same people were subbing over VHS tapes and trading them to one another, sci-fi had become very mainstream, in no small part thanks to Star Trek, and Star Wars, and many more such works. But now, in the advent of some of the more popular dubs, I'd daresay even anime is no longer a bastion of "true" nerd community. So, what is? That's my question, and the discussion I hope to get going.

Warhammer 40k, maybe? Until there's a theatrical movie, it'll be relatively obscure and the domain of Game shops for quite a while While D&D and other tabletop games are becoming more acceptable, 40k is still a bit too obscure for most people.

Thing about 40k community that it's mostly miniature wargaming community that just happens to have lot of rich lore to work with. I am not saying that other miniature wargaming communities wouldn't have that as well or that everyone in 40k community was into that rich lore but 40k has been around over 30 years and is biggest one around.

40k is relatively obscure in the mainstream, but anybody at all into gaming or sci-fi has at least heard of it. Lots of NYT bestseller novels, planty of popular videogames.

Even the fan comedy "If the Emperor Had a Text-to-speech device" has a quarter million YouTube subscribers, and you have to be fairly hardcore into the setting to even understand what's happening half the time for that.

This has got me thinking: is it a bad thing that the stigma that used to be attached to things deemed nerdy, thus deemed uncool, is becoming a thing of the past? I’m reminded of 21 JUMP STREET where Channing Tatum tries to recapture his 90s teenage persona by being the jock that picks on the nerdy kids, but then the millennial high schoolers start calling him out on his shit rather than join in on laughing and pointing at the nerd.



youtu.be/QSa368X1Z2w

TL;dr the nerd community is diminished, IMHO, but that's a good thing overall.

Being picked on used to give nerds a sense of community, and now that picking on nerds is frowned on, and nerds, or nerdish interests, are even... cool... I think some of that's been lost. Now anyone can talk about whether Captain America could beat Batman or not, and we don't have to depend on each other to have our backs for fear of being pantsed.

I probably don't need to pick out that a group being picked on has a downside. I'm not starting a "Bring Back the Bully!" campaign, no matter how much camaraderie we might get.

Enjoying Star Trek or comic books or computers is now mainstream. It's not that the nerd community is gone, it's that it's become so common that nobody really notices unless you actually hold your glasses together with tape, wear your pants around your shoulders, and go on about whether Batman would beat Tony Stark in stamp collecting.

Something's been lost, but it's worth it. And if someone really needs that feeling of social disdain and ridicule, there's always furry fandom.

Plenty of nerddom still being around. You just need to know where to look and if you were a nerd, you'd know where to look.


youtu.be/aPmSoG9BXjI

In the meantime, I'm back in Shenzhen I/O, programming a new level for "Maze Master", which I am going to share with the community of the game, which programs games in their game. We do what we must, because we can.

I think the term more aptly describes an ineptitude and is not so neutrally about being involved in over technical things.

It also just happened to be that the in crowd so to speak had a lot more superficial attributes in terms of how people regarded stuff. In other words they were more ignorant of "others" while also not being into computers which was much more rare. The point being that the threshold for being a nerd was a lot lower because technically sophisticated stuff and mainstream stuff were naturally further away from each other, not like today where literally everybody has a computer and all the little girls will have a technical device to play candy crush.

Of course those girls can't be called gamers, no way. If you look at the gatekeepers of gamers who frown upon mobile gaming so far as to deny mobile gamers the status of gamers, then you might aptly call these people nerds. They might call freemium games gambling, but are laughed at by the far prior generations that used to waste their parents money at arcades.

I would guess that the in crowd is still kind of ignorant to stuff like original Trek up to the Abramsverse, but millennials started becoming less arrogant, and it has expanded to include related material into mainstream. For that matter, nerds became more tribalistic in response, so it's just now much more how you act than what you're into.

At this point the "gatekeepers" are a punchline. They're just "the usual suspects". Would-be bullies who can't actually find anybody weaker than them. It's too well known that they're a tiny minority making a lot of noise online for anyone to take them seriously.

A lot of arcade games are literally just gambling, so I honestly have no idea what you were going for there.