What's your nerd origin story?
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I was not a nerd as a kid, at all. My parents were very norm core and as a result, my exposure to nerd stuff was pretty minimal. My dad liked scifi movies but that was kind of the extent of it. I was in theatre in high school but it was an extension of being a cheerleader and being on the dance team, because the musicals needed dancers.
I was aware of D&D and really high level stuff but only as it's portrayed in the media. I was in an improv theatre troop (Comedysports) because I enjoyed high school theatre and wanted something creative and active to do after work (I had already graduated college by this point). A few male members of the company invited me because we'd regularly grab beers after a show or a rehearsal. They invited me to a TT game that they were running because I was quick on my feet thinker and also I was a woman willing to come to their TT, to be honest about it.
From there, I just kept getting asked to keep playing and from there it transitioned into larp and online games.
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Mutant here, too. My nerd-dom was not created, it was bred. My mom was always a fan of the weird. My childhood entertainment was Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, Pet Semetary, It (loved that freakin' clown). And I have always been curious about just about everything, just like she is. I would dive into everything, tear it apart to figure out how it works, and unlike some parents who might have gotten mad about that, my mom encouraged me (while also showing me ways to remember how it goes back together).
Needless to say, I read a lot of fiction. Nonfiction. Ancient stuff from my grandpa's library. When I discovered the hidden language of math and the magic formulas of physics, combined with all the sci-fi I could handle, it was a lost cause. Event horizon passed.
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The one memory that always sticks out to me, not just in regard to gaming but interest in other common nerd topics (history, etc) was my mom taking me to the MET to see the Arms and Armor hall. Full suits of plate mail, swords, ridiculous exotic polearms that looked like they came right off that page in the AD&D PHB, the wing off to one side with samurai stuff (for a dash of weeb inclinations), etc. I don't even remember how old I was, probably ~8? But that memory is extremely vivid to this day. I'm lucky my mom was a teacher and always focused on taking me educational places!
After that, it wasn't long before I had my RL Stranger Things posse playing D&D.
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My origin as a nerd started as a five-six year old in the 70s. I watched the first Star Wars movie, Star Trek The Motion Picture, played video games in the arcade my mom would take me to, and even would play some of the first computer games on my dad's boss' computer when I'd go to work with him on a late night.
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So I was introduced to Attitude Era professional wrestling when I was 3 years old. My mother grew up during the golden age when Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Andre the Giant, Shawn Michaels and Mean Gene Okerlund were on every Saturday night. She didn't think little toddler me watching as well was a problem, so long as I didn't repeat anything I heard.
"Open a can of whoop-ass", "take you down jabroni drive", "check into the Smackdown hotel" and "whipped like a government mule" were several phrases I was specifically barred from saying, alongside a lot of other stuff you could get away with saying on late 90's TV that was trying to be edgy. I said a lot of them anyway when they weren't around to supervise me. A year prior Mankind had been tossed off Hell in a Cell by the Undertaker, who would go on to be my all-time favorite. Two years after that, five year old me was watching Wrestlemania X-7 to see Stone Cold turn heel. I was hooked in DEEP, man.
Alongside this, my step father was pretty big into video games at the time. And he also followed the trend my mother set of introducing me to stuff way past my maturity level so long as I was 'cool' about it. I was playing GTA III at six and seven years old, but I was strictly forbidden from "picking up those girls on the sidewalk in your car".
I fondly remember the first video game I ever finished without a lot of adult help was Metal Gear Solid for the Playstation 1, and I was super proud of myself.
My childhood was pretty much split between playing Playstation 1 and 2 games and being obsessed with professional wrestling, thanks to both of my parents sharing their hobbies with me. Questionable hobbies for a small child to get into, but hey.
Around 2006, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion came out and ten year old me was introduced to the wonderful world of RPGs. This became my brand new obsession that immediately eclipsed every other one. From then on I only wanted to play story games, I only wanted games where I could create my own characters and could do stuff that effects the game world in non-linear ways. Oblivion was probably my most formative game to cement me into roleplaying later on, though I didn't cut my teeth with trying to write things until I got into World of Warcraft in 2007. Now those days were embarrassing, but I met a lot of fantastic people in my age-group who were like-minded. That was the first time I had so much joy at just writing a character alongside other people.
The cycle of devour RPG media, devour wrestling media, devour video game media in general just continued on and on. About three years ago I finally took a dive into trying tabletop RPGs after being cripplingly scared of playing with strangers for the longest time. I started on Only War and then into Dark Heresy with a friend's campaign, which let me build the courage to try out sites like roll20 and other group-play sites.
That led me to meeting an acquaintance who about two years ago, mentioned this text-based game he was playing that was "like a liberal game of thrones, but you influence the story". And I was like "hell yeah, I want in on that."
That game was Arx and it was my gateway into the MU community in general. And it's been pretty cool overall.
Ask me about professional wrestling.
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@Arkandel said in What's your nerd origin story?:
What did you experience in your formative years that made you go "wow, that stuff is different and cool?".
I read books.
Sorry that this isn't more exciting, but I read books and books and books.
You can blame the internet for why I don't read anymore. This is not hyperbole.
I miss books.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Dreampipe You make me feel old. I don't like it. I got married in 2006, I was 26....
Edit: (also welcome to the community) -
You make me feel better. I've never really considered myself a nerd because all I ever really did was read? I don't play video games, I'm not super into movies and such. I just picked up Anne McCaffery at 11 and that was that. Asimov is my sci-fi God and for a while I was all over Orson Scott Card (why did he have to get so weird? As a fellow Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint member I think he is way too far out there now....)
I still just.... read. I don't have a problem logging off and curling up with a book for hours at a time. Books are my shield against life.
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I also feel like I was kinda raised to it. I watched Star Trek (both TOS and TNG as it aired) with my dad, and the Narnia books were the first 'real' novels I can remember reading, so I was on the road to sci-fi/fantasy fandom early. I was never really into tabletop games in high school, though I did play Magic: The Gathering (used to play a lot with my first boyfriend, our second date was to a Ren Faire, we were of a kind). I got into MUDs and then eventually MUSHes because I was blindly searching for Wheel of Time games and stumbled across the old Tales of Ta'Veren. The rest is the rest!
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My brother didn’t have a lot of friends, so he taught me to play classic games like RuneQuest and BattleTech. We played together, and he showed me the strategies. When I finally made it to middle school, I was winning BattleTech tournaments, much to the chagrin of his friends.
To this day, when we hang out, it’s all about the games. And bourbon and hockey, of course.
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I was always reading. But I think what really sealed the deal was when my aunt got me a box set of PC games from the Might and Magic series when I was in 5th. Done.
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@thesuntsar
Oh man Might and Magic. I used to play those with my dad all the time. I got him the collection on GoG for Christmas last year (he has still been using the old disks) and I think it converted him to downloadable games in a way Steam never did. -
My introduction to geekdom was a comic book I bought at Walgreens, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, off the rare rack, wrapped in mylar. I was in kindergarten, and the year was 1990.
The comic had been published ten years earlier, in 1980 (first draft, still own it, it's about ten feet away right now RL), Green Lantern vs. Evil Star. It discussed the ethics of imprisoning a supervillain that needed to destroy an entire planet, or else he'd wither and die of old age, in agony. A real exploration of the passing of life from the elderly, to the young, to allow society to continue on as we see it today. Today, we are Green Lantern, placing our elders in facilities where they can no longer wrack the chaos that we now inflict upon our society, in order for our children (you, the lovely reader of the comic) to grow. Tomorrow, we are Evil Star.
The second half of the comic was 'The Trial of Arkis Chummuck'. I spent a good 20 years of my life speculating on how the comic ended, since it was a cliffhanger. The comic features a Green Lantern losing a duel to an archivist civilian on a fascist planet, and having his body eaten by the archivist, in ceremonial tradition, before the ring selected the archivist (Chummuck) as the new bearer. Arkis then proceeded to defeat the military dictator of his planet in single combat, whereupon the dictator chose to die in a disintegration chamber, as befitting his culture.
Arkis was placed on trial before the Green Lanterns, on the charges of murdering the dictator. It ends with Arkis informing the court that if he is found guilty, he will be forced to kill himself under ceremonial tradition, dooming the Green Lantern council to the same fate as he, in the trial chambers.
Certainly an interesting exploration of law that haunted me throughout my years reading literature and reimagining it, to solve that quandry.
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@Three-Eyed-Crow I downloaded my favorite one last year and it was amazing how many hours of my life it SUCKED away. But it was fun, like meeting old very poorly rendered friends. And NPCs with pictures of real people on them.
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My parents definitely raised me this way. We read together a lot when I was little, many nerd books (starting with the Hobbit and then onwards). Also, all the Star Trek. ALL OF IT. When I was 10 or so, my mom penciled several pages of a graphic novel adaptation of my favorite Star Trek novel at the time, and she tried to teach me how to ink comics on those. I look back on that now in horror of what I did with her lovely pencil art.
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My parents did not raise me nerdy; they were conventionally stodgy sorts. Dad liked books about early American history and 1920s automobiles. Mom read fiction about small-town life in England -- Flora Thompson, Laurie Lee, that sort of thing. But they did encourage me to read; one of my earliest memories is of my mother arguing with someone at the public library over their insistence that I had to be able to write my name in order to have a library card, when clearly the only important thing was that I be able to read.
She was, I'm sure, tremendously disappointed when I decided that this Anne McCaffrey woman's books looked interesting. What my five-year-old self thought about all the sex and violence in "Dragonquest" is no longer clear to me, but once I had got through the two Pern trilogies (all that existed at the time -- this was, um, a while back) there were Tolkien paperbacks with the lovely Darrell Sweet covers, and then Stephen Donaldson, and, and, and.
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I was three years old when I carefully took apart my mother's 3.0 windows machine and swore I could reassemble it.
I couldn't.
I was still three when I took apart her replacement machine. That one we managed to put back together. It sort of snowballed from there.
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When I was 12 in the early 90s one of my friends (older) was a wizard on Furry Muck. I started role-playing online as my start into nerdom and participated in the space aspect of that mu* in the 90s.
I was also exposed to all sorts of things a twelve year old should not experience.
Alas.
I realized I was not a furry when I found other role-playing outlets some years later. Star Wars 2: A New Threat. I staffed there as the Head Judge and started role-playing outside of the Internet. Then sort of nerded out into comics and other things from there.
I eventually got into tabletop gaming, movies, and comics as my primary nerdom outlets. And took a ten year or so hiatus from mushing.
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I caught an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was about five years old and that was pretty much all she wrote. If that wasn't enough, the 2E Monster Manuals I used to comb through at B. Dalton's would have been. I've got a real keen memory of an illustration of some kind of mummy cat monster, in particular, but I can't find it for love or money.
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