What's your nerd origin story?
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Like a good bit here ( @Roz, @Auspice, etc.), I was born into it. Or perhaps you can say I was brought into it. My mom wasn't much of a nerd, being a single mom in the late 70's she mostly worked, which is where she met my Step-Dad. He was the nerd. We had an Atari 2600 when I was 5, regularly watched old Star Trek re-runs and saw every Star Wars movie whenever they came on the TV (which was a rarity growing up). He loved to play strategy games, though he couldn't quite get into D&D. I'd gone through my dad's collection of old books and read everything written by Tom Clancy, and then stumbled upon Frank Herbert's last 2 Dune books. I didn't go full-throttle into nerd-dom until I started to become more independent in high school. The city library was on the way to school every day, so I started reading every book I could find in their Science Fiction section. It all started with 'Dune' and exploded from there. Asimov, Pohl, Dick, I grew up with all the "classics". Then once I was fully on my own, it just went on from there.
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My dad was always this kind of pseudo-nerd. It was never anything he really prided himself on, it was just something he liked. And my dad loved science and especially science fiction. First it was rubbed off on my older brother who was a pretty big Star Wars geek when he was a kid(less so now, I think he forgets that he likes SW or played DnD). I got into it because of that. Because of the posters on his walls, and because in the late 80s/early 90s my dad bought my brother an NES. And that right there should've been all downhill for me. In terms of video gaming, yes. My brother eventually stopped playing after the NES, I took the system and made it my own. Eventually begged hard enough for SNES and N64 before finally buying a PS2 myself as it came out the year I graduated high school(2001, I think? 2002?)
But my dad loved science fiction. Stuff like Dark Shadows and Cholchak: The Night Stalker. The Mantis. Knight Rider. But the biggest one was X-Files, and to a lesser extent, Millennium. So that had a big effect in my life. As was TNG, but I don't remember watching that as much as it aired. However, I did watch DS9 and B5 religiously as those two aired at the same time. It was B5 that made my appreciate what storytelling really was. DS9 too, but B5 just did it better.
For the fact that my brother has either forgotten or doesn't care about those things anymore, he did get me involved in DnD and book reading. I remember he bought me Dragons of Autumn Twilight as a gift one birthday, saying he thought I might like it. I did, and eventually read the whole series. The reason I even love DnD to this day because I was six years old, being the annoying younger brother, while my brother had to 'babysit'. Or really, he had his friends come over to game, and to make things easier, his DM let me be an NPC in their campaign. It was 2nd edition, which I still have a soft spot for. But I still remember this NPC to this day. He was a red dragon that tended to spend most of his time in human guise, but he was a Lawful Good red dragon(I remember it was a huge plot point). I also had Thor's hammer which just did ridiculous amounts of damage. That character has since made various cameos across the years in my own games. The character is so goddamn eye-rolly and tropey because literally a six year old helped make him.
I eventually got into mushing via one of the many BSG games that was floating around the community some years back. Or was it a B5 game? I can't honestly remember. Either way, been in the hobby to some effect since 2005. And I only got into those because I had moved, had no one to game with and wanted to find an alternative. Was pointed to mushing via a friend of mine. Been kicking around ever since.
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@Testament Sturm Brightblade's end... man. That was harsh.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel True, but his death was kind of foreshadowed a couple times. Still, his death had a huge impact on how the story followed. Especially in bringing honor back to previously disgraced knighthood. And really, I feel like if you have to pick your death, I imagine that's how Strum would've liked to of gone out.
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@Arkandel said in What's your nerd origin story?:
@Testament Sturm Brightblade's end... man. That was harsh.
Man when Sturm <SPOILER> that got me good. I had to put the book down for a week. I loooooved Sturm. Hell, if Dragonlance ever got the Lord of the Rings film treatment, I'm still lobbying for Sam Elliot.
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@Ghost said in What's your nerd origin story?:
@Arkandel said in What's your nerd origin story?:
@Testament Sturm Brightblade's end... man. That was harsh.
Man when Sturm <SPOILER> that got me good. I had to put the book down for a week. I loooooved Sturm. Hell, if Dragonlance ever got the Lord of the Rings film treatment, I'm still lobbying for Sam Elliot.
The book came out in 1984. I was two years old at the time. I think we're way past spolier warnings at this point.
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My story?
My folks are Catholic and I got raised up in the Satanic Panic era, so comic books were okay but D&D wasn't. For me it was Dragonlance novels and for some reason Steven King, Clive Barker, and Dean Koontz novels were totally okay. So I mostly grew up a comic book and horror nerd, and was into Dragonlance novels before I even knew that Krynn was even some offshoot D&D setting. I think my first book was the Riverwind book. Buff native barabarian dude vs dragonman on the cover? Good shit.
By high school I was playing in bands, little metalhead goth guy, staying up late watching Hellraiser films and drawing horror comics with my buddies. We used to camp at a Village Inn in Omaha (Oakview Mall, for you Omaha people) sometimes until 1am just piling on a bunch of gothy nerds drinking coffee and rotating who's dating who. Mostly at that stage we were all punk/metal/goth show kids who went to a lot of GWAR concerts and snuck wine coolers out of our parents' fridges and smoked a lot of weed.
Around that time I got invited to a D&D game and played one session (Necromancer. HUGE SURPRISE THERE). D&D didn't exactly latch, but my first love was Vampire the Masquerade. Soon thereafter we were playing in a Little King sandwich shop after close (from around 9pm-1am) because the storyteller was the shop's manager.
When I found out there were girls, notably goth girls that were into RPing VtM? hoooooked
VtM on AOL chat rooms, VtM on the White Wolf chats, moved to where I live now and got into VtM LARPs and occasional side D&D games. VtM is really my first true RPG love. Truly.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
It's weird reading about all your guys' wonderful families full of nerds. I just can't relate to it at all since my relatives - although they were all wonderful in all the other ways that matter - were and are not nerdy at all.
My mom always rolled her eyes at the "weird dracula movies" I was watching, never knew what games a bunch of us kids were playing on her dining room table and never really knew what I'm doing for a living, either ("he works with computers").
Even today my sister basically refuses to watch Game of Thrones or any sci-fi even though she watches a lot of other stuff. She just... isn't into any of it. My niece on the other hand, who's in her early twenties now and whom I spent hours talking to about Harry Potter when she was a tiny little girl, has been on multiple D&D campaigns already so the circle is finally broken.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel I think this is one interesting byproduct of living in this crazy cool era where a lot of our nerdy stuff is popular. My mom sent me a message saying she's excited for Avengers: Endgame and asked if this makes her a nerd. I told her: "Nope, just that you have good taste".
I think a lot of people didn't give this stuff the time of day because there was a stigma surrounding the concept of the nerd. Revenge of the Nerds was a thing. The image of the Louis Skolnick pocket protector nerd or the neckbeard spending all day at a comic book shop was pretty prevalent. Cut 20+ years later and people are excited about the new Dune movies, my mom knows who BANE is, and fangirls over Bucky Barnes. Right, because it was good shit if you got out of your weird self-conscious box to give it a chance.
ETA: Oh, and her Winter Soldier thirst is a thing. Jesus Christ. Thirrrrst.
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There was really nothing remotely nerdy about my family when I was born (way back in the 70s), except I was an avid reader of anything I could get my hands on, including stuff I eventually got to read that I probably should not have read. From age 3 - 10 I lived on a farm in the middle of no-where in Nebraska and all there was to do was read and ride my bike and otherwise "play outside" unless I wanted farm work to do. So I read everything that came across my path. (I literally have report cards with the comments added by teachers indicating that I read too much and to please discourage me from reading as much as I do at home, they were sure it would be unhealthy for my development. I was also a quick-learner that there were things that should not be told to my parochial teachers & family that I was reading that wouldn't be approved of. I did read Playboy (thanks, Dad) for the articles.)
About halfway through elementary school I started playing a musical instrument, thus ensuring my future status as a "band geek". And in 7th grade my parents divorced, which is significant because my mom started dating someone (who eventually became my step-dad) and he was just out of the Navy. He had been a SEAL, and while in the Navy between missions his SEAL team apparently spent a good chunk of their travel time playing D&D with him running games for them. So when he got out of the Navy, and involved with my mom, for this new blended family (there were 6 kids total + 2 adults = 1 heck of a gaming table) D&D was our family bonding. He was also my introduction into the vast world of books of a fantasy and horror genre. I was probably the only 9th grader who had read all of Lovecraft's works, could quote large chunks of Beowulf and I wrote an English paper on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that same year. My reading comprehension level well surpassed anyone else in my school. For that I got to be the Academic team's English captain.
D&D 2nd ed. being the gateway game that it was lead to ALL MANNER of geekdom and nerdy activities and I continued through my mid-twenties just obsessively reading all the stuff I could get my hands on. I tell people I'm a 2nd generation nerd, raising a 3rd generation, because that's basically accurate - but I wasn't born into it, more like adopted.
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I've got three generations of engineer in me (Structural, mechanical, and electrical). My dad <electrical> was going for his masters when I was a kid in the late 70s'/early 80s; so I always had breadboards, vacuum tubes, relays and copper-etched circuit boards lying around the house. I just remember thinking the relays and tubes were really cool looking - like little cities or buildings under glass. I remember he once pulled a cathode ray tube out of an old TV (Which involved, I shit you not, shooting the screen with a bb gun until it shattered - did I mention my family are basically South American rednecks?) and let me play with it. Plus he got me watching re-runs of Star Trek.
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I was not born into a nerd family, at all. Dad was very much the 'manly' sort, cars, planes, sports. My birth mother - I have no idea her interests, since she passed before I could really know anything. Stepmom is super conservative in her hobbies - she has to be ladylike, so it's like scrapbooking, and making wreaths and things.
Brother and I had an Atari when I was still pretty young, because we lived in the middle of nowhere with not much to do, and pretty close to a highway. He always whipped my butt though, so I didn't play it much.
I learned to read pretty young, and would read as much as I was allowed. I was reading stuff inappropriate for my age pretty early, loved reading. When I was about 8 or 9, my brother picked up some comic books, and I read them when he was done, and that, as they say, was that. Played video games as often as I could (my folks would not get me a NES), did D&D, got into the horror movies... and never stopped.
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Jason and the Argonauts played multiple times over the PBS station. The climatic fight with the Children of the Hydra pretty much cemented my love of fantasy. I started reading all the collected books of mythology I could get my hands on. Somewhere in there I remember reading Richard Avery's 3rd Expendables book- the War Games of Zelos. My sister in law's brother approached me somewhere in there and like every good dealer told me there was a game where YOU could fight animated skeletons like in the Argonauts film.
To be honest, he put me through Tomb of Horrors and killed me a dozen times but I was still completely sold on this game and saved up to buy my own Basic Set of Dungeons and Dragons. It was a hard sell on my neighborhood friends and mostly unsuccessful. It wasn't until 6th grade that a few of us managed to find each other and start playing on weekends.
MU*s came about after my high school group had finished college and started scattering to the four winds with jobs, marriages, just getting the hell out of Texas, etc. Needed those stories to still be told after all. Still, looking back, I don't think I ever quite grasped the dynamics of MUSH, MUX, etc. despite being staff and all that.
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Another who was born to nerdhood here. It was definitely a collaborative effort to nurture it, though.
My maternal grandmother loved fantasy; when I was little, every summer either she and my grandfather would come to Seattle to visit us, or I would go to Philadelphia to visit them. Every summer we read another Oz book (or two) together; the summer she had laryngitis and she couldn't read to me, little-me worked hard to read the book to her instead because the tradition was that important to me. She was a physicist, chemist, and engineer, and the one who got me interested in computers and my start in programming. (She's also where I get much of my life philosophy from; nerdiness aside, she was absolutely the single biggest influence on my personality.)
My dad is a science fiction fan; when he realized I was reading way ahead of my grade level, he gave me Downbelow Station and The Pride of Chanur to read (C.J. Cherryh is one of his favorite authors, even still today). From there I went to get more Cherryh books (the Faded Sun trilogy) from the library and stumbled into Clarke, Asimov, Silverberg, and other old classics they had on the shelves.
As I kept reading voraciously, I started to give dad recommendations in return. When that happened, dad set aside a shelf in the house where we would collect science fiction and fantasy books which we both agreed were true classics; all my life, that shelf has been slowly filling as we read something and both agree it should be added. The first thing we added was dad's beloved Downbelow Station; the second, which I nominated, was Vonda N. McIntyre's Dreamsnake.
(...which I'm suddenly finding leaves me on the verge of tears to write. Years later I met Vonda and she became a friend, a mentor who took me—and many others—under her wing. For fifteen years she's been someone who I could turn to for advice about writing, or life, or even just to swap book recommendations. She also pulled me into a lot of activities, and I owe no small part of the offline fandom aspect of my present-day nerdiness to her. But I stupidly let myself get wrapped up in work and other things over the past year or so, letting our lunch dates become much more infrequent. It always felt like there would be more time later, until suddenly there wasn't any left at all, and her death this past Monday is still a fresh wound. Treasure the time you have with the people you care about, folks; it is not limitless. But I digress.)
My mother was not a huge science fiction and fantasy reader, but she was a Star Trek devotee; she pulled the rest of the family into watching The Next Generation every week with her, and from there I fell into the X-Files, Space: Above and Beyond (it was a great show shut up), and Babylon 5.
My maternal uncle was also a huge science fiction fan, and when he saw that I was reading classic science fiction, he introduced me to his frankly intimidating collection of old issues of Astounding, Amazing Stories, and Asimov's stored at my grandparents' house; I only ever worked through a tiny fraction of them when I'd visit Philly, but he's why I still have a (digital) subscription to Asimov's today. He also introduced me to Dan Simmons' Hyperion Chronicles, one of his favorite series. And, relevant to this forum, he was a D&D fan and introduced little-me to the idea of roleplaying.
My maternal aunt, meanwhile, is an enormous Tolkien fan; she is how I was introduced to the tapestry of stories in Arda. First the Hobbit, the the Lord of the Rings, and finally the Silmarillion
It wasn't just my family either, of course. My friend who lived across the street from me introduced me to Star Blazers, thus showing me that animated shows could have actual narrative arcs instead of being purely episodic. And little-me's best friend had a Nintendo; pleading to go visit even so I could just watch him play, if not play myself, was my first introduction to games. (And arguably, I suppose, to the concept of Twitch.)
So, yeah; my nerdiness was a team effort.
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I had Fraggle Rock and the Little Golden Books and a case full of Disney movies when I was really little, my mom liked cute things and so my exposure was cute things.
But then I got dumped with my grandparents for a year while my mom was finishing school.
I'd finished all the little cute books I'd brought with me, so I decided to take a look at the books on my uncle's shelf. Mutiny on the Amistad. Wuthering Heights. The Hobbit. Ender's Game. Speaker for the Dead. Several more I can't recall the names of, but these are the ones that impacted me in ways that I still feel to this day.
That summer and the following school year witnessed the birth of my obsession with all things literary, all things historical, all things sci-fi. I didn't know how to tie my shoes yet, I was eight and my hand-eye coordination was (still is) shit. But I was (still am) a pro page-turner.
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This thread reminded me of what we've come to refer to as 'The Xanth Incident'. Because I also grew up reading those books -- starting allllllll the way back in that 'grades 1-4' range.
Which means I got none of the lewd humor at all. None. And there is... a lot. Since I stopped reading them in about 4th grade (I forget off hand what I mostly moved on to then), this never really dawned on me save for a generalized later understanding that it was known to be there. (I was too busy giggling wildly as a kid over 'the catastrophe', which I still find funny to this day.)
Fast forward to about 2013 or so, and we're planning a road trip to Florida for the first time, and bringing my mother. This is also a reminder of childhood, because my father used to cover spring training for the local paper, and would be there for 3 weeks every year (split with another writer from another local paper); we'd go for one of those weeks and beach comb.
So, all the happy nostalgia, and since all three of us are going to be driving down, we're looking for something Mom-Friendly as an audiobook, and my husband said he could borrow 'those Xanth books you read as a kid' from a friend who had the whole set unabridged.
We thought this would be fine.
Y'all are already picturing the gif, right? Because it was apt.
And we were all trapped in that car for over twenty hours.
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I think I was born to be a nerd. My uncle, whom I was close to growing up, was a computer science major (Or similar) in the late 80s/early 90s. I was but a guppy who loved watching horror movies and stealing glimpses at Leisure Suit Larry.
Later, I was about 5 years old, I received an NES. I got a Game Boy when I turned eight. By the end of a decade, I was a fine young nerd. I had internet first amongst my friends. We are rural. I am the least rural, so I was first to get high speed.
I PC gamed through the 00s. Serious Sims player. I picked up console gaming again in '10s
MEANWHILE, when I was PC gaming, I picked up World of Warcraft and began role playing there. I met @Daeladras. He dragged me into nWoD and MUSHing in about 2011.
Looking back, my uncle and I, were kinda blazing a trail for nerdy black people. Like, I was a weirdo outcast so the kids can do the same today and be appreciated for it.
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My parents were about as far from nerdy as you could get, so they are often mystified how I turned out pretty far from them. My gateway to nerddom was literally Star Wars. I remember the first time I saw Star Wars was the year after Return of the Jedi came out. There was a drive in that was always doing double header movies and they did this July 4th weekend special with 3 movies and they showed all three Star Wars films.
Sci-fi in the form of cartoons, books, and movies pretty much dominated my preferences since then. Though I did expand my reading options while growing up. I had a 3rd-grade teacher concerned that a two-week book report I wanted to submit was on Tommyknockers by Stephen King - something that at the time was not on the recommended reading list for any child in our school district.
Then in early high school I got into tabletop gaming, joined the sci-fi club, the computer club, and all sorts of related things that were not what my parents would have preferred but it kept me out of trouble and away from the rising gang culture in our school, so they were not going to be too put out about it.
But it always came back to Star Wars. Novels, figures, comics - the movies. I consumed everything about that one topic and became so knowledgeable that I knew minutia that most people who called them 'superfans' did not know or remember. I have absolutely 0 friends today that will play the Trivial Pursuit Star Wars edition with me because of this. I even applied at Lucasfilm to be part of the continuity department that handled all of the Star Wars media - from books to comics to cartoons - when I was 20, on the hope that I could turn that love of everything Star Wars into a job. But alas there is always a bigger fish.
I have since tempered my Star Wars love into an expanse of love for other things as a whole. Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar, Red Dwarf, and so on - the whole theme of space opera or things like it just hit my sweet spot for science fiction.
Then my enjoyment of video games came from my grandmother. She bought all the consoles I had as a kid growing up, mostly because she liked watching us play them - but also because she liked playing them herself. She loved RPGs and she played the hell out of every version of Final Fantasy that the U.S. had for NES and SNES. She loved the Phantasy Star series from Sega more though and at the time when 'call in for tips' hotlines for both companies were prevalent she was so well known at the Sega tip line that a lot of the helpline guys got to know her, enamored that some 60-year-old woman was so interested in the games. She became so well known to them that someone sent her a whole printed out 80-page booklet complete with maps for the Sega Master System version of Phantasy Star so she could find the secret ending to the game. When Phantasy Star II was released for the Genesis, someone from the company sent her a copy of the game with a handwritten dedication to her signed by Yuki Naka one of the lead developers, inside the strategy book that came with the game.
From there, things just progressed until I am where I am today.
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@Goldfish said in What's your nerd origin story?:
Looking back, my uncle and I, were kinda blazing a trail for nerdy black people. Like, I was a weirdo outcast so the kids can do the same today and be appreciated for it.
I actually said almost this same thing to a friend of mine a couple of months back; don't look at the younger generation and think they're less into the fandom because they didn't have to endure the ridicule and ostracism that we did, or having to look high and low for a store that sold the kind of books we wanted, scrimping and saving on the odd chance we would find the gaming materials we needed, or what have you; look at it in the light of us having to go through all that so future generations wouldn't have to.
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@Killer-Klown I like this take because it makes us sound less like basement-dwelling antisocial nerds and more like brave pioneers who endured social ostracism for noble reasons.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
