What's your nerd origin story?
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@Arkandel said in What's your nerd origin story?:
@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.
so you like lies.
okay.
<.<
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Hey, we can be both. I mean, when LARPing came around we had to come out of our basements and force ourselves on the rest of the world...
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@Killer-Klown said in What's your nerd origin story?:
Hey, we can be both. I mean, when LARPing came around we had to come out of our basements and force ourselves on the rest of the world...
In fairness, funny dressed people in the park was trail blazed by SCA I think; or prior to SCA, maybe Thespians did it.
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@Lotherio And hobos. We really can't dismiss the 'hobo' part of our murderhobo genealogy
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when i was little you could still buy comic books w/o going into horrible nerd caves and i liked some of them
when i was like - 7? i got the first issue of Gen13 and loved it
i stopped getting comics around 11-12 bc ive only been in literally a single shop that wasn't grotesque in some way but i got like, vertigo-y stuff as graphic novels from book stores
then when i was, like, 14-15 somebody i knew gave me all of grant morrison's x-men stuff and a DC++ hub thing and now i have a HDD with like 500gb of comic scans
the WoD stuff is because when i was like 11 i really wanted to be a vampire and had a lot of striped leggings and they had the rpg stuff across from horror books, sorry
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My mom was a nerd. Some of my earliest memories are of watching the Star Wars trilogy with her. I will always associate those movies with love and warmth, and as a kid I watched them so many times my dad made a rule that I couldn't watch them while he was home.
Another part was the school library. In sixth grade, I found out they stocked Dragon Magazine, but kept it hidden under the librarian's desk for no reason I ever figured out. That they hid it made me all the more voracious for it, so I read it intensely.
In high school, I noticed some boys reading Wizard Magazine. The nearly full-page picture of Adam Hughes-drawn Vampirella they were looking at exposed me to feelings I wasn't ready to deal with, so I asked one of the boys I kind of knew if I could borrow the magazine to read it. He said yes, and I discovered I really like Superman. Things progressed from there.
There are other steps scattered throughout the middle; discovering Margaret Weis in junior high, for example, or my mom buying me my first ever hardcover books in the form of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy. I think she also gave me my first Stephen King book to read when I was ten, the Eyes of the Dragon. But, in general, I became a nerd because I kept noticing nerdy stuff and decided to fixate on it.
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I wasn't a nerd. I came to nerdom late in life - after I started living with a computer geek and gamer. I started playing discworld mud, which turned me into a massive geek and was my first attempt at coding (still can't do it, my brain isn't wired to work like that) and being staff on a game.
I have raised a native nerd though! She tabletops, computer games, and has mudded in the past.
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I was hyper as a kid. To the point that my parents got me one of those storytelling devices that also reads aloud to you just to make me shut up. It worked SO well that I started reading EVERYTHING.
The first series I remember fully was by Tolkien, but a lot of us cut our teeth on that. Terry Brooks, yeah, Xanth, Pern, Ursula Le Guinn -- gimme more.
My uncle had a collection of comic books that was insane. He literally could not fully open his bedroom door for the boxes of carefully preserved masterpieces stored in there. He had to have had Silver Age comics in there, if not Golden because I remember turning my nose up at some of the 'old art'. I also remember him gently telling me not to touch some of them because they were valuable. The tragedy is that he got sick and his comic collection got ruined. Our family members that cleaned up threw things out without trying to see if anything was salvageable (non nerds). It makes me hang my head and clench my teeth to this day.
The internet happened, AOL chatrooms, (Red Dragon Inn holla!) message boards, gaming consoles, and here I am. Gonna be old and grey and telling my great grandkids to remember to double tap.
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@Trix said in What's your nerd origin story?:
AOL chatrooms, (Red Dragon Inn holla!)
Hahaha shit holla. I was an AOL rper, too, but mostly World of Darkness stuff where everyone had screen names like:
VvSuperDarknessGothvV
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Trix RDI holla!
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Hell yeah RDI
also Wheel of Time AOL RP. The FWTG (forum of wheel of time guilds) had a decent system setup for consistent rules!
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Mom was not a nerd, and at first glance neither was my dad, but dad was a stealth nerd, actually. He was a track and field jock, but he also: worked for IBM in the 70s, read sci-fi and Conan, is the reason I saw weird stuff like Eraserhead or Tetsuo: Iron Man before I was even a teenager, owned IF games like Zork and HHGTTG, had an Atari 2600, subscribed to the Skeptical Enquirer, got really into specific sciences, etc.
So, that. Then reading his sci-fi and playing his video games turned into an interest in computers, which led to an AOL account, and RDI was a thing for a bit but I wound up hanging around a sci-fi chat room instead: Red Star Station. Never heard it mentioned since. Must have been a small group. I think I was in middle school. My generation was the right age for the NES, so I grew up gaming and never really stopped.
I think I discovered MU* because AOL used to offer Gemstone III, the only MUD I was ever on, and the leap between that and more RP-focused stuff was probably inevitable.
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@Ghost Revrend Pain (yes misspelled) was my AOL chatroom name, god was i cringy.
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My roommate in college. "Sarahn i will be the only girl in this group, i don't want to go alone. Can you come for the first meeting?" It was a tabketop group of 5 guys ranging from old school to7 years older.
They owned the local gaming store. I think I was bribed with a life size han solo cardboard stand up. We stuck around, hell they gave me a job in the store between jobs till I picked up another. They added my husband in - thats a long story that eventually saw one guy leave the group in a snit. They were there when we had our kid and our subsequent wedding. They helped me through my husband being deployed, we traveled across the border every two weeks for 4 hours for gaming night with them when I immigrated to the US.
They were my portal to all this. We are meeting up at gencon next year if money permits. I can't imagine life without scott the elder, scott the youngern geroge the computer guru, bart the stoic, chris the never aging, andrea the knitter. They hijacked my wedding even, five minutes to have me combat my maid of honour in - we played tt star trek - a rite of combat to marry my spouse. Complete with lirpa's and tgey supplied the dice for rolling to have us kiss.
Man. Memory lane. Nerd origins are fun.
