Mara Wilson: Nerd culture in the early 2010s was a weird time, I remember the time I talked to a guy who had recently graduated from MIT at a party and told him my dad was an engineer too, and, you know, I’m something of a nerd myself, and he DREW OUT A LOGIC PUZZLE for me to solve and said “Prove it.”

Nerd culture in the early 2010s was a weird time, I remember the time I talked to a guy who had recently graduated from MIT at a party and told him my dad was an engineer too, and, you know, I’m something of a nerd myself, and he DREW OUT A LOGIC PUZZLE for me to solve and said “Prove it.”

It just so quickly devolved from “People are realizing comics are art!” and “It’s cool to like science!” to all this watered down misinformation, cheap consumerism, and the undercurrent of furious, insecure boys who feared they were no longer special

comics went from being something entirely stigmatized to literally the biggest movies on the entire planet and they're STILL mad! everyone went "hey wait yeah this is pretty cool you were right" and the hardcore nerds were like "NO WAIT YOU CAN'T THINK THAT" like wtf do you even WANT at that point!

I deserve recognition! No, I don't actually want recognition! I just said I *deserve* it!!

I can only assume it's something like getting marty scorcese to acknowledge comic book films as cinema

Imagine trying to get an octogenarian New Yorker to change his opinion on literally anything

fucking lmao

He's not even specifically prejudiced against comics or superheroes, is the crazy part - they recently cataloged the thousands of videos he taped from TV (with the aid of a paid assistant) for 30 years, and it's the most omnivorous list you could think of bsky.app/profile/elec...

I love looking at other people's bookshelves, and this is a rare version of that - seeing exactly what was noted as worthy of adding to the Watch Later pile, which often raises as many questions as it answers

sorry i meant ayyyy-ty years old

ayyyy

A smug sense of superiority, would be my guess.

they can have that regardless! i have it all the time about nothing in particular!

They want everyone to truly realize that The Nerds Were Right All Along, AND they want them to be really mad about it, AND they somehow also don’t want non-nerds to actually like nerd things. They want what they see as vindication and to be the subject of non-nerds’ impotent rage

So very much buried resentment and unacknowledged anger, geological layers of it, from getting alternately bullied and ignored by the cool kids in middle school. And now they bring their children to see Avengers and X-Men but have no appreciation for Claremont & Byrne's groundbreaking work!

(The cool kids, now grown up and working as bank managers and hospital administrators and real estate attorneys, are the ones taking their kids to comic book movies, in case that was confusing.)

I DO NOT ENDORSE THE FOLLOWING ANALOGY BUT IT IS HOW SOME PEOPLE THINK: So when rock music went from "race records" to the biggest music genre on earth, Chuck Berry and Sister Rosetta Tharpe should've just been happy that everyone liked their thing now?

yeah actually they should

Thomas Frank needs to write a book called WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH NERDS?

I had attributed it to the long held nerd boy belief that we nerds were hated because the things we loved (science, super heroes, games) were unpopular. When they became popular in the mainstream we suddenly has to confront the truth that our outcast status was because we had no social skills.

What bugs me is the things so many nerd guys loved were already popular & main stream! Star Wars movies were blockbuster hits! Everyone knew who spider-man was! There was an x-men cartoon on tv! Pokémon was world famous! Bill Nye the science guy had a tv show we watched in school!

“We were outcasts bc we played VIDEO GAMES” buddy it was unusual NOT to play video games!

I think this is a timing-based thing because when I was in high school people absolutely got made fun of for playing video games, watching anime, etc. Not lightly teased, more like openly mocked. X-Men and Star Wars and some other stuff was mainstream for sure, but video games definitely weren't.

this was not a problem for me, I had excellent social skills and was lightly ribbed at worst, but for me it wasn't until college before video games really mainstreamed.

And nerds would have known that if they got out more

I maintain that Star Wars has one of the most toxic fandoms because it's full of people trying to feel special for liking literally the most popular thing in the world, constantly getting upset by evidence that everyone else likes it too.

It's hard to be A Special Little Guy when everyone else is special in the same way.

I think is Star Wars Fandom is where toxic Fandom did it's practice run, but also evidence it's kind of pointless. Everyone loves Baby Grogu, and Rey is still a big draw in theme parks. Not surprised Disney is making a new movie with her.

There was maybe a period from 1988-1992 when it was a bit more niche but then Galoob/Kenner/Hasbrouck started making toys and it got fancy new home video re-releases and a lot of YA books and has been mainstream and for everyone ever since.

We didn't have cable - it was on network tv ALL the time. In the 90s there were new novels coming out several times a year.

I wonder if part of it is the more popular something is, the more likely different people like it for different reasons. I don't usually bring up the notion of "canon" but those who first liked a book, movie, whatever might like canon more than added material. This shows up with music loving, too.

I remember about 10 years ago hearing on a podcast somebody debating whether or not liking Star Wars makes you "a true nerd." Baffled me beyond belief that you can't call yourself nerdy in front of some folks because the sci-fantasy you enjoy is "too mainstream." 🤨

Went from “you aren’t a nerd bc you don’t like Star Wars enough” to “you aren’t a nerd bc Star Wars is too mainstream (frequent subtext: ‘girls’ like it) so you’re a poser.”

“We want more Star Wars content! No wait not like that, it’s popular and accessible!!”

There was a time when it wasn't popular, or at least mainstream; every single mention of Star Trek in mainstream media was "look at what these losers like." But that was the seventies, and near the end Star Wars was a huge hit. That was over 40 years ago.

I had a boyfriend who claimed to be thrown into trashcans in high school for reading comic books. Mind you, this is post Toby Maguire Spider-Man, the beginning of the golden age of comics movies. I guarantee if anyone was throwing him in a trash can it’s because he was an insufferable dingus.

I argue it wasn't a matter of bad social skills but a matter of just being a crappy person and not wanting to face it. Plenty of people have bad social skills and don't do even half of what turbonerds have done in the last couple of decades.

Even more so, none of the "nerd stuff" was ever actually "unpopular". It's just that "nerds" were so corrosive, toxic, and unlikeable that people started to associate those things with them, because people would just assume all "nerds" were like that: gross, creepy, myopic, bigoted, unclean.

Cat Piss Men? web.archive.org/web/20071009...

SAVANT::Retailweb.archive.org

Also yes.

I disagree. Ted Bundy got dates before and after he confessed. Everybody who went home with Jeffrey Dahlmer did so willingly at least once. It's not being a good person it's having the ability to put your asshole tendencies in the closet long enough to seem like a decent human being.

Dahmer and Bundy both had decent social skills, though Bundy a little less so. Hell, Dahmer convinced a cop to let him have one of his victims back. Also you can have bad social skills and still hide being an asshole. Social skills wasn't and isn't the central issue. It's who the person actually is

I think the big wakeup moment for me was in highschool, when I would sit in the library and draw DBZ characters, because I felt like it socially excluded me, then the captain of the basketball team sat down next to me and wanted to talk about Goku. He knew so much more about Dragonball than I did.

This was followed by "lol i'm so nerdy i have no social skills and can't function isn't that quirky" Which did not help at all.

Science is popular in the mainstream?!!

I don't know. I've been a nerd my whole life, never gave two shits about what's mainstream. So I guess it's never bothered me.

Weird thing about MIT. I was working with someone who did a STEM undergrad from there who was on the spectrum with job placement. In four years he took three non math science classes. In eight semesters. It kinda floored me.

I once went on a date with a guy who went to Brown for Math, and he had barely read any books besides Harry Potter. And he’d read it as an adult. I found him kind of sleazy, so we only had one date. He took it very hard, and a year later he called me to tell me he was in an article in Newsweek. 🙄

The only positive thing to take from this is that he valued your opinion. (This, of course, does not mean that you do or should value his.)

He didn’t value my opinion, I have a feeling he was calling every girl that ever rejected him to be like, “look at me now!” Unfortunately, it didn’t work on me, because I was on a cover of a special issue of Newsweek when I was nine.

Ah yes, can confirm www.ebay.com/itm/40250720...

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