WHAT’S MY NERD CRED?

Hello all! Last post I talked about how I’m a nerd who’s going to dunk on other nerds! But, what’s my cred? What’s my credentials in proving that I am a voice of authority, a popular influencer that you should pay attention to? Why should you pay attention to me and not some—you know, actual professional? Why should you give your sweet, sweet, precious seconds of existence to me, instead of them?

What the hell else are you going to do? You’ve already read this far. And have you asked yourself—‘Where do I sit in the nerd hierarchy?’ I don’t know about you. That’s, why I’m asking you. But I can tell you about me!

So, first bit of nerd cred—I grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s, and I grew up on the Sci-Fi channel Saturday morning horror block! My typical Saturday in grade school was waking up to watching cartoons, from Warner Bros. and Fox, on my dinky, yet blocky 20 inch TV, that I had to adjust with an antenna with a piece of aluminum foil wrapped around the end. Then, when that programming block ended, I went to the living room, with the bigger TV, and watched dumb made-for-TV horror movies. The Lake Placid series? Check. Boa—the off-brand Anaconda knock-off? Watched all 4 of them. Mansquito? Saw the trailer, never did get around to seeing it. Interceptor Force? Octopus? Sharknado? Sharktopus? You betcha!

(And those were the ones made by studios related to the Sci-Fi channel, mostly small Canadian places. There were also classics, too, like Freddy vs. Jason.)

I can call myself a nerd because I can call myself a child of the entertainment age. In the 90s and early ‘00s, it seemed to be a small golden age for cartoons and animation. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network were skyrocketing in the USA, while anime, from Japan, was finally getting past the transportation hurdle and coming to American shores. That’s my second bit of nerd cred: I grew up on the American-Japanese anime boom. From the slice-of-life homeliness of Hey Arnold and As Told by Ginger, to the dark and brooding Batman and Gargoyles, to the fun, classic Disney slap-stick of Darkwing Duck and Goof Troop, and to the ACTION PACKED ADVENTURES of Samurai Jack. Yup, I was a couch potato—so much so that I was surprised I even read as much as I did.

Next bit of nerd cred—a reasonable amount of familiarity with Japanese culture. Can I speak it? No, but I can tell it apart from other Asiatic languages. Can I blend in with its context-sensitive, highly nuanced culture? Nope, but I do understand a good number of their endearing quirks. Do I understand its subtle blending of Shintoism, Buddhism, and contemporary Western modernism? Do I understand the way of the samurai and the ninja? Hell no! I am a pasty-faced, white-boy gaijin. You know! A perpetual foreign outsider who is an embarrassment to the native Japanese and to my well-meaning but concerned fellow Americans. …That’s nerdom, baby! Though, now that I think about it, I am familiar with the living mythology of Japan. Their worldview on spirits and the supernatural.

What’s my other nerd cred? What did I read? Meh, usual stuff. Read Moby Dick, voluntarily, in high school. For fun. Read Shakespeare for fun when I was about ten years old. The Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Narnia, all the source books [read: instruction manuals] for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition (especially the Monster Manuals); all of Harry Potter but that doesn’t count, everyone’s done that…Ooo! Biggest, most solid influence on the world of fantasy, growing up? …Two influences, sorry, but here the first is Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (may he rest in whatever afterlife he believed in)! A prolific writer and British smart-aleck extraordinaire, it was Mr. Pratchett who truly introduced me to the world of modern fantasy. Which, to date, means that all the fantasy writers who have most influenced me—Tolkien/Lewis/Rowling/Pratchett—are all British. That’s an important piece of the puzzle, too.

Philosophy? Yeah, got that too, before I got to college. I was so familiar with Fredrich Nietzsche that I never took him or his nihilism that seriously. FYI, Freddy here is the philosopher of edgelords and demi-god of emo-teenagers. In fact you can say I took Freddy here seriously, because I had similar notions that he did, but that I fought against him out of petulant rebelliousness. When did I read him? I know I found him on the wikis when I was eight years old, and we’ve been sparring ever since. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus? The French Existentialists? Ugh! Became more than familiar with them in Western entertainment over the decades, I also rebel against them out of childhood familiarity. First real comprehension was when I was in the sixth grade—sorry, I have to clarify. I had similar notions to these men, but I did not have any real ‘philosopher’s vocabulary’ until I read Philosophy Rocks!, a middle-school book that I read in the 6th grade. Its cover was a bunch of 90s squiggle art, with an actual rock that spoke in speech bubbles. “Who am I? How do I exist? Am I the same now?”

Sixth bit of nerd cred? …Practically no friends. No athletic abilities. Nature tried to kill me on the regular, because I overheated too quickly and got sunburn on a cloudy day. Technically, I shouldn’t be alive. I was born dead after the C-section! 9 hours in the NICU. Definitely an introvert and a wimp when I was younger, and embarrassingly smug, because I thought intelligence was equivalent to ability. (High school corrected that very quickly, thank God!) Momma’s boy! Yup. Yup, I think that’s the whole checklist.

But what gives me the right to dunk on nerds? Well, they are fun to dunk on, especially the ones that haven’t grown up. Which meant, that they haven’t dropped their bad habits either. Here’s my secret—I read fast and comprehend slowly. Hmm? Got that? I read fast and comprehend slowly, but I have a great memory for voices, speech, and writing. Not so much for instructions. Compare that to other nerds, who do read quickly, jump to assumptions quickly, and forget what they said in the previous minute. But they can regurgitate whole instruction manuals word for word. Their conversations are more boring than adult men who talk about sportsball! But that’s for later.

More to follow!