Xan Brooks: “The trouble is that there is a great deal of movement between these tribes, and a great juggling of different enthusiasms. Could it be that a nerd is defined not so much by his specialist genre than by the nature and intensity of his interest?”
The article makes reference to kidults and other marketing terms for groups of people based on age-range.
It mostly focuses on the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies, many of my contemporaries are watching because they read the books. I never read the books, and don't even plan on doing it, so I don't get the same nostalgic feeling for my childhood as they do watching the movie. To be honest, I don't get the big deal, so I'm going to save the however-much-it-is-to-see-a-movie-these-days and, I dunno, buy food.
The person that page-slapped me this article got, probably to her surprise, this angry email in reply: "About fucking time nerds got respect. Though being a nerd still hasn't gotten me pussy yet." In a less pissy mood, I might have mentioned the annoyance when confident, attractive, and charismatic people call themselves nerds simply because of the things they consume. Genuine Nerds consumed stuff like that long before them and then went on to produce movies like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, stuff So-Called Nerds are consuming now. Don't get me wrong though, I only started reading SF books recently, mainly because it seems to be the only genre of fiction dominated by men these days. (Also because science fiction is sometimes political science fiction in disguise, like the original Foundation trilogy.)
Point is, defining oneself based on what they consume is lame. And real nerds are the awkward ones without girlfriends, are really funny once you get to know them, but also, because of a comparative lack of social interaction, haven't figured out how not to initally come across as snobbish jerks.
