Rap Nerdy to Me
We’re starting a new feature here at Professor Awesome’s University, Nerdcore Fridays! To help ease you into the weekend, every Friday we’ll be posting new nerdcore audio or video.
For our maiden voyage, we have a really short (less than 5 minutes) documentary about nerdcore for those unfamiliar with it.
Also, the feature image on this post was viciously and immorally stolen from Level Up Video Games. If any minions want to produce a Nerdcore Friday cover image, that would be awesome.
Kill All Humans
On certain days, I think we can all agree with great thinkers Philip J. Frye and Bender Bending Rodriguez:
Wesley J. Smith writes about Hollywood’s general anti-human trend in “Hollywood Hates Humans.“
Paradise Lost as Fan Fiction
DeVries and Pyrdum on Game of Thrones
Kelly DeVries and Carl Pyrdum III discussing how real Game of Thrones is? Yes, please.
This isn’t the first time DeVries has written about Game of Thrones. A couple of years ago he wrote “Game of Thrones as History” for Foreign Affairs. And if you’re not following Pyrdum’s @gotmedieval Twitter feed, you’re not doing Twitter right.
Scarlett Johansson and Augmented Personhood
Wolven, whom many of you might recognize as a philosopher specializing in artificial intelligence and comic books (and yes, that’s a truly awesome career niche), points out that Scarlett Johansson seems to play a lot of characters with augmented personhood.
Dungeon Bastard’s “Overly-Critical Hit Deck”
The Dungeon Bastard has produced an Overly-Critical Hit Deck. I think all gamers will recognize the exquisite pain of legendary failure. Aristotle wrote in Eudemian Ethics, “Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.” Apparently he was referring to his Game Master.
Jake Rush: Politician, Defender of LARPers
Congressional hopeful Jake Rush of Florida (3rd Congressional District) is catching a lot of flack for being a Vampire LARPer.
The SaintPetersBlog refers to this as part of his “bizarre double life.” The unintentionally-hilarious article refers to the Mind’s Eye Society like it is some kind of cult. You can almost hear dramatic background music with such paragraphs as
MES, extremely trademarked and organized, is by no means a trivial enterprise. It is a highly regimented association of like-minded people, complete with its own rituals and performances.
Rituals! Performances! And it is EXTREMELY trademarked! (That’s like regular trademarking, but EXTREME!
The Miami New Times reads less like a parody, and attempts to explain what this LARPing is:
Apparently, Rush has been active in an intricate vampire-themed role-playing game called Mind’s Eye Theater. There’s really no way to explain this game in non-geeky terms, but we’ll try our best. The game is based on Vampire: The Masquerade, a traditional table-top role-playing game created by White Wolf Studios. Mind’s Eye participants have taken this one step further by dressing as their characters and playing a live-action version of the game. They also have a version of the game they play online. Basically, they adopt fantasy characters and pretend to go on quests and whatnot together, and their interactions are governed by a loose set of rules. The website also says they do stuff for charity. So geek stuff for a good cause?
They then go on to represent (pretty fairly, I think) some very politically-incorrect postings that Rush made in-character … things that it’s fair to ask a candidate to distinguish between what are his attitudes vs. the attitudes of his characters (and he clearly played some of the badder baddies in Vampire). I do wonder, though, if Arnold Swarzenegger was ever asked to explain what he thinks is best in life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQ6335puOc&safe=active
For national news outlets, the “crazy local candidate” story isn’t enough, so we go on a journey to find a broader hook. Slate ends their article with the laughable implication that somehow the Tea Party is a cabal of secret rape-fantasy fetishists infiltrating the Republican party to … well, do something dark. And somehow this ties into opposing Obamacare because … people who are cosplayers and LARPers are evil right-wing rapist cokeheads? Or something else Jack Chick might have dreamed up?
Vanity Fair got in on the fun, playfully referring to the “soulless lifestyle” of Rush and members of Congress, but their article clearly refers to LARPs as “games” and the image they include is far less provocative, an image of Rush cosplaying Flash.
To be fair to SaintPetersBlog, they did run Rush’s unedited press release on the matter. No matter one’s politics (and anecdotally, I suspect most LARPers are left-of-center), you’ve got to admire the way that even while he treats it as a distraction from the issues, Rush offers a defense of LARPing and other similar hobbies:
[Y]es, I play and have played video games, role playing games, board games, Yahtzee, Clue, and I have acted in dozens of theatre productions [….] I have never hid nor shied away from disclosing my hobby activities [….] I am deeply offended that the opposing campaign and their supporters would take a gaming and theatre hobby and mischaracterize it [….] Bottom line – There is nothing wrong with being a gamer. It’s kinda nerdy, but North Central Florida deserves a legitimate debate on the issues.
So, if you agree with Rush’s politics, vote for him. And if you don’t, invite this guy to play with your LARPing guild. Jake Rush, you have a standing invitation to my tabletop RPG night … but don’t forget to bring your own dice. I’m sure you have them.
Neverwinter April Fool’s Prank
“They’re a little OP in PVP …”
Wil Wheaton’s Changing Definition of “Nerd”
This video of Wil Wheaton responding to a little girl asking about how to deal with being called a “nerd” at the Denver Comic Con has gone viral, but one part of the response is a little strange.
The gist of Wheaton’s response is that when people try to make you feel bad, it’s generally because they feel bad about themselves. All that is pretty standard stuff.
But the weird part is when he speaks as if nerdiness is somehow an innate trait:
It’s never OK when a person makes fun of you for something that you didn’t choose. You know, we don’t choose to be nerds. We can’t help it that we like these things, and we shouldn’t apologize for liking these things.
Wheaton has two different ideas going here. The first is one that Wheaton has expressed before — that being a nerd (and he uses the words “nerd” and “geek” interchangeably) is about what you like, your preferences. The second idea, that this is somehow an innate trait, appears to be a departure from earlier statements. Take, for example, this response, aimed at a newborn, last year:
Not surprisingly, addressing a newborn, Wheaton doesn’t really push this idea that being a nerd is something you don’t choose, because if being a nerd is innate (and presumably not something readily apparent in infants), then there is no reason to assume that the child will be a nerd. Instead, he presents being a nerd as a choice:
It’s not about what you love; it’s about how you love it. So there’s going to be a thing in your life that you love, and I don’t know what it’s going to be. It might be sports, it might be science […] it doesn’t matter what it is. The way you love that, and the way you find other people who love that the way that you do is what makes being a nerd awesome.
Last year’s response is really different than this year’s response. In 2013, Wheaton presents nerdiness as being about a choice to unashamedly embrace the things one loves, and fellowship with others who love those same things. In 2014, however, Wheaton presents it as an innate love of particular things that are generally defined as nerdy. This is
Of course, in both of these responses, Wheaton is addressing children, and is simplifying an issue he has no doubt thought about a great deal. You can hear in his gentle tone and slow cadence his attempt to connect with the children, so it would be wrong to declare this some sort of geek manifesto as some have done. Wheaton is ultimately trying give these children (and the present audience) the freedom to be nerds … and given the response of the interwebs, he seems to have been pretty successful.
But the apparent inconsistencies is not, I think about addressing children, nor is it because Wheaton hasn’t thought clearly about these issues. Instead, I suspect it’s because the role of geeks and nerds is rapidly changing in our culture, to the degree that it’s becoming more difficult to distinguish between nerd culture and popular culture.
Wheaton and I are about the same age, and when we were children, to be interested in things like computers was definitely a nerdy interest. You could play the occasional game of Pac Man or Donkey Kong, but excessive interest in video games created a social stigma. Reading pre-Harry Potter was bad; when adults used the word “bookish” to describe you, it wasn’t a compliment.
Today, bullying is more likely to come from NOT reading the coolest books, from NOT playing the latest video games. My own teenage son (who, very unlike his father, has twice been the top phys. ed. student at his school) spends most of his free time shouting into a headset to his friends about the various tactics they are using in their MMORPGs. When other kids are physically present at our house, he either recruits them to play basketball or Munchkin. He doesn’t get beat up because he has a cane with a d20 handle — his friends think it’s cool.
It’s harder to tell geek culture from other parts of the culture, so if I had to choose one of Wheaton’s approaches when talking to children, I’d choose his earlier position. We do choose to be nerdy, to cultivate our interests, and to associate with similar nerds, whether we’re baseball stat geeks or steampunk cosplayers. Gleefully celebrating those choices is a more sustainable position as nerd culture becomes more and more mainstream.