Last weekend I went to a book signing with my roommate. I'd never been to a book signing so agreed to go with him to check it out and figured I can usually find something entertaining to read in a Barnes and Noble in case I got bored. The signing was for a fantasy series 'Wheel of Time' so I was expecting it to be flooded with nerds. When I arrived I was surprised to see that everyone seemed normal. Just regular guys that happened to be fans of the series. That was until I got involved in a conversation with a guy who was talking about a William Shatner signing. This is basically what he said: "So I got up there and told him I had named my kid Kirk after Captain Kirk. He gave me this look like 'Oh, one of those guys' but I smoothed it over. I told him I want my son to embody the same moral compass and personal integrity that represented the character." Translation: I want my kid to grow up to be Captain Kirk. Then another guy started talking about how he named his kids Perrin and Eowyn. Another guy started complaining about how his wife wouldn't let him name their cat Nynaeve. I really didn't know what to add to this so I just excused myself to the bathroom. Not like it was awkward or anything. Focus: What is the lowest form of nerdiness you've ever seen? Bonus points if you did it yourself. Alt Focus: What is acceptable and what is going too far?
Another from the archives. A couple that were friends-of-friends named their kid Logan, after Basil Exposition's character from Logan's Run, and, of course, Wolverine. Another couple that were coworkers of my brother named their kid Atticus. A noble character and everything but c'mon. Besides, if you're going to name your kid after a fictional lawyer, shouldn't it be "Denny?"
My uncle named my cousins Luke and Leia. I don't know if my aunt knows the origins of where he came up with their names. In high school I used to host computer game LAN parties for me and my friends in my parents house. It's very nerdy, but I always had a blast. I also had about a Taun-Taun sleeping bag off ThinkGeek.
I once got into an argument with an old lady at a Toy'R'Us over which system was better PS2 or Xbox. She worked there and I was there with a group of friends to pick up a game. I feel like I was in the right arguing this with her as we had simply asked her where we could find a certain PS2 game, or if they had a release date list (as this was as reliable for game release dates as IGN was in those days). Instead of just simply answering our question she says, "Why would you want it for PS2? Xbox is better!" I went into full on nerd mode and started listing PS2 exclusives that blew away any Xbox competition. She then drops the "Well the graphics are better on Xbox!" At this point I was starting to get loud as we went back and forth. I was saying something about graphics vs. game play when she said this verbatim, "Well I don't know about gameplay but if my children are playing a game and I come in the room I'd rather look at an Xbox game than a PS2 game..." I said, "Well that's because you are a god damned GRAPHICS WHORE!" I then stormed out of the store with my friends cackling like wild animals following behind. I never lived it down with them. Though they were heavy gamers too and we'd had similar arguments they had never called a middle aged women working at Toy'r'Us a graphics whore.
I had a roommate who had people over from time to time for Star Wars-themed Dungeons and Dragons. I avoided this like the plague because it was D&D, but one night I overheard one of his friends offer a smartass question that I instinctively answered with the name of a character from one of the EU novels. Nothing nearly as low as D&D, but still a low point for me.
A few months ago, I went with my friends to Gamestop for the midnight release of the new World of Warcraft game. It was pretty eye-opening. My friends and I are pretty normal, albeit pretty geeky (we're all chemistry and biochemistry majors), but we were seriously the coolest people in that store. I recognized a few of the faces there from around campus, but the whole place smelled like fat nerd who didn't know what a shower was. We passed the half hour until they let us buy the game judging everyone else. And then when I went to buy the game without having preordered it, the dude there actually had to ring me up on the register. He said something stupid like "next time, you should preorder the game so you don't hold up the line." To which I responded, "oh ok, but I wasn't going to buy the game at your store anyways. Until about 2 hours ago, I was planning on buying it online." I'm not sure if Gamestop trains their employees to tell paying customers what to do, but that shit was ridiculous.
Nicholas Cage changed his last name to "Cage" after the comic book character Luke Cage. He also named his son Kal-El I believe. As for nerdy stuff, I've run a pretty big gamut. D&D (and similar games), LARPing, lots of sci-fi and fantasy reading, etc. It's fun and interesting and engaging. It's also somewhat frustrating at times because the people willing to be in a documentary about LARPing, for example, are the people with nothing to lose because of the stigma so you wind up with a slanted presentation. But, much like video games have become mainstream (usually in the sports games or FPS genres), I figure someday most of this stuff will no longer be so looked down on and you can actually see the cops, lawyers, judges, and doctors who LARP show up in a piece about LARPing without worrying about their professional standing.
Focus: As much as I love them, fantasy sports (in all forms) is incredibly nerdy. I participate in a Keeper Hockey League with strangers and a head-to-head (fun) league with my pals from work. The Keeper League is intense. All of us go into detailed descriptions of why we chose a certain player during the draft. There is even a league trophy that gets mailed to the winner, and they get to keep it for an entire summer. Easily the most nerdy thing that I'm involved in.
I watched the entire new series of Dr. Who in about 2 months on Netflix Streaming, and then various extralegal websites last fall. Then I watched all of the spinoff Torchwood. Now I'm occasionally going back and watching some of the old episodes from the 60's and 70's, also on Netflix Streaming. Cheesy, nerdy, fun as all hell to watch.
Oh man my nerdiness has different brackets 1: Convincing people in line next to me in best buy, potentially googling reviews and specs to prove the sales rep wrong. 2: Marathonning anime I'm just getting into - watching a 26 episode series in two days. Though it's not anime I finished all five doctor who new series in 11 days. 3: I know the star wars EU in depth.. or did until it was retconned badly. Up until the end of NJO basically 4: I name my servers and hard drives after anime characters - this probably works on multiple levels. 5: I've gotten laid off of the trivia of knowing where all the keys are on the keyboard. Does this even count?
I play Role Playing Games. The pen and paper kind. And lately I've been playing a game called Eclipse Phase however as part of the game's character generation you practically need a spreadsheet to keep track of the math involved. (no crazy formulas just hundreds of variables and addition for a points buy system) so I built a spreadsheet to help with character generation and then posted it on the internet Here and get 500 or so downloads a month from it. But I don't really consider it geeky because its an awesome game. What I consider geeky is the repetitiousness of my miss use of Excel for gaming purposes.
I have so many stories I can tell, and I'll try to think up some good ones, but for now this is probably the worst I have done. The first time my current girlfriend told me that she loved me, I simply responded with "I know". She didn't catch it at the time, but we watched The Empire Strikes Back a month or so later. It dawned on her after we watched that scene...she wasn't too happy.
I consider myself to be a big nerd. I enjoy Star Trek (original, TNG, Voyager and DS9 but not Enterprise), I like pencil and paper roll playing games and I am currently starting a campaign of the Dragon Age RPG with my boyfriend and son in which I get to DM. I will get into arguments with my friends of equal nerdiness while in public over video games, consoles, certain topics of software development, D&D, Magic the Gathering, Pokemon etc... These can get embarrassingly loud if we have been drinking. Two of my friends have very nerdy tattoos. One is a Trogdor and one is a 1UP mushroom. They thought it would be cool. I think naming your kid something nerdy takes the cake. A girl a used to work with named her son Raiden after the guy on Mortal Kombat.
I did that for the last two expansions, but I only went to a smaller shop two minutes away where both times had less than 20 people. Of course, most of them were unbathed nerds wearing unwashed black clothes. The nerdy part for me was that after overhearing a few conversations, NONE of them knew a fucking thing about the game. It was full of the full on retards that have 80 characters and none of them were close to the current end cap. These guys also never followed anything about the release of the game, and generally were the worst players you'd ever meet in game. I felt I was the only exception, being a worldwide top rated arena player at the time. I guess it blew my mind that these guys were nerdier then me, but at the same time weren't. Still, at the time I wanted to stab each and every one of them as they were physical manifestations of the pieces of shit I had to deal with in game whenever I played.
I don't know if this counts or not,,,, because I'm not nerdy.... But every cat we've ever had in our household has been named after one of the characters in "Two Guys and a Girl" Currently we have a "Pete" and "Sharon" living amongst us. Berg ran away a couple years ago, and the next pet, according to the Fiance will be named "Johnny"
In late middle school through my freshman year of high school, I played warcraft, starcraft, dungeons & dragons, magic the gathering, warhammer 40k, and pretty much read the entire science fiction section. Then I got into lacrosse and drinking.
One of my roommates in college spent two weeks slowly crafting herself a magic wand from a stick she found outside because she was going to a midnight showing of one of the Harry Potter movies. She carved off all the bark, shaped it so it was kind of crooked, rubbed it with shoe shine, and than sealed it with clear nail polish. I won't lie, I was kind of jealous.
When I was in my teens I had a black cat, I named him Jackson. My Mom named me after her favorite stupid Soap Opera star at the time.
I was in Home Depot purchasing a new rake, the kind with the iron tines and the thick hardwood stick. Two little kids were walking in the aisle with their mother when I turned and struck the floor with the stick, yelling in my best Gandalf voice, "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" Nerdy, funny and pants-soiling all at the same time.