(Thread IKs:
Nuns with Guns)
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Alaois posted:actually a geek is the guy who bites the heads off of chickens at the circus You shouldn't bring that guy up, he's got a baaad consumerist streak. Always showing off that lambo he bought with chicken head money...
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May 5, 2022 22:08
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| # ? Jun 4, 2024 14:03 |
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you can still find more 'authentic' expressions of geek culture if you burrow into a niche. the nerds who sit around and make up conlangs all day aren't about to be monetized.
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May 5, 2022 22:08
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The conversation standards are on a downturn now so here, have a Endgame rewrite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-IsSzq0sQU This isn't related to the video specifically but in general, I don't get how every threat aside from Hera isn't just stopped by putting Mjolnir on top of it.
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May 5, 2022 22:09
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Alaois posted:actually a geek is the guy who bites the heads off of chickens at the circus you know what you're right and im going to become a single minded advocate for returning this term to the community
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May 5, 2022 22:20
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KingKalamari posted:You shouldn't bring that guy up, he's got a baaad consumerist streak. Always showing off that lambo he bought with chicken head money... tai lopez showing off his garage but what's really important is this shelf of headless chickens that got him where he is today
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May 5, 2022 22:27
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Famethrowa posted:she is very much a child of tumblr/fanfic weirdness and takes as granted some of the bizarre cultural signifiers of that group. I have a pretty hard time identifying with her videos. I kind of take her videos as an interesting view into a different, alien culture and how it attempts to communicate.
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May 5, 2022 22:38
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That's sort of why I occasionally watch Swell Entertainment and Strange Aeons. It's a little window into what younger people are doing and it's pretty cool to find out about a few hundred Tumblr kids going deep into pretending that they're in an alternate universe. Helps keep me from being completely out of touch with the drat kids these days 
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May 5, 2022 22:47
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The weirdest part about the Sarah Z video was it seemed to me she was basing a lot of her ideas on how "nerds" and "geeks" were treated in the past on pop culture. Maybe it was different for other people, but the highly structured cliquey jock vs nerd dynamic was not a thing in my experience in the late 90s. A huge proportion of adolescents played video games at arcades, liked comics, played Magic, loved Dragonball Z, but it was never a singular identity. I think her experiences of growing up in the post-2000 internet era of fan culture really narrowed her perspective on this one: she brings up the individual fan communities that existed online and I'd guess that gives the impression there's more division than there really is. I can't really relate either, I was fully out of school for years and talking with coworkers about Game of Thrones by this point in her video's timeline. The people saying it would've been better to focus on the shift of these disparate hobbies getting glued together into one capitalist commodified base was right. Companies are always looking for ways to solidify a group, it makes it easier to market to them and get their money.
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May 5, 2022 22:49
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Strange Aeons in particular is a great way to get an insider look at an entirely parallel internet that I had nothing to do with in the mid 2000s to early 2010s despite visiting the places like the Facepunch forums almost every day. So of course the Sarah Z videos have limited frames of reference. If I were to make videos like that it'd be talking about forum cultures and arbitrary moderation and people like Slowbeef or whatever. Even though it's really been less than a decade it all feels very far removed from my own experiences. Interesting stuff, even if the big takeaways are kinda innaccurate.
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May 5, 2022 22:53
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I really like Izzzyzzz. A lot of the things she covers are weird, niche communities and subcultures but she always talks about them in such a way that even a total newcomer can understand. It's fascinating.
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May 5, 2022 22:56
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Libluini posted:I kind of take her videos as an interesting view into a different, alien culture and how it attempts to communicate. oh for sure. some of her videos, like the "geek" video I really enjoy because I was only an observer to Tumblr culture and had none of the context for the weird poo poo that would go down. SuperWhoLock was utterly baffling when my friend would talk about it and now I...slightly understand?
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May 5, 2022 23:04
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Mercury Hat posted:The weirdest part about the Sarah Z video was it seemed to me she was basing a lot of her ideas on how "nerds" and "geeks" were treated in the past on pop culture. Maybe it was different for other people, but the highly structured cliquey jock vs nerd dynamic was not a thing in my experience in the late 90s. A huge proportion of adolescents played video games at arcades, liked comics, played Magic, loved Dragonball Z, but it was never a singular identity. I think her experiences of growing up in the post-2000 internet era of fan culture really narrowed her perspective on this one: she brings up the individual fan communities that existed online and I'd guess that gives the impression there's more division than there really is. I can't really relate either, I was fully out of school for years and talking with coworkers about Game of Thrones by this point in her video's timeline. I think a lot of it is up to individual experience. I don't remember if I mentioned it here or in another thread, but the first HS I went to was in a weird upper income white Mormon hellscape and actually had like sitcom style social groupings and dynamics. There were cliques of "jocks" and "nerds" and "goths" and people were ostracized and bullied based on who they associated with. When I later moved to much more diverse HS none of that was a thing and like 2/3rds of the cafeteria on any given day were people openly playing Magic or Pokemon. This was all in the '05-'10 range, idk Sarah's age or background but it is possible she legit experienced those stereotypical group dynamics.
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May 5, 2022 23:08
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yeah, as someone who's around sarah's age i can confirm the secondary school i went to (instead of middle and high they just combined 7th-12th into one group, it was a private school) had 'nerds' and 'not nerds' as the primary cliques and it was pretty socially acceptable to bully/pick on the nerds regardless of what grade you were a part of (and the handful of emo/goth kids were usually in fluctuation between the two, like the one guy who could play guitar was fine bc playing guitar was cool but the goth chick who liked fantasy novels was "acceptable"). It wasn't in the same way that pop culture usually portrayed it, but whenever people go 'NERD BULLYING STOPPED IN THE EARLY 90S' its like. lol maybe in your neck of the country i guess 
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May 5, 2022 23:20
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Strayan David over at Primitive Technologies has a new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eesj3pJF3lA One of the things I like about this channel is that it shows the likely progression that humanity has been through, in order to get to where we are - mostly skipping over all the figuring out stuff, and instead showing how it's possible to go from not being able to beat sand together, and in theory going all the way to teaching sand how to do mathematics and boolean algebra. fun hater posted:lol im not saying youtube essays are the reason for the commodification; the urge to monetize their hobbies and interests has plagued nerd culture ever since they realized they can validate themselves by selling their subculture to "normies"
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May 5, 2022 23:28
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Mercury Hat posted:The weirdest part about the Sarah Z video was it seemed to me she was basing a lot of her ideas on how "nerds" and "geeks" were treated in the past on pop culture. Maybe it was different for other people, but the highly structured cliquey jock vs nerd dynamic was not a thing in my experience in the late 90s. A huge proportion of adolescents played video games at arcades, liked comics, played Magic, loved Dragonball Z, but it was never a singular identity. I think her experiences of growing up in the post-2000 internet era of fan culture really narrowed her perspective on this one: she brings up the individual fan communities that existed online and I'd guess that gives the impression there's more division than there really is. I can't really relate either, I was fully out of school for years and talking with coworkers about Game of Thrones by this point in her video's timeline. I remember middle school being way more intensely clique-y and prone to bullying the weird kids, but by high school things relaxed more, and then nerd things were pretty normal things in college. It definitely varied a lot by school, like friends from the more affluent high schools said the cliques were worse, or in college friends from smaller/more conservative areas said similar things. It's all exacerbated by there being a timed delay on how school life is portrayed that's usually ~20 years off and based on whatever the movie or TV show's writers' experiences in school were.
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May 5, 2022 23:42
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Nuns with Guns posted:I remember middle school being way more intensely clique-y and prone to bullying the weird kids, but by high school things relaxed more, and then nerd things were pretty normal things in college. It definitely varied a lot by school, like friends from the more affluent high schools said the cliques were worse, or in college friends from smaller/more conservative areas said similar things. It felt like by high school you were more likely to be bullied by people ostensibly sharing your interests than eponymous 'jocks' if you liked nerdy crap. They were generally busy with their own drama and stuff.
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May 6, 2022 00:05
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Going to high school from '03-'06 I can say that there were definitely little subculture "cliques" that formed, nerds being one of them, but what I don't really have experience with is the traditional "jocks vs. nerds" rivalry you see in media. Like, I got ostracized and picked on a lot but that was more because I was a socially awkward kid who was a bit too sensitive for his own good and not because of the subculture I belonged to. So while there were different lunch tables for a bunch of subcultures people weren't really bullied for the lunch table they sat at...
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May 6, 2022 00:10
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The Drama nerd were always the worst. Bunch of attention seeking assholes
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May 6, 2022 00:12
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As someone born in the mid-90's (93) I was never at an age where it was considered uncool to be into comics and video games. I can certainly understand there being a point in time where as an adult if you were still into the these things that (by the perception of most people) were made for children, it was a little weird and uncool. But, I feel as far as middle and high school go I have to wonder how much the perception of nerds and "nerd oppression" is just a product of accepting 80's comedies as reality and socially awkward kids misunderstanding why they were targets for bullying.
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May 6, 2022 00:45
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"Nerds vs. jocks" always felt like a quaint 50's trope to me, even as a kid. My experience was "assholes vs. anyone even slightly awkward/funny-looking/poor".
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May 6, 2022 00:47
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Babaduck posted:As someone born in the mid-90's (93) I was never at an age where it was considered uncool to be into comics and video games. I can certainly understand there being a point in time where as an adult if you were still into the these things that (by the perception of most people) were made for children, it was a little weird and uncool. But, I feel as far as middle and high school go I have to wonder how much the perception of nerds and "nerd oppression" is just a product of accepting 80's comedies as reality and socially awkward kids misunderstanding why they were targets for bullying. Yeah I was also born in 93 and didn't really understand a lot of high school tropes on TV as well. I'm also not American so there's that. We didn't have homecoming and sports were just something people did. There was barely any focus on college sports at all. We had prom but it was called "Grad Dinner-Dance" for some reason. Cliques barely existed in my high school.
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May 6, 2022 01:01
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people were bullied mostly by how gay they appeared 
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May 6, 2022 01:11
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Went to a posh Presbyterian boys’ school. The socially awkward turbo nerd Jewish kid got it pretty hard. I’m the only person from high school he keeps in touch with. Another classmate that I recently ran into asked me how he’s doing and has expressed remorse and shame over how our cohort treated him, and that we all owe him an apology. Some students who were deemed “effeminate” were bullied as well. Meanwhile, this guy was a gay jock, but he got along well with everyone.
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May 6, 2022 01:15
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There were different cliques in my high school, but that was more along the lines of money. I was a freshman when Columbine happened and that had a lot more impact on my school memories than what media I was consuming. The school was constantly trying to trump up charges to get me expelled, of course the guy who sexually assaulted me got off scot-free. Life got a lot better getting out of highschool.
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May 6, 2022 01:16
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Remember that the tropes of high school were instilled into pop culture mostly by boomers drawing from their own high school experience when writing shows and movies in the 80s and 90s. You don’t understand those tropes because they’re based on faded memories of high school experiences 10-30 years before you entered high school. And they just entered our collective subconscious of what high school is “supposed” to be.
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May 6, 2022 01:28
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I'm a little older than some of you, born in 1978, and there were no 'nerds' and 'not nerds' in my school experience either. My secondary school was all-girls, not sure if that made a huge difference, but honestly I doubt it. There were weird kids, but there was no hint of 'lol you like maths, you're not COOL'. Nobody was cool, we were awful teenagers. Mind you I'm in the UK and I feel like this is pretty culture-specific maybe.
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May 6, 2022 02:12
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Sydin posted:"Geek" and "Nerd" culture are still very much a thing and if you go deep enough. Hell they can even still exist in various outgroup forms, it's just that over the past couple decades a lot of activities that would have identified you as part of those cultures simply by engaging with them at all now have mainstream consumers. There are anime, comics, video games, sci-fi and fantasy stories that are all accessible to and enjoyed by the mainstream in a way that there just really wasn't 30, 20, or in some cases even 10 years ago. The real litmus test is asking someone to watch the DF Retro video covering all of Doom's console ports. If they say they're not interested, then they KingKalamari posted:Going to high school from '03-'06 I can say that there were definitely little subculture "cliques" that formed, nerds being one of them, but what I don't really have experience with is the traditional "jocks vs. nerds" rivalry you see in media. Like, I got ostracized and picked on a lot but that was more because I was a socially awkward kid who was a bit too sensitive for his own good and not because of the subculture I belonged to. So while there were different lunch tables for a bunch of subcultures people weren't really bullied for the lunch table they sat at... I never felt like there were cliques at my high school, or at least not stereotypical ones. It could be that there were, but I was just never aware of them. The other students who would harass me (I hesitate to say 'bullied', because I feel like it never got that bad) weren't jocks, but just kind of obnoxious shits who were the type to disrupt class. In contrast, I remember the guy who I think was captain of the football team (or was on the team to some capacity) being a pretty laid-back, friendly dude. I don't remember there being anyone that was considered nerds, save for myself, but that was more of a self-assessment. EDIT: Thinking about it, I remember there was one or two people who I remember made reference to old machinima videos like Idiots of Garry's Mod and Chuck Norris in Oblivion, which was a surprise to me. Max Wilco fucked around with this message at 02:25 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 02:21
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Violet_Sky posted:Yeah I was also born in 93 and didn't really understand a lot of high school tropes on TV as well. I'm also not American so there's that. We didn't have homecoming and sports were just something people did. There was barely any focus on college sports at all. We had prom but it was called "Grad Dinner-Dance" for some reason. Cliques barely existed in my high school. Late Gen-X-er here... ...as someone who is nerdy and moved several times and went to seven different schools from Grade 1 through high school, there definitely was varying degrees of "ew, nerrrrrd" at some places, where just that label alone got you on the outs with the main group of kids, though overall it seemed to decline as I progressed to high school. So I don't know if there's something magic that turned it around between the mid-80s and the early 90s, but it went away for me one way or another, even if "geek culture" still wasn't in the mainstream yet. At the same time, I think the insult was also kinda self-propagating. Kids are amazingly good at finding another kid's weakness, and when the kid has a nerdy interest or is awkward that's a big blinking beacon for other kids to zero in on. When schools were big enough that you could find a group where that wasn't going to be a go-to insult, you were fine. Smaller schools meant you were more on your own, easy to single out, and the kids would immediately go for the "nerd" as easy shorthand to pick on you. Bullying has always found a way to treat a kid like poo poo, it's just a matter of finding something to pick on. So yeah, I could definitely see where the early 80's "nerds being bullied" thing came from, but in my personal experience it was on the way out by the late 80's.
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May 6, 2022 02:55
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The dicks with a Napoleon complex or Little Person Syndrome were always worse than the the sporting types.
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May 6, 2022 02:56
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I'd say the meal kit stuff is very useful if you're anxious about thinking about what you want to eat every week (like my wife is) or you're a new cook and want to find new stuff to try. We've done it for a few months now, a couple of different services as we get discounts, and we definitely found a few things we'll be using going forward. Apparently, we both really like sweet potatoes, and I'm good with fresh green beans (but not canned, ugh).
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May 6, 2022 02:58
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I'm the bully
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May 6, 2022 03:05
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Dawgstar posted:It felt like by high school you were more likely to be bullied by people ostensibly sharing your interests than eponymous 'jocks' if you liked nerdy crap. They were generally busy with their own drama and stuff. There's that, too, yeah. Like just kids generally being lovely to each other in adjacent friend groups because adolescence is the age everyone starts understanding enough about other people to know how to hurt them and we haven't fully fused all the synapses that help us feel empathy at the same time.
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May 6, 2022 04:41
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Nuns with Guns posted:There's that, too, yeah. Like just kids generally being lovely to each other in adjacent friend groups because adolescence is the age everyone starts understanding enough about other people to know how to hurt them and we haven't fully fused all the synapses that help us feel empathy at the same time. I thought that was middle school age tbh
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May 6, 2022 04:48
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In grade school about 5 or 6 kids from the football team tried to claim a cafeteria table as their own. Then the rest of the class called them a bunch of tools, including their own teammates and they just gave up.
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May 6, 2022 07:18
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Having been around a lot of geeks and nerds, I suspect a lot of the issue of "I am bullied for being a geek" is a personal narrative that makes one's situation feel better. More often it seems like the reality is "I am bullied for being weird and awkward," "I am bullied for being an rear end in a top hat," or "I am not actually bullied but I perceive normal interactions as bullying because I have issues nobody has helped me with yet." As someone else pointed out, it's taking stuff enjoyed by people who don't fit in and assuming the source of the issue is the stuff, rather than the people. There's just always going to be weirdoes who don't fit in well and end up gravitating toward communities based around some shared balm for the soul. Often, that balm will end up going mainstream at some point because it's usually fun power fantasies and most people like those. fun hater posted:dont listen to this. go to the tienda and buy the el guapo brand spices. they come in like plastic baggies so just have a container ready at home. the price is 1/3 what white ppl pay. Unless these are dime bags (which from a quick googling seems not to be the case) they're still presenting the problem of "I need a teaspoon of a spice I may never use again and don't want said spice lurking in my cabinet mocking my wasteful lifestyle of trying new dishes." Like don't get me wrong I know the value of Brown People Stores and their superior selection of spices but my experience has been that they are better for spices I know drat well I'm going to use a shitload of, like turmeric and cumin, rather than ones I'm taking a gamble on. ETA fun hater posted:geek culture is conspicuous consumption As An Old, I can remember a time when geek culture was considerably less so, mainly because there just wasn't a lot available to conspicuously consume. (And also because being conspicuous about it might lead to awkward conversations where a non-geek would be wanting explanations re: why do those cartoons look so busty is this kiddie porn/what's so fun about pretending to be a guy with a sword you're not a child/oh my nephew loves those computer games do you play the Marry-o? etc etc) At that time, a lot of geek culture was more based on making things, talking/arguing about your particular interest, and generally hanging out with people who shared your interest because nobody else cared when you got excited about it and went on a hyperfixated ramble. There's definitely been a change in the tenor and makeup of geek society as more corporations realized that a lot of geeks grew up desperate for any crumb of extra stuff. (I think a lot also has to do with social media doing away with forums, so there's much less a sense of community and everything is more like being a sports fan than a more active enthusiast.) Puppy Time fucked around with this message at 07:39 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 07:23
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Puppy Time posted:
i am a world class cheapskate and my rationale is that if im only spending a dollar or two on an obscure spice, it doesn't hurt as bad when i throw it out for being too old
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May 6, 2022 07:31
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fun hater posted:i am a world class cheapskate and my rationale is that if im only spending a dollar or two on an obscure spice, it doesn't hurt as bad when i throw it out for being too old It's less about being cheap and more about having been raised to Never Waste Food. It's not really something explainable to people with a saner relationship to ingredients.
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May 6, 2022 07:42
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Spices also last for ages and having something sitting around can provide a good inspiration to try a new recipe.
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May 6, 2022 07:43
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Puppy Time posted:It's less about being cheap and more about having been raised to Never Waste Food. It's not really something explainable to people with a saner relationship to ingredients. my cheapness stems from poor people brain. i get it
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May 6, 2022 07:44
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| # ? Jun 4, 2024 14:03 |
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Puppy Time posted:Having been around a lot of geeks and nerds, I suspect a lot of the issue of "I am bullied for being a geek" is a personal narrative that makes one's situation feel better. More often it seems like the reality is "I am bullied for being weird and awkward," "I am bullied for being an rear end in a top hat," or "I am not actually bullied but I perceive normal interactions as bullying because I have issues nobody has helped me with yet." I'd go so far as to say that kids are barely human, and that growing up basically means becoming human because it involves learning of your own mortality, that you aren't the center of the universe, that empathy is needed to connect with other people on a deeper emotional level, and that you end up very very lonely if you treat other people badly. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 10:39 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 10:35
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