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1000th post here!

Wich leads to to this question: Am I a nerd?

Spends hours on the internet discussing unimportant matters with complete strangers; CHECK!
Plays with little plastic men; CHECK!
Has a very well used gamer PC; CHECK!
Has got no Girlfriend; CHECK!
Does not drink alcohol; CHECK!
Reads 1000 page books without being forced to do so; CHECK!
Solves the Rubiks Cube in under a minute with a self made method; CHECK!
is interested in LARP; CHECK!

on the other hand, some things I do are not very nerdy and even threaten my nerdiness:

wears no oversized glasses
has no tiny, fuzzy upper lip mustarche
does too much sports to justify serious nerdiness
has too many friends to be a complete nerd
goes outside too often
unlike other nerds might actually get a girlfriend soon

so, am I a nerd now? Looking at the above again, I think yes.

And how about the rest of the wargaming society? Are you also nerds?

You are what you are. You list factitious, stereotypical requirements to being a nerd. If you wish to label yourself go ahead.

True nerds don't run around calling themselves nerds...

Remulus wrote: True nerds don't run around calling themselves nerds...

Well, if its true thats another point proving my innocence......

Like i told my kids"i'm that uncool i've swung back round to being cool again.

I guess it would depend on how you define nerds. If by nerds you mean, science fiction buffs, comic buffs, general movies, role playing and stuff, i can tell you we are quite a bit nerdy. On the other side i would also point out that most nerds i know (and i know quite a few) are also musicians, artists, and practice contact sports like boxing or rugby and martial arts.

People can be nerdy about all sorts of things. Take myself for instance:

Football Nerd? Check
Music Nerd? Check
General Knowledge Nerd? Check
Car Nerd? Check
Wargaming Nerd? Check

The thing is, because of my curious little peccadilloes, I find myself being friendly and chatty with all sorts of people. I find myself being equally at home chatting to strangers in a pub about the game or thier car or thier musical tastes.

I'm equally at home in an FLGS or GW chatting about all sorts of Wargames. And I'm a married man.

MrMerlin wrote:1000th post here!

Wich leads to to this question: Am I a nerd?

Fine, i'll actually answer your question: it doesn't matter.

I always say I'm a Geek not smart enough to be a nerd

I'm a geek. I'm deffinitely a geek. A bit of a nerd to. But you know what, it doesn't bother me as I'm proud of it. I'm so much of a geek I'm going to go ahead when I am of age and get the aquila tattood on my shoulders haha, possibly an Imperial regiment badge on the top of my left arm to, you never know. At the end of the day it doesn't matter. If you're happy then there is no problem with it.

I never like all these labels, I'm just me

Labels for things are fine in my opinion - Warhammer is a fairly nerdy game as it requires a depth of thought that isn't 'pick-up-and-play', works around strategy, probability and some serious collecting and time investment on something many people wouldn't consider worthwhile.

However, people are odd things. You can't really nail them down with a label and the definition of any said label varies in meaning from person to person.

I'd say that I'm nerdy. I play a load of video games, I love sci-fi, wargaming, anime and manga and I don't drink/go clubbing on a regular basis (in fact it's very rare ). However, I'm a drama student, am fairly popular (not UNpopular, anyway) and have a girlfriend. Go figure xD

You can just arbitrarily label people with a standardised template, the world just doesn't work like that xD

There is a fair difference between calling oneself a nerd and playing to a stereotype.

If you're going by stereotypical standards, I'd say there are very few actual nerds in existence. I've never met someone who seriously wore a pocket protector with thick framed glasses and extreme social awkwardness who did not have at least one other non-stereotypical nerd trait.

I've never met anyone who wears a pocket protector at all for that matter.


I'm not a nerd nor a geek. I am nerdily inclined.

Well I am a nerd. I do alot of sports, but people just know oh yes he is a nerd.

Meh, I collect toy soldiers and play games with them.

Other people go out and get drunk every Friday night and then waste half the weekend getting over a hangover.

If I'm the odd one, so be it

Yesterday I got stiffed on the London Underground for nearly £12 in travelling. I was jogged having two journeys, one "uncompleted" after I entered a station, and one "unstarted" from when I left a different station. When a journey appears to have no start or finish, you simply get charged for the full amount of a day pass.

What happened was that I took too long travelling from one place to another, and the system assumes that it can only be explained by you having left a station and not swiped your card to leave and entered another one at a later time.

But of course I had been on the trains the whole time. The reason was that I took what I later explained as "the scenic route". Facing a loss of £12 on my pre-paid travel card was more than any embarrassment factor.

You see, I did take a long time to travel from one place to another because I was stopping and photographing trains. I explained this at the ticket office and showed them my train-spotters book and camera to convince them that I genuinely had spent half an afternoon on the tube network merely going from one place to another. Fortunately they accepted my explanation that I was some sort of mad train enthusiast and refunded most of the costs of this little adventure.

That's a nerdy adventure for you!

crimsonfist832 wrote:I'm a geek. I'm deffinitely a geek.

Not me...

I prefer the term geek myself.
You can be a geek and still retain social skills, whereas a nerd defines himself with his lack of them.

I don't really care. I tend to be into a lot of things that most people aren't, wargames being one of them. I'll just do what I want and people can think what they think.

I guess it's okay when people to call them a nerd/geek because they are
but I dont like it when people do that to try to get sympathy from others or to seem smart

Does working in I.T. brand you a nerd? I actually enjoy working in I.T.
I get called a nerd at work all the time. But it has nothing to with me trying to get a Linux cornel running on my tablet during my lunch breaks.

I think the nerd stereotype has been overused in the media and it needs to be recreated.

Capt. Rex wrote:Does working in I.T. brand you a nerd? I actually enjoy working in I.T.
I get called a nerd at work all the time. But it has nothing to with me trying to get a Linux cornel running on my tablet during my lunch breaks.

I think the nerd stereotype has been overused in the media and it needs to be recreated.

Do you mean "Kernel."


Who cares anyway. I mean, does it honestly matter what you decide to label yourself with? I don't think that's mattered since High School, and even then it wasn't a big deal.

I am gonna say yep I'm a nerd, but I come about it honestly. I was raised watching Star Wars, Stargate and Star Trek. I was also reading Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia and many other fantasys. I then started playing wargames and playing cpu RPGs and things like Warcraft and Starcraft. The things I got working against are like I have a girlfriend and have had her for over a year, I train boxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu and love/have a buttload of guns!

Sasori wrote:

Capt. Rex wrote:Does working in I.T. brand you a nerd? I actually enjoy working in I.T.
I get called a nerd at work all the time. But it has nothing to with me trying to get a Linux cornel running on my tablet during my lunch breaks.

I think the nerd stereotype has been overused in the media and it needs to be recreated.

Do you mean "Kernel."

That is what I meant, however Android has some weird autocoreect on it that I can't disable. Hence the Linux

I suppose I could be labelled something of a nerd or geek. But I don't really fit into either of those properly.

I prefer just being strange.

The 8 Levels of Nerd:
-Level 1: Casual Gamer
-Level 2: Likes Sci-Fi/Fantasy
-Level 3: Hardcore Gamer
-Level 4: Wargamer
-Level 5: Writes fan-fiction
-Level 6: Anime/Manga Otaku
-Level 7: Still likes Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh over the age of 13
-Level 8: LARPer/Cosplayer

I'm definitely a nerd.

EDIT: I'm also a level 7 nerd.

Nerdiosity:
I'm a level 5 nerd.
Ich lerne Deutsch für Spaß auf der Freizeit.
I do wargames.
I research physics on weekends.
I research words like sesquipedalian loquaciousness, which are real. Go ahead and look it up.

Coolioness:
I do physical sports.
I have an NRA award (if not somewhat redneck)
I have five friends.
I, erm, that's it, I guess.

I wore a gandalf costume in a circle pit once... Though I think that just makes me awesome.

Everything in balance is how I go about it. I might play in a larp today, and I might go play paintball tomorrow. D&D one day, snowboarding the next.

It's all about experiences, and sticking to just nerdy things is so boring, however that does not mean such activities should be thought of as lesser than others. Nerdy activities usually lean towards using imagination, and I firmly believe if you let your imagination die, you might as well go along with it.