The Onion AV Club's Top Nerd Pop-Culture Obsessions - how do YOU rate?

Cafe Society
41

A few more pop-culture-related obsessions they left out:

being a most influential/prolific reviewer on Amazon, IMDB, etc.
posting videos to YouTube
James Bond
It’s important to note that the Onion’s list includes only “pop-culture obsessions,” thereby DQ’ing a whole host of legitimately nerdy obsessions that have nothing to do with pop culture, to wit:

collecting (stamps, coins, glassware, guns, wine, you name it)
non-pop-culture modelling (model trains, miniature battlefields, planes, ships, etc.)
birdwatching
photography (anything but nude subjects, which isn’t nerdy at all)
political-conspiracy theorizing (UFOs, JFK, 9-11, etc.)
competitive animal husbandry and horticulture (Kennel Club competions; cultivating new varieties; preserving legacy varieties)
history buffs & historical re-enactors (WWII counterfactual history; Civil War battles)
metal-detector scavenging and/or GPS caching
automotive restoration & modification
pumpkin chunkin’ cannon/catapult/trebuchet building
There’s a whole lot of nerds out there who just aren’t into RPGs and Joss Whedon shows.

42

I have a fantasy NASCAR team, but hated fantasy football the one time I tried it, for exactly the reasons in that article. I also like the Simpsons. That’s it.

And I’d never even heard of game show tape-trading. (This should not be construed as a request for informative links.)

43

Used to be:
Star Trek
Battlestar Galactica (though this is one where I missed so much of the new series my plan is to wait for it to end and then watch it all)
Magic: The Gathering
The Simpsons
Anime

Currently:
Joss Weadon (I’ll give whatever he makes a chance at this point but I’m not fanatical about him; call me a borderline case here.)
Dr. Who

I’d like to think that I never descended into the spiral of full blown obsession with these, just the “I really enjoy” level of fandom.

44

bzzzzzt!

Sorry, but you’re not allowed to have Joss as an obsession until you can spell his name correctly. Your penalty is to watch Beer Bad, DoubleMeat Palace and Buffy vs. Dracula in unending rotation until FOX greenlights the next Whedon show. Thanks for playing! :stuck_out_tongue:

45

Uh… That was a clever ploy to downplay my fandom, of course and you were completely whooshed by it. I laugh at your foolishness now. Ha ha ha.

Covered that up nicely I think…

46

I actually like two out of three of those “punishment” episodes.

47

Aren’t you a twisted little homunculus.

:wink:

(Before I get mod-slapped, it’s a *Buffy *quote (Giles referring to Snyder) and a joke, not an insult.)

48

Well, let’s begin by saying that whatever else I might have or not have, with Otaku firmly taking pride of place in my name… (WTF, how can they use fanboy as a synonym for obsessed nerd and talk about how “otaku” is perjorative in Japan?)
I’ve got to cop to anime.

I will admit to having done the following:

Ren Faires
LARPing
fanfic
Wikipedia editing
and, of course, Dr. Who from before WGBH bought the originals. (Tom Baker forever!)

I think I’ll get to keep my nerd card, but it does seem to be a close-run thing.

49

Me too. Willow doing her drunken bar patron impersonation in *Beer Bad *and Xander being Dracula’s butt monkey in *Buffy vs Dracula *both entertain me greatly.

50

0/20. That probably explains why I don’t spend much time in this forum! I hadn’t even heard of a lot of that stuff.

51

Besides which, it’s a perfectly accurate description of your’s truly.

I’m pleased that Aesiron correctly guessed which two episodes I was defending. Is there anyone, anywhere, who liked Doublemeat Palace?

52

hold it…
there are people who tape game shows? and trade them?
really?

It is the onion - so, are they kidding with this one?

Aren’t game shows something you just kind of watch in the background while waiting for something else to come on? or at the gym?

I mean, I understand if, say I ended up on Jeopardy or a close friend or family member ended up on something, I might want a copy. (If I won. If I lost, well, nevermind.) But why on earth would I want to watch some guy to whom I have no connection buy a vowel? Why would I want to watch the same guy do that over and over again?

53

And here we see the TRUE sport of nerds. Quibbling over minutae!

(I know, technically, I Wanna Be The Guy isn’t a romhack. But the only thing I could think of was Asshole Mario, and I wasn’t going to go searching for that at work)

54

I see a point, though, where one’s breadth and diversity of interests begins to take one out of the nerd class. A nerd is basically someone whose world is limited and bound in by hi/r passions and pastimes, to the exclusion of…what, if you’re involved with so many different activities, contexts and communities? Where’s the tunnel vision?

Could there be such a thing as a Renaissance nerd? I don’t know.

55

Back in college, I was into Star Trek, Rocky Horror, Ren Faires, and Anime. Had there been WoW back then, I probably would have been into that (my friends and I had to obsess over Angband).

Now, all I’ve got is the fantasy Sumo league I run.