A Guest Post by Brian Crawford

Brian is a friend I met in College during my time at Cal Poly SLO.  During that time we new eachother, but it wasn’t till he and I started talking over Facebook about Embracing the Nerd that I discovered how deeply nerdy this man was.  It was hard to discover at first because he is what I’d like to call a “hybrid.”  A man who loves sci-fi and nerd things, but  ALSO has a beautiful wife… something only hybrids can do.  Too extreme one way or the other and you end up either single with blisters on your thumbs from xbox, or totally cleansed from any sci-fi love what so-ever to pursue the opposite sex.

Here is one man’s satirical story on how he was able to accomplish something only few can (and please notice his footnotes) .

From One Who Has Been to the Pit of Ultimate Nerdiness and Back

My name is -(:::Geek_Masta:::)- and I am a recovering nerdaholic.

Bigger, better, faster, smarter, easier.  These are the mantras of our age.  In our society driven by technology, our primary goal is to fulfill those five words.  We want our hard drives to be large enough to contain the Library of Congress and several full-length movies on the side.  We want our computer processors fast enough so we can run five programs simultaneously and still eat our TV dinners on the side.  Nothing but the newest technology will satisfy our urge to fulfill the five mantras.  We need more RAM[1], a bigger iPod[2], a dedicated DSL[3] connection, and the kitchen sink before we slow down and put our credit cards down.  Then in six months when everything but the sink is obsolete, we do it all over again.  Before long, impersonal computers and all of the great things associated with them become the best things on earth.  Sadly, many more important things in life fall by the wayside.  I write this because I have returned from the horrific pit of nerdaholicism and now realize that many in the next generation are growing up to be socially inept.  I am now 23 years old, out of school and happily married, but I would have lost my soul to my Athlon 2500+ CPU[4] had I not seen the error of my ways.  I needed to add balance to the mix of technological advancement lest risk turning into Mr. Spock from Star Trek.

I have always been a nerd at heart; make no mistake about that.  Born Bartholomew Reginald Wilford IV, I started out already disadvantaged with a nerdy name.  I have seen firsthand how disastrous it can be if one does not understand the depths of his nerdiness or how it makes 86.3% of society cringe.  After many years of counseling, watching movies like “Dumb & Dumber”, and taking up surfing, I have learned how to “flip the switch” on my nerdiness.  Unfortunately, many present-day nerds have no concept of such a switch and will use large words like “obsequious” and talk about the benefits of Unix-based web servers in front of the common folk.  If such annoyances are not eliminated soon, we will soon have a new social class in America led by Bill Gates.  Additionally, since most nerds are male, increasing numbers of innocent women will find themselves with shallow, boneless men who communicate best with emoticons and think that in our world of reason, even women’s emotions can be predicted with a mathematical formula.

Let me take you through my life to show you how technology is adversely affecting today’s youth.  The following is an excerpt from one of my journals from my high school years:

“This kid got mad at me today when I was just trying to demonstrate a little humor.  We were in my calculus class and the kid was just not making any mathematical sense.  I told him to rephrase himself, but he still did not make any sense, so I told him, “You’ve got a syntax error!”  He stared at me like a hung computer, so I said, “You divided by zero!  Your hard drive crashed!  You got a program fault!  Your CD stopped spinning!  Your math logic megabytes[5]!”  I thought I was pretty comical, but he didn’t act very benignly.  In fact, he became quite irate.  Just like Spock did in that one Star Trek episode where he’s out of control, driven by his Vulcan Ponn-Far nature to fight for a mate.  Don’t want to mess with an angry Vulcan[6]. “

The next day I printed out an encyclopedia article from Encarta and gave it to the irate student.  It was on the topic of “Anger”, and I highlighted the section that talked about historical methods for dealing with out-of-control fury.  Then I tried to brush off our checkered past and attempted to lighten up the conversation.  “Did you know that the term ‘computer debugging’ came from when a moth got stuck in the vacuum tubes of an old computer from 1945[7]?”  He still didn’t seem quite happy, but at least I had attempted to apply a patch to the buggy relationship.  Later in that class, someone stole my TI-92 graphing calculator, Betty, from my backpack, and I never figured out who did it.  Nonetheless, I did not communicate with this student in a socially acceptable way since I was at the height of my blind nerdiness.  This was a case in which my extreme nerd knowledge simply got in the way of normal human conversation.  But this is just one facet of the many problems with today’s technological world.

Acknowledging the concept of femininity was a tough stepping stone for me.  An entity driven by something other than reason, logic, and fast CPU’s just didn’t make sense to me.  Here is another excerpt from one of my journals:

On Tuesday, September 24^th, at 11:56 AM, otherwise known right now as today, someone called Patricia asked me about my new calculator watch.  Under normal circumstances I would have brushed the interviewer off to the side and would have continued calculating the orthoganality of the space vector problem I was working on.  But today’s occurrence was quite different.  I had a new revelation today; up to this point I did not know that the female species existed.  Up to now the male race seemed to be the only one that could communicate with me.  I realize that this is a turning point in my life.  But by the time I was done gawking at my newfound information, she was gone.  Maybe her signal got cut off, or maybe I was at a different wavelength.  Whatever happened, I do not know if I will ever make contact with this new lifeform again.

Luckily I was able to recall the circumstances of this first contact in order to replicate the situation again.  However, since I had this revelation in 11^th grade, I was too far behind the curve to catch up with my peers.  I resorted to finding my friends and talking with women elsewhere.

My best friends in high school were some fellow Quake III[8] players I met in a server based in Sweden.  We spent so much time together, I felt like I knew the sound of their footsteps as well as the sound of my computer booting up.  I never met them, but with names such as FrAg_GoDdEsS and DETHenforcer, I knew that they were very personable and likeable people.  I felt like I knew FrAg_GoDdEsS so well that I wanted to marry her.  I knew how she always typed “LOL U R D3AD”[9] whenever she would snipe me from afar, and I’ve always liked women who can snipe me even when the ping of the server is greater than 300 milliseconds.  But I was devastated to find out that my love interest was not a woman like she said she was.  She always picked the female characters in the game, so you can imagine how depressed I became when I figured out that she was a he.  Soon I found that I couldn’t play Quake III anymore because of the painful memories that surfaced.

That’s when I went even lower in my descent into nerdiness.  Since I couldn’t open hailing frequencies with people at school and I wasn’t able to move on after FrAg_GoDdEsS, I decided to forsake individualistic communication altogether.  Only my computer understood me.  Computers were unchanging; when an icon was clicked on, it logically opened like any scientific, rationally thinking person would think it would.  I needed that kind of security in my life.  I decided to block all of the people on my AIM[10] Buddy List, but every once in a while I would unblock them so I could “warn” them up to 100% so they couldn’t type any more.  The sheer pleasure I felt after such a heinous act led me to believe that life was happier when people couldn’t be seen.  I swore I would never step foot in another store after I saw how Amazon.com[11] had everything I could ever want in life.  Most of my life was spent in my bedroom cave gaming away while clicking on “Find More Sources” in Kazaa[12], endlessly.  I figured out how to dual-boot my computer with Windows XP[13] and DOS[14] 6.22, so then I could run my new applications as well as nostalgically return to the good old days of Conventional Memory[15] and Autoexec.bat[16].  I had everything I needed in life.

That is when my mother started to crack down on my pathetically geeky and antisocial lifestyle.  She restricted my computer access to 2 PM-8 PM everyday, and I felt like I could barely breathe.  I had no idea what to do with my time.  I began to go to Best Buy daily outside of my computer use hours, but I knew that was merely a futile attempt to get as close to computers as possible yet still not be able to use them.  Soon I began to despise the fact that I longed for my computer for 18 hours a day, yet I was only able to use it for 6 hours a day.  It became an intangible desire that was simply not being fulfilled.  There was no hope in sight, and I knew that I needed to change something.  I was beginning to see the light.

I decided that I needed to forsake the lifestyle that had turned me into a mass of human nerdiness.  I had bought into the world of technology and in the process I had given Bill Gates my soul.  My life had reached an impenetrable wall; for the first time, I did not want Moore’s Law[17] to dictate my increase in nerdiness.  It was destroying me from the mouse-pointer-hand up.  To begin the process of transformation, I cancelled my subscription to PC Gamer and instead bought a subscription to Transworld Surf.  Soon my everyday language was transformed.  Instead of saying, “That is highly illogical.  Please reassess your judgement”, I began to say things like, “No way, dude!” and “That’s gnarly unreal, man!”  I also started forcing myself to like the humor of movies like “Dumb & Dumber”, “Meet the Deedles”, “Cheech & Chong”, and other quality motion pictures.  With my nerdiness off to the side, I started to like talking with people face to face again, and without my old nerdbonics jargon I was able to talk with people in a more normal way.  I started to skimp on my school assignments so I could go to the mall to waste endless hours walking around, talking with girls.  I didn’t know what was happening to me.  I decided to give up my techno and turned toward country music, which I have grown to love.  I pushed myself to give up my position as Grand Master Wizard in the Chess Club and then joined the Swing Dancing club. The era of FrAg_GoDdEsS was brought to a close when I met my wife there, and at the time she was escaping from the clutches of nerdaholicism as well.  Now we are very happy people and forsaking our nerd heritage together.

Do not let the current generation degenerate into a culture of pathetic nerds.  I was a casualty of this society, with all of its computer programs, MP3[18] players, and abundant CounterStrike[19] servers.  I had no life.  I was socially inept.  I couldn’t talk about anything for ten minutes straight except about the benefits of Athlon processors or the makeup of the Enterprise D’s dilithium crystal chamber.[20] I thought that the concept of the feminine personality was a contradiction to rational logic.  I did not know that cars don’t run on diesel gasoline.  I thought that the imminent issue of our era was the fact that anyone at anytime could write a virus to destroy the world’s C:/ drives.  I thought that football teams scored home runs.  I was beyond all hope of a cure.

I testify before you today that there is a cure.  The path is long and hard, requiring great force of will.  Every time you decide to watch Days of Our Lives on TV rather than rain holy hellfire of doom down on fellow EverQuest-ers[21] with your Level 73 cleric, you take a step in the right direction.  I had to do everything possible to keep from being carried off against my will into the pit of ultimate nerdiness.  Your transformation will take equal force of will.  Do not think that refusing to pay your electric bill or living with the Amish folk for a summer is too drastic.  Desperate nerds require desperate measures to cure them.  If you are unwilling to submit to willed transformation, you might as well become a Borg[22] and rest in peace.

Just as Jean-Luc Picard[23] was once a Borg and was brought back into humanity, I was once the king of geekdom and have now been brought back to humanity.  I have been brought back from the great abyss of cyberspace, yet many still remain there.  Do you not see what happens to people when their life becomes about technology?  They cut themselves off from society and somehow convince themselves that they are happy in that position.  If we let this continue, everything good and right about our society will die away and file itself into our hard drives!  Do not give into the mantras of this age.  Most nerds are avid Star Wars fanatics, but they fail to see that following the mantras is simply the quickest way to the Dark Side[24].  We do not need bigger, better, faster, smarter, and easier to live in this world.  These simply convince us into thinking that the world of technology is the best the world has to offer.  I hope my sad story has shown you the ill effects of technology gone awry.  When the grip of nerdaholicism has you by the throat, its lifestyle will always beckon you to come back.  Please, do not let this happen to you or anyone you love.

My name is -(:::Geek_Masta:::)- and I am a recovering nerdaholic.

[2] An MP3 player made by Apple.  For a definition of MP3, please refer to footnote #18

[3] Digital Subscriber Line

[4] A Central Processing Unit created by AMD Microprocessors that runs at 1.83 GHz

[5] This is a pun, in case you didn’t notice.  For those still requiring translation, “mega” is a Greek prefix meaning “large” or “million”, and to “bite” means to be pathetic.

[6] Actually, an “Angry Vulcan” is an oxymoron, but it serves its purpose to show Spock’s determination to non-Trekkies

[7] Source: http://slashdot.org/articles/03/09/09/1631250.shtml?tid=126&tid=128

[8] A multiplayer FPS (first person shooter) game in which the goal is to kill other people.  Created by John Carmack.

9 Translation:  Laugh out loud.  You are dead.

[10] AOL Instant Messenger

[11] http://www.amazon.com

[12] A program used to download everything on the planet, illegally

[13] Windows XP means the “Windows Experience”

[14] DOS:  Disk Operating System

[15] 640 Kilobytes of memory

[16] A relic of the old DOS days.  Upon bootup, DOS would load the device drivers called for in Autoexec.bat.  This file is similar , yet different syntax-wise,  to Config.sys.  To all who remember: SET BLASTER A220 I5 D1

[17] Moore’s Law dictates that computers will double in computing power every 18 months.

[18] MPEG²⁷ Layer-3

[19] A multiplayer FPS (first person shooter) game in which the goal is to kill other people.

[20] The dilithium crystal chamber is located in Main Engineering on Deck 10

[21] A multiplayer game in which millions of people pay $12 a month to create fantastical characters with magical skills and abilities.

[22] The Borg are a cybernetic collective of beings first seen in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Q Who”.  They are many in nature, yet one in essence.  They are fitted with cybernetic implants and are connected to a central “hive” that dictates their thoughts and actions.  Their main goal is to assimilate other beings into their collective and make them Borg as well.

[23] In the two-part episode entitled “Best of Both Worlds”, the Enterprise D, led by Captain Jean Luc Picard and his fearless crew, encounter a Borg ship.  The Borg invade the Enterprise when their shields are down, and they kidnap Picard.  Now Commander William T. Riker must step up and be Captain.  Likewise, Commander Shelby had to become First Officer.  Geordi LaForge stayed at Engineering, where he belonged.  Counselor Troi was phased out of the episode because of the guest star playing Shelby’s part, but she comes in handy in the end of the episode when Data and Worf rescue the Borgified Jean-Luc Picard and they need her telepathic skills to find the old Picard buried under all of the cybernetic implants that were cruelly administered by the Borg surgeons aboard the Borg Cube, which is ultimately destroyed in the end when Data places a command into the Borg collective and their ship blows up because of the energy overload, but all is not good since the Enterprise had a chunk of its hull cut away by the Borg tractor beam, added to the fact that there was a huge battle and the Enterprise would have to go to the spacedock in the next episode to repair all of the damage dealt by the Borg Cube upon its hull.  However, the producers of the show, Rick Berman and Jeri Taylor, realized that the Borg were very popular with the ST:TNG fan base and they decided to bring the Borg back for many episodes afterward.  They even created one of the best Star Trek movies ever when they made the Borg the central part of Star Trek: First Contact’s plot in 1996.  For those of you still reading this, I pity you.

[24] The more sinister side of the Force²⁵ that compels young Jedi to strike out and waste their lives

25 The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.²⁶

26 Quoted from Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Hope ©1977  Property of Lucasfilm, Ltd.  All Rights Reserved

27 MPEG: Motion Picture Editors Group

For those who decided to notice, you will realize that in all my nerdiness, I could not get Microsoft Word 97 to be friendly with its administration of footnotes.  For some reason, Word particularly likes to put footnotes on pages without the reference.  This is an affront to humanity if a former nerd master cannot arrange his stinkin footnotes in the way he wants to.  For all squinting to read this, we should band together and sue Bill Gates for his hidden footnote conspiracy.