Just in case the content of my blog hasn’t clued you into this fact, let me state quite straight forwardly that nerds love to critically examine popular culture. We talk about it; we argue about it; we insult each other over it.
The best way I can sum up how the typical nerd views the internet comes from the movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, when Holden McNeil says, “The internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.” And truthfully, I think nerds love to bitch about movies way more than they love pornography.
The release of Star Wars III Revenge of the Sith on DVD has set the forums and blogs in a furor not seen since the previous summer when it was released in theaters. Over at Slate Aidan Wasley has published the article “Star Wars I-VI: The Greatest Postmodern Art Film Ever.” Wasley reads the movies as a literary critic would read a great work of literature, and in spite of several instances where I disagree with the way in which Wasley applies the term “postmodern” I enjoyed the article very much.
Go read that if you want to, it’s really nerdy, but that article’s really just the setup for this next bit of jackassery.
Several hours after reading that article I found that it was already being argued over in a forum I regularly visit. Amidst all the intellectual and pseudo-intellectual babble sat a post that went like this:
He’s only got a beard so you can tell where his neck ends and his face begins.
Nerds”¦you gotta love us.
Post Script:
Some of you may wonder why I use term “nerd” instead of the more common epithet “geek.” When I was in tech school there were cliques just like any other school. The clique I hung around with readily acknowledged the fact that computer programming as a hobby and an occupation was a difficult obstacle to overcome socially, and we tried quite hard to find other activities to lessen our inherent awkwardness. In contrast to this was the clique of folks who lived and breathed computer programming. We made fun of that group. We called them “geeks,” and our favorite saying was “Geeks are the people nerds make fun of.” So there you go.