Thanks, but I am a drama nerd. We’re really not that cool.
I was referring to the frequent use of drama references in BBT. Like when Sheldon and hoodie dude’s mom decide to act out musical numbers. Or when they riff in detail off other vintage films that science/SF/comic book nerds normally wouldn’t touch. It’s just this vague collection of uncool things tossed together, apparently unaware that things like comic books are most definitely now cool.
I was unaware nerds were so compartmentalized. If science nerds could also be comic book nerds, can’t they also be theater nerds?
In my experience the Venn diagram has science/SF/comics in one circle, and art/drama/non-SF literature in another circle, with very little overlap.
Otherwise CP Snow wouldn’t have had to write The Two Cultures, and I wouldn’t have had nearly so many people tell me I can’t like SF because I have an English degree.
My son’s Aspy, so yeah, lol.
I must be weird then, because I was a math and science nerd who liked art, literature, and music (but not theater) and was totally indifferent to comics. I learned to love sci-fi as an adult, and I can’t stand most fantasy.
Speaking of which, where do math and music fall? I was interested in math, but not because of modern physics. Classical dynamics and differential equations, as in engineering math, but not the quantum physics stuff that draws a lot of people in. These days, I mostly do probability and statistics stuff. I was into music both as a musician and as a music fan who ingested every type of music I could get my hands on. There are three instruments within five feet of me at this moment, and three more in the next room waiting to be played. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I’ve got a playlist that would be a couple of months long if I were to listen to it straight through, and that’s only the 20% or so I haven’t listened to yet.
So yeah, I’m not a traditional comics or theater nerd, but I’m not not a nerd either.
Me too, sort of. Kanner’s autism.
There was a subset of the drama kids at my first highschool who were in the sci-fi club as well. They all liked to play Changeling more than other RPGs. But they generally liked sci-fi and anime as well. Everyone liked the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the overlapping groups.
At my second highschool the poetry club was the sister club for sci-fi. We did joint events at school fairs. There was a lot of cross over interest in paganism which we got in trouble for a bit.
At both of there was just alot of overlap with gaming, sci-fi, goth, pagans, drama, writing, art, ect. Even though I tended to think of kids would “partied” as more “other” there were still some in the sci-fi club, and even in my more immediate circle. I think the main thing is that no one was on a sports team.
Actually in the sci-fi club there were some splits over music taste, but connection over gaming. There was a goth rivalry sort of thing with ravers and ska kids but we still played games together.
Whenever I see other people talk about highschool grouping it seems so regional down to specific schools sometimes. (Although I’m sure averages do emerge) And in college most people explore beyond their clique.
I saw more overlap in high school, less overlap in university (partly driven by the university’s own policies on which majors could take which other courses as electives), and way more since graduating.
One guy I was on a date with told me I didn’t belong on the nerd dating web site we’d meet on because I had an arts degree. Several other wouldn’t date me full stop because of that. I got laughed at and called a unicorn because I have an arts degree and run Linux on my home computer.
Back to the topic at hand: a lot of this crap overlaps with the whole “fake geek girl” trope. To me geek and nerd just mean that whatever you’re into, you’re really into it – whether that’s astronomy, quilting, history, or SF.
There was a character on The Bridge who was implied to be autistic. They seemed to handle it pretty well. It didn’t give her superpowers (cf. Rain Man), it wasn’t played for comedy, and there was nothing cute about it (cf. Bones).
Oh yeah, the fake geek girl myth has made it worse.
I’ve been lucky to retain a more reasonable group. My current long term game has two people with art degrees, a philosopher who now works in tech, and someone who works in computers and medical research. Others in my extended gaming circle are writers and mostly people who are more working class. The new people we’re meeting since the move, work in or around tech.
I’ve never been accused if being a fake geek but I’ve also never really been on the dating scene or ever had a high profile online. I’m in a poly relationship but I’ve been with my long term partner since our first year of college. The closest was when we first started dating a few of our mutual friends went from treating me like “one of the guys” to making jokes about me being a ball and chain kind of drag. But none of the friends we had later got like that. I have been in games with more misogynistic friends of friends but no one ever called me out or tried to stop me from snarking and getting combative when they annoyed me. I’ve been lucky that on one’s ever tried to quiz me on my fandom, but I also almost never get hit on or harassed. I’ve got a preternatural skill for not being noticed.
I have gotten hit with some artist cliches in conversations but those are usually from the same type that assume I also keep house in the relationship. These are never people we spend much time with.
Ah.
If you take “nerd” to mean “has taken at least undergrad level classes in at university”, then I am a math geek, no more no less. I tested out of all my gen ed requirements plus calculus and linear algebra, so I didn’t take any humanities courses in a university setting. However, I am interested in the arts and literature and read voraciously, and I’ve known liberal arts majors who can’t even remember the classes they took, let alone what they learned. Our education system is mostly cram and forget, unfortunately, so coursework and pieces of paper don’t count for too much.
Yes, this is exactly what I mean. A liberal arts degree doesn’t mean that you’ll have to go and work in the liberal arts factory for the rest of your life. College isn’t trade school, so your degree doesn’t determine your exact career path. I’ve known so many top notch programmers who didn’t have a comp sci degree, or even any degree. More importantly, and this should go without saying, you don’t need to have a degree to be interested in shit.
Yep. Men just have to be vaguely quirky to be considered nerdy. I get pegged as a sci-fi / fantasy nerd quite a bit, even though that label doesn’t fit at all. Women, on the other hand, need to be able to rattle off some extra’s parent’s dog’s food allergies to avoid the “fake geek girl” label.
I hate men sometimes. I am one, but shit like this makes me hate them.
Rain Man wasn’t even autistic IRL, nor was he intellectually disabled. He had a neurological condition, but it was extremely rare. Yet somehow, by making the fictionalized Rain Man autistic , autism was associated with being a savant, which is something totally different. Besides, megasavants like Kim Peek come along once in a generation, if that.
Bones, on the other hand, doesn’t even seem autistic to me. It’s like someone read a little bit about some of the outward manifestations of autism, misconstrued nearly all of them, and shoehorned them into one character who also still had to be likeable somehow.
Autism as cheap humor, such as Sheldon Cooper, rankles me a bit, but not quite as much as Autism As Plot Device. This is where a two dimensional autistic character is created to teach neurotypical characters a Very Special Lesson, or for them to demonstrate how strong or compassionate they are for allowing someone who’s just a tiny bit different from them to occupy the same physical space. Gag.
From what I’ve seen of Community, literally only a few episodes, I think they do a good job of creating an autistic character who isn’t a plot device or a cheap joke, but a character in the same level of all the others, so just happens to be autistic. Not sure what else qualifies. There are woefully few examples.
That differs from my experience. As a kid, I wanted to be a paleontologist or astronaut, and I’ve been a lifelong science fiction nerd, though I never got much into comic books (even when they were 35¢ each I couldn’t often afford them) and to this day have little interest in superheroes. And I always loved math and the hard sciences like physics and chemistry. But I got really into art and the humanities as a teen, and ended up a Theatre Arts major in college. My SAT score was pretty high, but also perfectly balanced between the math and language halves. Also, I never felt alone bridging that dichotomy. I’ve had several friends who enjoy and embrace both “sides” of nerdery.
I have trouble relating to science nerds who don’t love drama and art, or art nerds who hate math. I know there are plenty of both, but they’re not my peeps.
I had a great conversation with another arts major where we started talking about how we hated math and wound up with so many exceptions that we both learned we didn’t hate math at all – we just hated math class.
Then I had another great conversation a few years later with someone who had majored in math (I forget which branch). He’d assumed when he met me I was another “math person” and was surprised when he found out that wasn’t so. The way I put it to him was all the people I knew who were really into math would gleefully solve for X and be genuinely happy when it comes out to 0, whereas while I’ll use math for all sorts of things and respect it makes other people happy when something comes out to 0, I didn’t get any joy from it – besides being glad I was one step closer to finishing my homework, anyhow.
Those puzzles where they tell you Jane has a blue house and always eats fish on Sunday while Frank has pink sweater and lives next to the person with the green house – those I love, and I’ve heard people call them math (though I wouldn’t).
I’ve always loved those puzzles, too. I guess they’re logic puzzles rather than math ones, but I can see how they would be useful in developing an analytical mindset needed for success in math.
If you’ve seen Parenthood, about 4 seasons in it seemed like they started doing some more nuanced things with the two aspbergers characters. It wasn’t particularly deep but I thought over the course of the show they went from some pretty broad attempts at writing and playing autism to creating real characters. I particularly liked the story line of the adult not realizing he had it and then piecing it together. I imagine that is happening to a lot of people right now.
I’m with you. I’m definitely a music and math geek, and one stop away from being an art and science geek. Looking at people’s MFA projects, there are loads of interdisciplinary geeks out there fusing art and science in really clever ways.
I have a theory about comics and gaming geeks, as opposed to arts and science geeks. If art geeks and science geeks have their one discipline that they’re pouring themselves into, the comics and gaming geeks are looking for escape. Not saying there’s anything wrong with that, or even that someone can’t have both motivations at the same time, but I do think the motivations are more different between science and comics geekery than they are between science and theater geekery.
In engineering school, I met so many of these people. They not only thought any major other than engineering was a toilet paper degree dooming the graduate to a life of poverty, but thought having any interests in the arts or music were a waste of time. My guess is they were pushed into engineering by their parents, or were after a paycheck in Big Ag, Big Pharma, or Defense. Whatever it is, they had issues.
I believe we call these people “neckbeards” today.
I’m not sure what we call artists and musicians who don’t like technology. I’m sure there are some, but they’re about as rare as computer illiterate math professors, who most assuredly exist.
Keeping a population of 60-70 million perhaps.
Sakhalin is roughly the Eastern equivalent of the UK. It’s habitable - for about half a million people who probably wish they lived elsewhere. Even Siberia can be nice in summer.
They were invented, AFAIK, by Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll, and he used to send them to the many girls and young women with whom he corresponded. Remember that at the time the universities were barred to women.
I tend to distinguish arithmetic from mathematics. These puzzles are mathematical, full stop. They involve set theory and Boolean logic and you can’t get much more mathematical than that. Unless I have a specific problem to solve, I hate arithmetic, calculus and trigonometry send me to sleep and algebra I find boring. Symbolic logic is a little better - sufficiently non-boring that I could end up earning a living at it.
Could be. I really haven’t seen the show.
I can’t relate to that at all. My experiences have been almost the polar opposite of that. I thought there was something horribly wrong with me until fairly recently, and now I realize I’m more normal than I thought. Not only are there more people getting diagnosed, but it’s more acceptable to be outside the mainstream now than it was when (and where) I grew up.
Also, it’s hard to believe anyone who has Asperger’s would think they’re normal their entire life. Even if they don’t have a name for their condition, it must be different enough from the norm where they know something is up. If they really do think they’re normal, then they are either from a more permissive culture than I am, or autism and Asperger’s are more different than I thought.