My nerdfighter story isn't anything spectacular. It's almost boring. Like for many of us, Youtube videos were the ones to lead me to the Green brothers, and the nerdfighters. I had seen vlogbrothers mentioned in a variety of videos by people I was subscribed to at the time. I think Ray William Johnson was the one who finally made me crack with his video, which showed a clip of a vlogbrothers video, asking what the hell was happening to the men of youtube. I wandered to check out the video the clip was of, and it was this video of all things:http://youtu.be/U1dirHGODpM
Yeah, Hank in a tutu, claiming in a true Rick Astley fashion that he was never gonna give me up, confused me enough to make me check out the rest of the channel. It made me wonder if the whole channel was full of that stuff, it made me question what sort of a person he was, whether he was one of those rather exceptionally weird guys on youtube, like the guy who has 500+ videos on his channel of him, dressing up in full motorcycling gear and humping inflatable animals. Or the guy who just posts videos of him farting. Yeah, doesn't quite have the showmanship of the motorcycle guy.
Anyways, I went to the vlogbrothers channel and started watching from the very first video. To my surprise, it turned out they weren't like that inflatable-toy-humping guy. No, they were actually two wonderfully geeky people with an actual purpose to their videos. Ultimately I think what first got me hooked was John. Something about his voice was, and is, very pleasant to me - not to mention his videos were, and still are, often quite wonderfully informative and fun. In any case, that is how I became a nerdfighter. I hit the subscribe button and watched every single one of the videos, becoming more proud of being geeky in the process.
After watching videos for a while, I did also join the ning, but never became active. The problem with ning sites, in my opinion, has always been that they are unnecessarily messy and no matter what you do they look clustered. It was unnecessarily difficult to navigate and browse, so I just never bothered, letting the nerdfighter community slide past me like a penguing on ice for the most part. I had been hoping for a nice forum for nerdfighters for quite a while, so when Your Pants, a clean-cut normal forum, finally opened to a small portion of nerdfighters, I was there among the first 200 to join, thanks to my bad habit of procrastinating going to sleep. I practically jumped at the chance. It quickly became one of my favorite forums to visit. It was active, full of discussions, and wonderful projects. It hadn't even been open for long and it was already teeming with wonderful, geeky life! I won't bore you with the details of my YourPants forum life, but I will say that I really miss the old forum layout. I really do. And I wish to kick the hackers in the shins for essentially prompting the change to the current version.
On the old YourPants forum I was able to meet several nerdfighters from Finland. We even organized the first Finnish nerdfighter gathering last summer. Only five of us could make it there, but we had a great time – we sat around outside, chatting about books, Doctor Who, and so on, while munching on some ice cream. I even wound up visiting a wonderful, large book store with some of them. We are already planning another gathering and hopefully this time more people will be able to make it.
Now a random nerdfighterly story, because I couldn't come up with anything else to add here:
I have a john Green Pizza shirt. This is the story of getting the shirt. When it arrived, last summer, I was visiting my dad's, so it was my lovely mother who would open the package. What she discovered positively appalled her and she went on to call me, saying how a horrible red shirthad arrived for me, a shirt that says 'pizza' on it. At this point she was very fixated on how redthe shirt was. I really just had to chuckle at her. “With the picture of a creepy-looking guy on it?”, I asked, knowing that she was probably even more horrified by that than anything else on that shirt. She proceeded to describe, in length, how the man’s face “looks like some sort of a terrorist with horrible moustache!”. Needless to say, I was highly amused when she was narrating all this. I assured her that it was all related to a joke, which seemed to lessen the blow, slightly. I made the mental note to explain it all to her better when I would see her face to face again.
Upon getting back home, I put on the shirt, parading around the apartment while wearing it, and mom kept glaring at it with a half-amused, half 'oh-my-god-what-the-hell-are-you-wearing?'-expression. Once I had enjoyed her positively disasterous facial expression long enough, I proceeded to explain to her that the man on the shirt is in fact an author, not a terrorist (that I know of), and that he usually doesn’t come with a creepy moustache. I also told the tale of John’s weight struggles and how the wonderful people on the internet started posting every picture of him eating that they could find, and how that essentially was how this shirt came to be. Mom laughed and her initial horror seemed to subside more or less.
I took her amusement as a good sign so, to further calm her, I showed her the video where John speaks about the John Green Is Fat Facebook group and expresses that he wants the Pizza-image as a shirt. I think that my mother was mesmerized by his hair more than anything else. She found it adorable how it kept changing after every jump-cut. I explained to her the concept of John’s puff levels, but, honestly, she was paying more attention to the shiny video (his hair might have hypnotic powers). She was amused by it. So. John’s puffy hair essentially made it okay for me to own a horrible shirt that says PIZZA on it.
Anyways, I went to the vlogbrothers channel and started watching from the very first video. To my surprise, it turned out they weren't like that inflatable-toy-humping guy. No, they were actually two wonderfully geeky people with an actual purpose to their videos. Ultimately I think what first got me hooked was John. Something about his voice was, and is, very pleasant to me - not to mention his videos were, and still are, often quite wonderfully informative and fun. In any case, that is how I became a nerdfighter. I hit the subscribe button and watched every single one of the videos, becoming more proud of being geeky in the process.
After watching videos for a while, I did also join the ning, but never became active. The problem with ning sites, in my opinion, has always been that they are unnecessarily messy and no matter what you do they look clustered. It was unnecessarily difficult to navigate and browse, so I just never bothered, letting the nerdfighter community slide past me like a penguing on ice for the most part. I had been hoping for a nice forum for nerdfighters for quite a while, so when Your Pants, a clean-cut normal forum, finally opened to a small portion of nerdfighters, I was there among the first 200 to join, thanks to my bad habit of procrastinating going to sleep. I practically jumped at the chance. It quickly became one of my favorite forums to visit. It was active, full of discussions, and wonderful projects. It hadn't even been open for long and it was already teeming with wonderful, geeky life! I won't bore you with the details of my YourPants forum life, but I will say that I really miss the old forum layout. I really do. And I wish to kick the hackers in the shins for essentially prompting the change to the current version.
On the old YourPants forum I was able to meet several nerdfighters from Finland. We even organized the first Finnish nerdfighter gathering last summer. Only five of us could make it there, but we had a great time – we sat around outside, chatting about books, Doctor Who, and so on, while munching on some ice cream. I even wound up visiting a wonderful, large book store with some of them. We are already planning another gathering and hopefully this time more people will be able to make it.
Now a random nerdfighterly story, because I couldn't come up with anything else to add here:
I have a john Green Pizza shirt. This is the story of getting the shirt. When it arrived, last summer, I was visiting my dad's, so it was my lovely mother who would open the package. What she discovered positively appalled her and she went on to call me, saying how a horrible red shirthad arrived for me, a shirt that says 'pizza' on it. At this point she was very fixated on how redthe shirt was. I really just had to chuckle at her. “With the picture of a creepy-looking guy on it?”, I asked, knowing that she was probably even more horrified by that than anything else on that shirt. She proceeded to describe, in length, how the man’s face “looks like some sort of a terrorist with horrible moustache!”. Needless to say, I was highly amused when she was narrating all this. I assured her that it was all related to a joke, which seemed to lessen the blow, slightly. I made the mental note to explain it all to her better when I would see her face to face again.
Upon getting back home, I put on the shirt, parading around the apartment while wearing it, and mom kept glaring at it with a half-amused, half 'oh-my-god-what-the-hell-are-you-wearing?'-expression. Once I had enjoyed her positively disasterous facial expression long enough, I proceeded to explain to her that the man on the shirt is in fact an author, not a terrorist (that I know of), and that he usually doesn’t come with a creepy moustache. I also told the tale of John’s weight struggles and how the wonderful people on the internet started posting every picture of him eating that they could find, and how that essentially was how this shirt came to be. Mom laughed and her initial horror seemed to subside more or less.
I took her amusement as a good sign so, to further calm her, I showed her the video where John speaks about the John Green Is Fat Facebook group and expresses that he wants the Pizza-image as a shirt. I think that my mother was mesmerized by his hair more than anything else. She found it adorable how it kept changing after every jump-cut. I explained to her the concept of John’s puff levels, but, honestly, she was paying more attention to the shiny video (his hair might have hypnotic powers). She was amused by it. So. John’s puffy hair essentially made it okay for me to own a horrible shirt that says PIZZA on it.
The End.
Oh look, another doodle of me! This time wearing the pizza shirt.
And clearly trying to get you to understand that I do not wear pants at home.
I can assure you, this image made more sense on Tumblr.
Pants are over rated :)
ReplyDeletePants are only good for In Your Pants jokes!
DeleteWhy would anyone willingly wear pants at home (barring presence of guests)? I mean, I understand PJ pants, especially if you feel cold. But actual pants? WHY?????
DeleteI can't believe there was a point in my life where I wore actual pants at home. Honest to god pants! Even jeans! And I didn't mind them!
Me too, I'm always wearing pajama pants or jogging pants. I would never even spend 5 minutes with normal pants at home!
DeleteI learnt to use gym shorts or pajama pants (depending on the season) at home by the hard way, there were too many times when i thought there wasn't anybody and suddenly... oops, we have guests and I'm walking though the place in boxers...
DeleteBut yeah, When you put your pants on it means that the serious part of the day has started....
Do shorts count as pants? Because I wear shorts all the time, and I don't want to get left out of the 'not wearing pants' club.
DeleteAs long as you don't wear fancy pants you're on the safe side!
Deleteshorts do not count as proper pants. You are safe.
DeleteI always thought pants counted as shorts too. Phew. I am safe as well then.
DeleteI'm now imagining that random poor soul that is not an author on this blog, venturing here, seeing 9 comments on nothing but anti-pants statements.
DeleteIf we suddenly get hate mail from pants fanatics, we know what's up.
DeleteWhat random poor soul? o.O
DeleteWe won't get hate mail. We'll get sent pants.
I now wish there was a 'like'-button that I could hit in these comments.
DeleteI got HankRoll'd twice today... Somehow, I still get your fascination.
ReplyDelete