what has ever been your nerdiest hobby?

maybe 800+ hours I've spent playing team fortress 2.

or when I was about 13 or 14 I used to sit in the basement by myself, roll up d&d characters and have them fight. also constantly read various pen and paper rpg rule books that I almost never played (star frontiers, marvel superheroes, dc superheroes etc).

i started playing mtg in '96, back when the cards looked like this:

i still have a shoebox and a binder full of them.

there was a local tournament every week. i won it many times. great fun.

then we moved to the states, and no one played magic. people thought it was "the devil". :(

i guess it would be playing quake online about 10-11 years ago. i played for about 3 hours a night. i got invited to a tournament in simi valley at the time. i was in there for about 10 minutes, turned around, and never played quake (or any video game for that matter) again.

My dark angels appeared in White Dwarf at one point, along with an action shot of me playing a 40k championship match at Games Day in the early nineties. I still have my gold bolt gun badge. Don't judge me, I was 12.

  On 10/10/2010 at 6:50 PM, disparaissant said:

i larped

i have a bunch of friends who are into this. i just find it funny, they've tried talking me into it

  On 10/10/2010 at 7:45 PM, tv_party said:

maybe 800+ hours I've spent playing team fortress 2.

one of my buddies was around that time, possibly (more likely) even beyond that. i'm surprised he passed 12th grade, and the grades he had surprised me even more.

for me i guess i love video games (yet hardly play them), i like movies that are probably considered obscure. but that's probably not enough for the nerd branding. as a little kid i spent a lot of time by myself, either playing outside, reading, or drawing(i was unusually good, i wish i had taken the skill farther). but then again, what kid didn't do those things

but i'm pretty obsessive with music, and learning more about my musical idols. perhaps that'd do it.

oh and i wrote all of Star Trek

oh, and i also played world of warcraft for 4+ years (first public beta in 2004 to late 2008), 2 of those years in a super serious raid guild, rushing home from work every other day in order to keep up with the set raid times etc.

it really seems like such a waste now, thinking of all that time spent in the game, mining for hours on end, following the auction house market closely in order to make enough gold to buy potions and what not for the next raid. quite scary really, and yet i look at the next expansion thinking "that does look kinda cool", just before mindslapping myself across the face.

  On 10/10/2010 at 8:36 PM, data said:

rushing home from work every other day in order to keep up with the set raid times etc.

 

DKP is serious business!

I used to try making electronic music.

Mapping/designing houses, caves, NPCs, etc for Morrowind

I wrote a game for my ZX when I was about 10. You played a postman and you had to avoid a dog and some cars. A postman, what sort of spacker was I as a child? The ability to imagine anything and I choose the most mundane job in the planet. Saying that, I think it predated Trashman and it was pretty similar.

I play World of Warcraft, I enjoy Scrabble and Chess quite often, I make electronic music which for me also involves procuring as much music equipment as my salary allows, plus I also have a large and ever expanding cable collection which I keep in a bucket.

it seems like everybody here did the 40k stuff pre-getting laid/getting IDM. I'm backwards that way, I'm only now getting into it (22yo) and i dedicate about one full day a week to it (modelling + playing).

Also it's awesome here in Romania, it's a like a very small tightly knit community of circa 30 guys who are all heavy drinking fun guys. Only one or two tweens and only one or two permavirgins. The kids don't show up much and the permavirgins come in handy when ordering pizza.

Big up disparaissant for the single VTS/VTDA mention. Never played it, but read copious amounts of fluff and rules with the intention of eventually getting a group together, never managed, then went to uni, nerd dreams crushed.

I wouldn't larp under fucking gunpoint though, wtf?!

.

watching insects in the same manner which many enjoy watching birds

  On 10/10/2010 at 9:36 PM, BCM said:

I enjoy Scrabble and Chess quite often

you must have some powerful binoculars

lol

I'd like to point out I never had anything to do with warhammer you fucking nerds.

  On 10/10/2010 at 9:39 PM, Lube Saibot said:

it seems like everybody here did the 40k stuff pre-getting laid/getting IDM. I'm backwards that way, I'm only now getting into it (22yo) and i dedicate about one full day a week to it (modelling + playing).

 

Also it's awesome here in Romania, it's a like a very small tightly knit community of circa 30 guys who are all heavy drinking fun guys. Only one or two tweens and only one or two permavirgins. The kids don't show up much and the permavirgins come in handy when ordering pizza.

 

Big up disparaissant for the single VTS/VTDA mention. Never played it, but read copious amounts of fluff and rules with the intention of eventually getting a group together, never managed, then went to uni, nerd dreams crushed.

 

I wouldn't larp under fucking gunpoint though, wtf?!

yeah i played the tabletop game casually at school with a group of nerdy boys and it was fun and i was looking for something to piss off my fundamentalist mormon dad with and sneaking out of the house to go act like a vampire on saturday nights seemed like just the thing. boy did it ever fuckin work.

it only took me 3 months to realize that wow is a huge waste of time and energy. my roommate kristi convinced me to play ugh hghghg gghhg so stupid. on the plus i didnt actually pay for it, her and my other flatmates sprung it on me as a "gift."

worst gift ever!

OH HEY the nerd thing i get the most flak for is my slight obsession with typography. people will post stuff on my facebook wall in comic sans just because they KNOW i will go on a fucking rant about how awful it is. comic sans can actually ruin my day.

just gonna go ahead and get it out of the way now

AWFUL

  On 10/9/2010 at 10:52 PM, Dirty Protest said:

Im spending my Saturday night sitting in listening to Chomsky debates and lectures. My 16yo self would kick my arse.

this hahaha....ive spent nights listening to old adorno lectures that were broadcasted. anyone who has ever witnessed how slowly that guy speaks knows what it means. i stll think hes a dappa though.

It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions. What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty! We speak of a "snake": this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one. One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music. Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni's sound figures; perhaps he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear that he must know what men mean by "sound." It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. In the same way that the sound appears as a sand figure, so the mysterious X of the thing in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an image, and finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is a least not derived from the essence of things. - from Nietzsche's On Truth and Lies

SEE THE POINT OF ME POSTING IN IT WAS LIKE KIND OF LIKE A FLU SHOT OR SOMETHING BUT WITH LESS CANCER VIRUS AND AUTISM I DID IT SO I WOULDNT GET SO PISSED OFF WHEN SOMEONE INEVITABLY POSTED A HUGE SPIEL IN COMIC SANS OR WHATEVER NOW I AM DOING THE SAME WITH IMPACT BECAUSE IT, TOO, IS AN AWFUL FONT

plus i kind of have to be in a really awful mood in the first place, ya see

papyrus is much worse

I've spent days play axis and allies games. I suppose that's pretty dorky.

Now that we're on typography, I ALWAYS point out any signage in Helvetica. even if no one is with me....

  On 10/11/2010 at 1:30 AM, dr lopez said:

I've spent days play axis and allies games. I suppose that's pretty dorky.

 

Now that we're on typography, I ALWAYS point out any signage in Helvetica. even if no one is with me....

yeah that's another one. i like helvetica. to a point. i mean it's overused but hey it's honestly a great typeset.

also i get wet for din 1541. german road signs are beautiful!