Indeed. And "real" nerd culture has just became deeper, and more specialized. Back in the day, a lot of the nerds were into the same type of things, while now there are sub-groups. Some nerds are anime-nerds, others are programming-nerds, and not every programming-nerd is an anime-nerd, and vice-versa. And the amount of nerd-sub groups is huge, every quarter or so I encounter a nerdy topic and sub-group I had no idea about before.
Being from a small rural Australian town, it was amazing when I found my nerds in the big city. You do end up a bit pigeonholed when everything gets too specific. I think that is why I like makerspaces and things like that. You get all sorts.
I had the same experience. It wasn't until I was around ~15 or so I discovered our tiny place actually had two whole other people who were into computers. At one point, I moved to a bigger area and discovered there were full groups of up to 20 people per group that also liked computers. Opened up a whole new world.
There are so many groups and most of them don't regularly pop up in mainstream culture.
The fact that mainstream has co-opted many of the past nerdy things doesn't mean they are gone. They have just moved to new not so visible things. And those are hard to see in sea of all the content produced. Independent podcast and comics are a thing. And then there is novels and such from China, Korea and Japan. Some of these more mainstream already lot less.
The objects of nerd culture went mainstream, but the nerds themselves did IMHO not. And because of the change that mainstream brought on their objects, nerds are losing their culture. People can like the same thing, but for different reasons. And this becomes a problem when people are not aware of other people's reason and just start changing them, making them more matching their own reasons. So at some point, the traits that the original fans like are disappearing, getting replaces by the preferred traits of the new fans.
We've seen this many times. Star Trek being probably a very notable example, where the fancy new original Series was a great disappointment for many fans, while the (semi)comedy-version from a fan became the preferred love of this fans.
Well, TNG put the bar very high on quality. New series, don't.
On video games, even simple games like BSD trek and Super-Star-Trek on Python3 have great designs and still be played. The same with roguelikes like Nethack/Slashem.
I think 'geek chic' (i.e poseurs) went mainstream a while ago, but actual nerds will never be popular by definition.
I've tried in vain to find people at parties who care about my favourite arcane programming languages and obscure political doctrine, it's impossible :(
Other nerds don't have to care about the same stuff as you, they just have to be interested.
I am still tight with my group of 7 guys from school and we are all nerds but hardly share a single interest. We are interested in hearing about each other's niche shit and that's what keeps us together.
> I am still tight with my group of 7 guys from school
While that's nice and all, it's not super helpful advice for people who are trying to make new friends, as we cannot go back in time and repeat school from younger days...
Ah, but the parent made the explicit point of trying to find people they have two specific topics in common with. To argue that they shouldn't, doesn't help them in their quest for what they are specifically asking about.
It's ok to want to look for people with common interests, just as it's ok to feel it's enough to spend time with people you don't have a lot of common interests with.
Some sub-groups of people are more frequent visitors of some type of events than others. Depending exactly what you mean with "parties", it could be that those types of events are not the right one to find the sub-group you're out after.
If you wanna find people to talk about finance, you wouldn't attend a football match, for example. So if you wanna find programmers, you're gonna have to attend programming related events, or some related area like hardware hacking, or just generally "makers" meetup.
For political groups, there tend to be groups of those all over the world, for every affiliation, but depending on the ideology and the overall political temperature, sometimes people try to avoid letting those opinions bleed over to other areas of interest.
FWIW I consider myself an "actual nerd", but I also find "arcane programming languages and obscure political doctrines" to be extremely boring. No offense, but I would definitely snub you at one of those parties where you're looking for nerds. To me programming languages are just a means to an end and political doctrines are for nontechnical people. I'm more interested in building stuff.
Eg I wanted to benchmark the CPU inside my Apple Watch last week and I couldn't find any off-the-shelf apps that do this, so I had to learn enough Swift to create a basic UI with a start button and a multiply-and-add loop that pegs a CPU core. I would never learn a new language if I didn't have to.
Another example: I couldn't find any reasonably priced tool chests so I bought a table saw with the intention of building my own tool chests out of plywood next week. When I mentioned this to nerdy/technical friends, they were all interested because they also had a metric fuckton of tools, computer hardware, solvents, etc that they wanted to store efficiently. I think if you worked on more practical projects like this you'd be a lot more popular at parties where most attendees are engineers.
Fair criticism. I think I need to move away from politics for my own sanity. I've thought this way for a while, even though I've avoided partisanship and focused on philosophy. Even there it's all heat and not much light, and in my experience building things is always more fun.
> In conclusion, the earliest instances of this remark were anonymous. The comedians Rags Ragland and Ukie Sherin employed the quip, as did the writer John McNulty. In addition, there is some evidence that Yogi Berra employed the joke, but in all cases the jest was already in circulation.
The others before McNulty in 1943, the others were thematic, but not there. Berra was born in ‘25. It’s possible in the days before the internet that two distinct an unconnected people came up with a similar expression, or, given baseball traveling maybe he picked it up from others along the way. So I think it’s a tossup between Berra and McNulty. The others are on their way there but not there.
Most "nerd" interests like SciFi have been neutered if not completely bent out of shape while going mainstream
So no, it's not nerd culture that is dying, it's mainstream "nerdism" that committed suicide.
Nerd culture was never mainstream, MCU wasn't nerd culture becoming mainstream, it was "squeeze the lemon and hope it sticks".
And it did for a while, but not understanding what's the appeal of nerd culture for nerds, they went back to producing blockbusters that kinda resembles marvel if you squint hard enough, but it's actually the same thing of watching independence day set in a World where they replaced Jeff Goldblum with a guy dressed like a superhero.
Nerd are still enjoying their nerdy stuff, while completely ignoring mainstream travesties from multi-billion-dollars corporations.
MCU is not the same MCU nerds were crazy about when they were kids, in the same way kids today consider what we called nerd stuff back then as "old people garbage"
George RR Martin made a good point- that if a nerd is someone with a lot of knowledge about something others find uninteresting, we've all become nerds with the advent of the internet. It's just too easy to go down a rabbit hole not to be a nerd in regards to something.
But going down a rabbit hole in the era of internet does not necessarily mean gaining a lot of knowledge. Usually it means binge learning other people's information and conclusions, while not making any relevant experience and conclusion on your own, thus not making much knowledge yourself. And then moving to the next rabbit hole, to forget most things you have learned just now.
For me, a nerd is also someone who sticks to the hole and builds their own labyrinth to some degree.
I think it's fair to say that nerd culture does, has, and always will exist, but what nerd culture is changes with the passing sands of time. The nerds of today are not the nerds of yesteryear (read: us).
Anime in Europe was already mainstream in the 80's and 90's with Dragon Ball (late 80's/early-mid 90's), Captain Tsubasa, Candy Candy, Mazinger Z, Heidi. On video games, well, everyone played Tetris at least once.
When you have a Dungeons and Dragons movie hitting over 100mil in the box office, and when comic book movies are some of the highest grossing, i think its pretty safe to say nerd culture is incredibly mainstream.
Most comic book movies are simply bad, and "real" nerds hate them.
No nerd loved the last Star Wars trilogy or Rings of power or Wonder Woman 1984 or the nth spider-verse repetition, mostly because studios take something popular among nerds and change it to please modern audience which is exactly what's wrong with the so called "nerd culture" today: it's not a culture.
This. Also, the term "roguelike" for action-adventure games. FFS, if you play a roguelike like Slashem you will know all of these "roguelike" wannabe's have nothing to do with the genre. There are just rehased Zelda-likes with permadeath.