Comment by timcambrant
2 days ago
I feel the same. It's a distinct part of nerd culture.
In the '70s, if you were into computers you were most likely also a fan of Star Trek. I remember an anecdote from the 1990s when an entire dial-up ISP was troubleshooting its modem pools because there were zero people connected and they assumed there was an outage. The outage happened to occur exactly while that week's episode of X-Files was airing in their time zone. Just as the credits rolled, all modems suddenly lit up as people connected to IRC and Usenet to chat about the episode. In ~1994 close to 100% of residential internet users also happened to follow X-Files on linear television. There was essentially a 1:1 overlap between computer nerds and sci-fi nerds.
Today's analog seems to be that almost all nerds love anime and Andy Weir books and some of us feel a bit alienated by that.
> Today's analog seems to be that almost all nerds love anime and Andy Weir books and some of us feel a bit alienated by that.
Especially because (from my observation) modern "nerds" who enjoy anime seem to relish at bringing it (and various sex-related things) up at inappropriate times and are generally emotionally immature.
It's quite refreshing seeing that other people have similar lines of thinking and that I'm not alone in feeling somewhat alienated.
I think I'd push back and say that nerd culture is no longer really a single thing. Back in the star trek days, the nerd "community" was small enough that star trek could be a defining quality shared by the majority. Now the nerd community has grown, and there are too many people to have defining parts of the culture that are loved by the majority.
Eg if the nerd community had $x$ people in the star trek days, now there are more than $x$ nerds who like anime and more than $x$ nerds who dislike it. And the total size is much bigger than both.