Nerd Culture

By fifteen I was halfway through the classics. I'd acquired pretty much the whole Western canon out of used book sales sponsored by the local library. One paper grocery bag of used books was one dollar. In paperback prints of classics, which are rarely over 250p, that's pennies per book. I never bothered to finish the canon. My cutoff is WWII. I only read anything written before then to enjoy the language. Anything useful, any interesting idea or clever joke, has been recycled many times by people like me, other students of the language. I say, skip "Candide". This is not the most perfect of all worlds. There, I just saved you 129 pages of prose.

As far as I'm concerned, all English literature up to this millennium can be distilled into the works of Sir Terry. I spent my 30s rereading the Discworld pretty exclusively, and even recently found another uncaught joke. Discovering new jokes in Pratchett books is a lifelong task. I don't know if you can tell yet, but I'm autistic enough to be slightly up on my toes. It's a pain in the balls. I recently accidentally snuck up on a pit and got bit. Picture Sheldon as a snooty book lover stuck hawking overpriced comic books for spending money as a teenager. I mean, it beat flipping burgers. I could at least wear my own clothes, but I ended up with a hard-on against comics, collecting, and fandom in general.

I'm a real nerd, baby, from back when we had to pay some fucking dues. All this "nerd culture" shit really chaps my ass. The old internet, where the real nerds congregated after having been driven from mainstream society, was by far the coolest one-off subculture scene in world history. All the world's outcasts got together to chichat, trade drug recipes, and binge on grotesque porn. Then somebody told the world's in-groups you could watch people fucking on the thing and in, like, six months, so many people had signed up for AOL that enough Sun Workstations had been purchased to finance the first expansion of the original internet. The world's normies, the fucking pinks came on and displaced the nerds into nerd culture and never looked back. All because they thought there was anonymous porn on the thing.

You realize the porn companies own every right-wing "moral christian" politician in the world by now, right? The people who run the computers quietly took over the world while making it ever easier for a total idiot to use their products. I blame the mouse. It totally killed Apple. The IIe was a beautiful machine, and if one didn't develop a hardware fault by 1990 it ran until the plastic crumbled. Then that fucking idiot at Apple added a hard drive to make the thing a lot more resilient and a GUI so the nitwits in my elementary school could use it. Please, I'm still trying to figure it out—of what good is a one-button mouse? I mean, I know there are people you could give one button and one flashing diode and they'd write the word processor before writing the next work of Billy the Bard. I don't think the Macintosh was optimized for them.

I'm prone to tangents so long they need a derivative, but it's just a terminal case of isolation brain. Didn't some asshole say the joy is in the journey anyway? I'd swear I read that somewhere. Anyway, there was no actual comic book store where I worked. We had a storefront, but it wasn't open to the public. Jay put up a sign to let the local cops know he was protected. Joe ran the office and handled most of the mail order, Jay was the mobile partner who did the shows and buying. The kids mostly worked shows so, starting from ninth grade, I would go to work Friday night after school and get home on Sunday night, probably 2.25 weekends a month, plus a few days of $5 an hour sorting and bagging work after school.