Wolter wrote:BostonBeaneater wrote:Those cosplay get-ups have a lot of hiding places for weapons. The good thing is they get caught up taking pictures of them in their dress up.
Seriously, these people are sad and sick. What a waste of air.
Ironically, most cosplay people are women/accepting of women. They're probably the least assholish nerds around.
This is true. Cosplayers, board game nerds, etc. But the difference is...that's a
social activity. It frequently involves facetime with other actual human beings. Some of the most socially inept people I've ever known fit into that category, and yet they were socialized a lot more by being forced to interact in real-time with other humans. Rising tide lifts all boats, and so on. And yes...it's structurally a lot more egalitarian that way. Beggars can't be choosers, so the labels get boiled off. Guys talk to breathing females. The spectrum of sexuality is more or less irrelevant. Straight-edge nihilists don't judge the ones who come to every meet tripping balls on somethingorother. I used to live right by the engineering dorm at school. It wasn't BU's most noteworthy 'alternative lifestyle' dorm by accident. I think it was queer-cool and this sort of bustling community of the weird because of that. I picked up a part-time job at the dining hall, 7:00pm-midnight snackbar shift, and stayed at it almost 3 years mostly because it was such good people-watching...whatever board-game table table going on out in the front lobby attracted a collection of hangers-on, and they'd treat whoever was working the snack bar like their personal Sam Malone. It was awesome. Frequently strange and awkward, but the melting pot in action.
My younger cousins fit the same mold...two brothers, one of them's almost 30 and a band-camper turned music teacher and one of them's 25 and an unemployed engineering undergrad. Both into D&D, playfighting and obstacle courses, big WWE fans as little kids for the cosplay side of it. Traveled in likeminded friendship circles at the local state U campus with a lot of weirdos. The band-camper met his now-spouse in high school through band-camper activities and all things Harry Potter. The other one met his steady through a steampunk bicycle club. And they both will haul this same cast of characters and weirdos they collected years ago over the house for theme movie night or board games even though half these people have kids of their own now. They have to coordinate babysitters and whatnot when King Richard's Faire swings through the area.
And yes...nerds god laid. It wasn't exactly pretty to watch a courtship in action, but put socially awkward pairings in close contact and they figure it out. And then some. Those D&D tables in the dining hall tended to have a bit TMI coming from them about some pairing's 'self-discovered technique' with no mental filter applied. Dear god. I was not qualified to be the Sam Malone sounding board for some of that.
Now, the #gamers. The ones I knew on campus always tended to be a bit more Stormfront than nerds. They were the ones who would sit in their dorm rooms with the shades drawn. If they'd make it downstairs to the dining hall at all it would be to load up the doom bunker with more snacks then disappear. Severe-looking...no chit-chat or eye contact...occasionally resentful stares at the other nerds having fun. And then back upstairs to the doom bunker. I shared an overnight shift with one of those guys in a 24/7 computer lab one summer session. Just me at the printer window and him lurking at a workstation deep in the server room. Nothing but evil eye from him the whole 8 hour shift as he would glance warily up at me from whatever chat log he was engrossed in. Always clad in some black straight-edge sloganeering T-shirt. At least once I caught him looking at some neo-Nazi websites, then explaining to some other #shithead just like him who worked upstairs and would occasionally visit that sometimes "I like to look at the dark side...you know, to get a sense of different perspectives."
And sooner or later after seeing the patterns of behavior and "self-expression"...it just became easier to pick out these people. Which sounds like horrible stereotyping (it is)...but the traits scream out like that enough that my instincts haven't been wrong nearly often enough for me to doubt where I'm grouping them. #Gamers give off those stink lines of separatism and whatever deeply fear/loathing-rooted anger is behind that. #Nerds give out at minimum some fractured signs of wanting to be social/socialized and at most...fracturedly social that's more social than anyone else's social. The difference is the petri dish you used to see both of them was usually some combination of your city or college + the Internet. And now it's shifted not only almost entirely to the Internet...but the
viral Internet. Which disproportionately gives the Stormfront guys a lot more weapons in the arsenal while the nerds...well, proportionately they're still having various and sundry lives even if more of it is publicly-aired online than ye olde D&D table at the dining hall. "War" vs. "Life". That's the sum difference in motivations.
So why wouldn't the "war" people be acting the part of other aggrieved wingnut coalitions? Why wouldn't they? I'm surprised it's taken this long for the press and public at large to see the same language, the same rhetorical fallacies...as ordinary non-technological bigots. Hell, I'm surprised the JesusRandoids haven't targeted them as a proven GOTV growth demographic. Fits their collection of aggrieved coalitions like a glove.
