After reading this I realized that my formative years were very similar and I experienced a bit nostalgia among those words. I believe that your assessment is spot on!
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After reading this I realized that my formative years were very similar and I experienced a bit nostalgia among those words. I believe that your assessment is spot on!
~kyle mentioned Star Wars as a prime example of what you're talking about and I have to agree, it's the first thing I thought of. I'm old enough to have seen the first run of it in the theater, and to remember freaking out with joy when I saw the first commercial for action figures and OMG an X-wing!
Part of my reaction now is I'm sure being older and interests changing, but I didn't see the last few movies until they were almost out of the theater, and the very last I waited for streaming and just caught it at home. Haven't seen any of The Mandalorian, even as good as I've heard it is. We've achieved Peak Star Wars and to me it's just oversaturated.
Same with gaming. The last gaming series I enjoyed was Half-Life. Single-player stories, well developed, very absorbing, and played alone. Most things now are designed around team play, online play, gaming headsets and a kind of shit-talking, low-level chest thumping about one's own skills vs. the other n00bs seems to always be in force. The nerds have their own locker room now. So that appeal for me is also gone.
I think I'm getting at the same thing you are, and it's clearly not an age thing given our age differences; I learned to enjoy my nerdiness in solitude, and at most with a very small number of other people. I never wanted it to be a 'culture' or a team sport. I just wanted time to go off into my own world with it, and not find it an overcrowded room. The only true nerd culture was probably the nerds at MIT, and they earned it, built it. They didn't just buy it.
I imagine it's a similar story for anyone attracted to the un-marketed corners of the Internet.
Your reply made me think of another aspect of it: the solitude of it is particularly jarring just because I came of age during the period when geek culture was becoming mainstream. As a child I was alone, but then as a teen suddenly there was an EXPLOSION of people who were into the same things and it was great. Moving away from the directions most of these people have taken has created a certain solitude, and it is particularly jarring after the explosion of geek culture in the 2000s and 2010s.
I get it. It used to be that being a geek was a subculture. It wasn't necessarily a subculture people chose, but one into which they were pushed because they were too "weird" to fit in with the normies. But many of the most popular artifacts of geek culture (like Star Trek) have been commodified and made normie-friendly. They're geek-lite at most.
Fortunately, there's still plenty of really obscure shit available. Everybody watches Star Trek, but how many trekkies have read even one novel in C. J. Cherryh's FOREIGNER saga, about a human linguist/translator/diplomat navigating a society where humans are the aliens?
That's true. One can always dive deeper into the rabbit hole. However, I always feel like I'm missing out or abandoning things if I don't keep up on things, even after they begin catering to normies.
The way I see it, I'm going to miss out on something no matter what. I only have so much time and so much money to pursue my interests. Moreover, time and energy I spend consuming other people's creative work is time I could spend on my own work.
TL;DR: no FOMO.
I know how you feel, and we are of the same generation. I was also deemed a nerd when younger, but that was mainly because I studied a lot, liked math, read lots of books and was mostly quiet. Now it seems to me that nerd is just a person who fails to take a shower.
Still, there are two points I'd like to make. First, I'm very distant of the current geek/nerd culture of nowadays. Second, I believe that everyone experiences some kind of longing for the times of yore, how things "used to be", more often than not this is an illusion, things are just different, and our past might not be exactly better. Anyway, we might be getting old indeed, heck I feel much more alive and comfortable interacting on gemini than with any nerd.
Finally, I'm also glad that I can still enjoy many of the past activities that I loved so, like playing table-top RPGs, and I know that out there there are many people like me, our group simply changed, the meanings of words drift with time.
Reading your post filled me with nostalgia!
Besides that, yes, I think your perception is correct, or at least I do perceive the same.
About movies and series, there's an obvious trend of revival of classics, but to be honest it feels like a vulgar attempt to make money on people's nostalgia. Yes, young adults are those who earn money, those you can milk. And what's better than nostalgia as a trigger?
I'm now thinking of star-wars: bought from Disney, who immediately spawned tons of material and started to dictate what is canon and what not. And if you happen to write some book set in the same universe (as many old ones already exist), keep your lawyers ready.
Let's face it, taking an old setting, making some cheap content that keeps winking at old patrons, and filling the gap with extra special effects, does not make a good movie. If anything it makes me feel sad about the forever gone old times.
On the plus side, there's always a new place where the hordes of corporation-driven normies are not able to get quite yet. And the recesses of the Internet (such as Gemini) seem to be the right place where one can still find that authenticity we all crave for.
I agree completely. It's all just a cash cow to milk now. There are a handful of exceptions (the Doom reboot in 2016 is absolutely kickass), but the majority of reboots and re-dos take the same road that Star Wars has taken (to be fair though, people said the exact same thing about the Prequels). I know that the end-goal was always to make money, but I feel like today the corporate overlords are whipping and yoking everyone all the way down the line to just make whatever the algorithms say will make them maximum cash with minimum effort.
Additionally, it's a huge "fuck you" to fans who have spent their whole life learning canon, lore, and generally studying everything about a series, when a company just buys it and says "none of this is canon anymore."