This is tough to admit but...Magic: The Gathering. I played as a kid but then grew out of it. Then, recently, a friend of mine told me that someone had made a platform called OCTGN that could be used for a variety of card games including Magic. After some urging, I downloaded it along with a bunch of card packs and he got me back into it, the bastard. These past two months we've been playing 1-2 nights a week online. I haven't told anyone.
I managed a Gamestop for 5 years during undergrad, which spawned a lot of nerd-laden stories. The best (worst?) however, comes from the Alltel store next to us in the plaza. Their manager, we'll call him "Mike," was a dude in his late 30s. Bigger guy, glasses, but physical image aside, he was a charismatic guy who didn't particularly exude nerdiness, especially when compared to our average clientele. That is, until he brought his 7-year-old son in to shop for games. When he called his son "Yoda," we thought it was just a nickname. Maybe the kid digs Star Wars. Plus, he was the right height and had kind of a turtle-y face. Makes sense. No. The kid's LEGAL FUCKING FIRST NAME WAS YODA. I can't wait until 2019 when there are college co-eds out there who can say they've actually banged Yoda. Then again, with that name, he might not have anyone telling those stories until well into his 30s.
Last summer my friends and I found a bunch of these cards at Liquidation World so we loaded up and had tournaments all summer long. I regret nothing.
I'm glad I'm not the only person that dealt with this. I played varsity soccer through high school but spent my free time playing WoW with a few friends (no one on the team knew I played, I was a closet nerd). I had gladiator titles in multiple seasons and was in a top raiding guild. When I heard other people talking about WoW, and they almost always fit the stereotype of course, I would have such a hard time not telling them how awful they were. I made the mistake of letting a few guys find out I played, and when they saw that I had a gladiator rogue I got bombarded with questions. shame
Sit around kiddos, it's story time. My brother's cousin (we're half brothers, so he's technically not my cousin) is a huge Star Wars nerd. He wanted to name his first son Darth or Vader. His wife, who didn't want her son getting beat up on the playground, was having none of this silliness. "Anakin?" "No." So he thought about it for a few days, and then said, "What about Hayden*?" "Hayden? I like that." Fast forward six months. She's at a cocktail party, while he's home watching baby. "What's his name?" "Hayden" "Oh, like Hayden Christensen?" "Who's that?" "The actor who was Darth Vader in the new Star Wars movies." He had to slept on the couch for a week. *Why a Star Wars fanatic would honor that douche-tard, I don't know.
I might be maxing my nerd rating right now. Having recently been promoted to a position with ban powers on a forum I go to, a member suggested that I "accidentally" ban an Unpopular Member. Seriously, this is possibly the lowest form of nerdiness here. I apologize in advance. Spoiler http://forums.filefront.com/spam-forum/433634-new-spam-mod-7.html <a class="postlink" href="http://forums.filefront.com/spam-forum/433701-redgroupclan-has-been-banned.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://forums.filefront.com/spam-forum/ ... anned.html</a> The rest of the story's below, although I think it's a fairly easy path to follow. NSFW I decided it'd be funnier to ban the member who suggested the idea, but because I wanted to maximize the funny while minimizing the abuse of mod-power, I turned it into a joke, where a special usergroup was created that appears to be a banned member, but still retains the abilities of a normal member. I then messaged the target member and asked that he refrain from posting for a week and put himself in "invisible" mode. After "accidentally" "banning" him, I tried yet again to ban the UM, except again "missed". Third time's the charm, right? Apparently, not so. Upon attempting to undo all of the bans, I somehow managed to ban an admin. The current ban toll is three normal members and one admin. We'll see how this plays out over the next week. Please don't spoil the joke.
My nerdiness? Let's see. In order, I was into the Pokemon card game (I still can't believe I traded my 1st edition holofoil Charizard for 2 expansion packs), elementary school Chess Club (that only lasted a year. Even I have some limits), Magic: The Gathering (the unglued series was the shit even if it wasn't tournament legal), GURPS (generic universal role-playing system, akin to D&D but super-flexible with just one rule book, along with expansions like CyberPunk), and then Battletech (I still want to get back into that, my group had some pretty good times at those games). Now I'm in a relationship (my girlfriend wants to LARP sometime), a full time student as well as a full time employee, so I don't have mush time for my inner nerd. But some day, I will be back with a vengeance
I play text based RPG's (see <a class="postlink" href="http://www.mudconnect.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">www.mudconnect.com</a> if you're not sure what that is). Not so much now, but in high school I was the weird silent kid. Thank god I was also a starting varsity offensive lineman. The one good thing that came out of this is my love for programming. I've self-taught myself C, Lua (and how to interface it with C), Javascript, and PHP to a degree.
Naming your kid Jake after the character in Avatar, I guess that's okay (though picking a better movie would have been a smarter move, maybe Nathan for Last Samurai?) But naming your kid Neytiri? Eytukan or Moat? That's crossing the line. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2603523/the_rise_of_avatar_babies.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.associatedcontent.com/articl ... abies.html</a> On a side note, I was named after the dog. But not in the nerdy way you would expect: Indiana. No. The damn dog was named Michael.
I did this to my boyfriend, then started laughing because I was wicked stoned and he didn't get it....PIMPTRESS fail. haha. It wasn't the first time he said "I love you", but I sure thought I was hysterical. This moment brought to you by some good cannabis.
Guy I work with named his son Anakin. He's actually not THAT nerdy (a bit nerdy, but not seemingly "name your kid after a Star Wars character" nerdy) but he and his wife are both batshit crazy. I'll admit--I've actually been to a science fiction convention. In my defense I was 8, and was just really into the Star Wars and (original) Star Trek movies plus the guy who played Chekov, my favorite character when I was little, was going to be there. I get there and the place is crawling with grown adults dressed as Klingons and Stormtroopers--keep in mind this was around 1992, before the original Star Wars trilogy was re-released and it became "big" again. I'm pretty sure my dad and the guy who played Chekov were the only people in that building who had ever seen a naked woman, let alone had sex with one.
Coin collecting - that was my hobby. I was a huge nerd there. I could tell you more about more variants of Canadian 1989 1ยข than most people (or used to). I spend few hundred dollars for some coin sets, but I did get rarities for fairly cheap, compared to market demand. I don't have a favourite coin, but I have one from 200BC Greece. For several years all my web forum/email addresses were all coin based, now it's all beer based, that's how I've developed so little.