the crimes of george lucas ('90s on)

'Cult' these days meaning 'hardcore built-in demographic'.

Nah, fuck that. There was no hardcore built-in demographic for Repo Man. Or for Star Wars, for that matter.

The question of is it cult or not has nothing to do with numbers but everything to do with the level of intense scrutiny and obsession it inspired.

I have to say I'm enjoying the current cult election!

(That said, I could totally imagine someone describing Avatar as a cult movie in 20 years, if James Cameron dropped dead today)

would be fun to see a 1982 theater audience for Tron vs. a 2010 theater audience for Tron: Legacy

'Cult' these days meaning 'hardcore built-in demographic'.

What im saying is there are two definitions of 'cult' and two definitions of 'nerd', and the 2ks is when both "broke" and the meanings changed. Most of this has to do with the internet and smart phones. Cult may have once meant something like a sleeper hit but with the internet nowadays it's pretty much impossible for anything to slowly grow a dedicated fanbase like that. Repo Man is a genuinely awesome movie but maybe if it came out in the internet era we would all be so sick of Repo Man Twitter/Tumbler/FB/animated GIFs/etc. that it's status as a cult movie may be in question. It's sort of impossible to conjecture tho since Repo Man helped create the idea of a cult film.

Politics has lots of cultish aspects to it (tribalism, obsessive combing over details, etc) but I think an object of cult affection sort of has to be largely a fictional creation. Not that there isn't plenty of fiction in politics....

Has anyone written any good articles about the death of nerd culture?

getting flashbacks of this thread: EW 25 best cult tv shows from the past 25 years

adam you misspelled "dearth"

lol i didn't think that through, doesn't really work

star wars is like the most popular movie ever made

i think that takes it out of the running for 'cult.'

wasn't there a living colour song 'cult of popularity'?

...

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/upl1/1/15111/29_2008/megnafox.preview.jpg

Guess i'll read this, though I don't really like Patton Oswalt:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_angrynerd_geekculture/

That’s when we’ll reach Etewaf singularity. Pop culture will become self-aware. It will happen in the A.V. Club first

hm.

there's a wolf eyes interview from like a decade ago where they go, fuck these fake people who think that downloading every single punk album from 1976-1978 makes them an expert on punk, that is not how you become an expert on punk, fuck the internet

i. this is an entirely valid way of becoming an expert on punk
ii. only seven people in the world actually ever did this

there's some dum stuff in that oswalt piece but i liked this part:

When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.

I know it sounds great, but there’s a danger: Everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more. Ever see action figures from the ’70s, each with that same generic Anson Williams body and one-piece costume with the big clumsy snap on the back? Or played Atari’s Adventure, found the secret room, and thought, that’s it? Can we all admit the final battle in Superman II looks like a local commercial for a personal-injury attorney? And how many people had their cassette of the Repo Man soundtrack eaten by a Walkman?

Now, with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately awesome (or, if not, just as immediately rebooted or recut as a hilarious YouTube or Funny or Die spoof), the old inner longing for more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is dwindling. The Onion‘s A.V. Club—essential and transcendent in so many ways—has a weekly feature called Gateways to Geekery, in which an entire artistic subculture—say, anime, H. P. Lovecraft, or the Marx Brothers—is mapped out so you can become otaku on it but avoid its more tedious aspects.

Here’s the danger: That creates weak otakus. Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie? The Shining can be remade into a comedy trailer. Both movie versions of the Joker can be sent to battle each another. The Dude is in The Matrix.

The coming decades—the 21st-century’s ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s—have the potential to be one long, unbroken, recut spoof in which everything in Avatar farts while Keyboard Cat plays eerily in the background.

" -- Christopher Weingarten is the senior editor for SPIN and former drummer for Gay Dad."

ii. only seven people in the world actually ever did this

― set the controls for the heart of the congos (thomp), Saturday, November 3, 2012 5:59 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

so many people did this, man... i bet some of them post on ILM too

Yeah everyone does that. And being an expert on 'punk' is pretty much as meaningless a thing as being an expert on baseball stats, only with the added dimension of preening social coolness. And that dimension seems to be what the new generation is being trained to be experts at. Now you can take photos of your punk costume the minute you design one and get instant feedback from all of your friends, even the ones you secretly think are WAY cool and more punk than you.

The Oswalt thing was OK until it completely degenerated into pop culture soup. Has anyone written intelligently on the subject? There's emotional significance, social ostracism, technological superiority, etc. so many dimensions that are ignored in essays like this in favor of "I was into Star Wars before it was cool".

I'd like to read one "Death of Nerd Culture" article that mentions there was a point in time where everyone didn't walk around with internet-connected computers all the time.

that was kind of the point of the oswalt one?

Too many pop culture references, not enough actual original content in the article. Which is ironic cos yeah i felt like THAT was the main point.

The Onion‘s A.V. Club—essential and transcendent in so many ways—has a weekly feature called Gateways to Geekery, in which an entire artistic subculture—say, anime, H. P. Lovecraft, or the Marx Brothers—is mapped out so you can become otaku on it but avoid its more tedious aspects.

I'm a total H.P. Lovecraft geek, and aside from the Re-Animator movies, AFAIK there are no other aspects of it that are not exceedingly tedious.

There will be no death of nerd culture... nerds are de facto culturally contrarian, so as soon as something obtains pop-culture cache they become bored by it and move on to something more obscure. Early-model electronic typewriters aren't considered cool yet, are they? I'm currently trying to break into that fandom...

who really gives a shit if someone who isnt a REAL expert on punk thinks he's an expert on punk because argh why am i even typing this.

Can't fake the punk on a nasty dunk, haven't you heard?

ok, who are these tedious marx bros fans out there because i want to join them

Dr. Morbius

I thought we left punker-than-thou shit in the '90s

Duck Soup clearly the best one, but the lack of a musical segment prevents it from being my absolute favorite. The "We're going to war" thing doesnt count, you gotta have Harpo playing a harp and Chico playing the piano in it SOMEWHERE dammit!

I wonder if there are "The Big Store" or "Night in Casablanca" apologists out there. I imagine a tedious Marx Bros. fan would be "it was all downhill once they started making movies!" and just focus on eyewitness reports of their stage show.

Yeah count me in too!

big store has my favorite moment in movies

chico and groucho are demonstrating a camera to a female lead

"just look at me and pretend to laugh"
"i've been doing that for thirty years"

I imagine a tedious Marx Bros. fan would be "it was all downhill once they started making movies!" and just focus on eyewitness reports of their stage show.

haha

i have read the scripts of the lost radio show 'flywheel, shyster, and flywheel'

Early-model electronic typewriters aren't considered cool yet, are they? I'm currently trying to break into that fandom...

― Frobisher the (Viceroy), Saturday, November 3, 2012 11:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have seen early model word processors with big signs on them saying SOLD AS DECOR in wannabe stores in london so er

i think the whole 'nerd culture IS the culture now' thing is misplaced or fails to articulate the actual change

like re: balls' thing upthread the difference is that now people know that there is a community of people, somewhere, with admiral ackbar masks (though this community would probably overestimate what proportion of the wider community knows about the existence of the community that owns admiral ackbar masks)

but i think the extent of the changes in consumption patterns and the cultural effect of same is regularly overstated -- of the community of people who are occasional or frequent watchers of the show 'two and a half men', the subset who are 'members of the two and a half men fandom'

is pretty small.

we prefer to be called twopointfiveans

big bang theory is now the most popular sitcom in america, even more than two and a half men. i don't know what that says about nerds or nerd culture though. urkel was bigger than jesus once..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mQD_Wd6Ajo

Biggest annoyance for me is the tendency to rate anything marketed to male children in the 80s as nerdy. It is nostalgic or retro, it is NOT nerdy. Ninjas are not nerdy, Chuck Norris is not nerdy, Ghostubsters is not nerdy, etc. Yes people can quote "Predator" but you know, that was a film popular with both the nerd that collected Star Wars figures and the jock that beat him up. Zombies are not nerdy, b-movies and grindhouse stuff was not the sole domain of horror film fans but also an entire generation of highly sociable dudes and dudettes that took their dates to an age-appropriate makeout place.

I think that's spot-on, the tricky thing is figuring out whether there is some blanket nerdiness associated with being in 2012 and deciding, of things to do with your present-day date/friends, to watch a zombie movie from the 80s as opposed to going out to see a movie that's currently a popular age-appropriate makeout place. IOW, is choosing retro seen as nerdy? But again this would be "nerdy" understood very differently than what it meant when we were growing up.

It seems difficult to separate out from the shift in what "hipster" means over the past, let's say 5-7 years, where it is now a fashion category, the signifiers of which are recognized by a pretty large segment of the population, but not really connected with lifestyle/music/bohemianism/starving-artist/liberal-arts/whatever. I saw a Craigslist ad the other day specifically looking for someone with "hipster style" but "not necessarily the lifestyle."

er and my point was, a lot of "nerd" stuff is bound up in these "hipster" things if that makes sense

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcu79w7AKY1rxufqpo1_500.jpg

to find this i had to page through fifty posts of miley cyrus guest spot .gifs, what does this say about america

what thread is this

yeah but who gives a shit about star wars

big bang theory being the most popular sitcom in america means the mainstream is aware of geek culture as some kind of Other embodied within the culture proper; it doesn't mean that geek culture is now the culture proper. but it indicates that there's a certain level of awareness of it.

there are geeks who adopt it, enjoy their portrayal. but there were probably vets who enjoyed M*A*S*H.

ninjas are nerdy

i probably just set myself up for a ninja assassination huh

imo geekdom is a mode of approaching the world (& more specifically cultural products). some of the objects of geek culture have become superficially integrated into mainstream culture but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the geek “attitude” or w/e has