Meet 'bronies' -- grown men who are fans of My Little Pony

i mean to say what is nerd culture other than fetishizing poor socialization

it's a good point, but I think there's a way for the whole nerdy fandom popcultural milieu to exist w/o letting its adolescents grow up into adults who are still proud of how bad they are at getting along w/ people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDS_YABbh6w

atheist, nod, wisdom, frankfurters, little, pony, chimney, santa, burp, guadeloupe, brassiere, nimrod, candelabra

i mean to say what is nerd culture other than fetishizing poor socialization

― the late great, Wednesday, August 29, 2012 8:51 PM (14 minutes ago)

fetishizing other stuff to soothe the pain of poor socialization

^ this is the pure shit, first principles. actually fetishizing poor socialization and "nerd culture" itself comes later, when late capitalism fucks its own third eye.

powerful image

nah fetishizing is poor socialization

example

1) fetishizing the tit
2) good socialization = not treating all girls like mom
3) ok gotta find non-mom figure
4) fetishizing the pretty girl that's nice to you, then getting pissed when you find out she makes out with jocks
5) good socialization = not treating all girls like virgin/whore

it's a chicken and egg thing

now go back to sci-fi where everyone is either mother, virgin or whore ... are you soothing pain, or just seeing the fantasy world you want to see

i think one of the big things in nerd culture is this idea that 1) other people don't understand me 2) i have a fascinating story to tell you

hence the line between star wars fans and star wars nerds where you have to cross the line into understanding every single back story and going deep into the fascinating story of who that imaginary person is

oh yeah, sure, but fetishizing fetishization itself is troo kvlt wormhole shit

i have a lot of big ideas on nerd culture and socialization if you guys want to start that thread, i might be working one-on-one with several aspergers kids this year instead of running a classroom so i'll have lots of data points

i don't know enough anthropology to imagine what fetishizing the fetish looks like

i was at a neurobio presentation awhile back and world famous professor was showing us how baby birds recognize a mother's beak via a pattern of light and dark areas, and how you could simulate that with a stick, if you painted it in the right way.

and then in his veddy biddish indian raj accent he was like: "the baby bird loves the stick! he worships the stick! they begin to FETISHIZE the stick!!"

crowd could not contain LOLz

i guess i see old school sci-fi freaks as being like trainspotters, or rock polishers, ham radio junkies, avid fly fishermen, numismatists, bird watchers, etc. weirdos who happened to fetishize this one weird thing, but who weren't, for the most part, fetishizing their own ostracism (consequence of poor socialization). if anything, they seemed to be trying to escape it. perhaps that's an overly romantic notion.

tlg, totally start that thread

no actually contenderizer i think you're on to something esp w/r/t bronies

but then i wouldn't exactly put rock polishers, ham radio junkies, fishermen, birdwatchers and numismatists in the same category

a lot of rock polishers are geologists and gemnologists whose hobby is an outgrowth of their work

birdwatchers are nature enthusiasts and might belong in the same category as dudes who make lists of technical bouldering spots in their state they have to hit up

fishermen consider themselves sportsmen and in any case they eat and/or give away the fish they catch

trainspotters and numismatists might be closest, but afaict they're not writing slashfic about their pursuits

i think the comparison to old-school sci-fi fandom might be closest, or perhaps even to comic books. there seems to something about slashfic that is crucial to understanding the brony thing and my understanding is that slashfic dates back to ... the 70s? late 70s?

but slashfic has definitely picked up in popularity, esp if you count something like the millions of licensed novels about every last character in the mos eisley cantina or in the bowels of deep space 9

all those things you mention lack the infantilism of mlp. MLP reminds me of people who dress up like a pirate on "talk like a pirate day" or were in a "ninja" club in college. Scifi nerd-dom or even comic nerd-dom aren't this weird childish thing, they're just things than teenage nerds like as well.

infantilism and wish-fulfilment fantasies

given everything I know about bronyism, dude, it is NOT just about the ponies

Ultimately I think there are a ton of people out there in well-off countries who have strong logical skills but aren't very intelligent otherwise. And all of those people find their way onto the internet. And we've all been through high school, I would guess most of them are outcasts who cynically disregard everything they're supposed to learn and look for like-minded people on SomethingAwful or Reddit to teach them the "true way"; in other words the emotionally stunted teaching the emotionally stunted. You know, the three A's: Ayn Rand, Atheism, and ron pAul. I was the same way for a while when it came to poker; I like to think of it as more useful than watching pony cartoons because I was at least able to put myself through school that way. But the 2+2 boards were like, 10% well-adjusted, intelligent individuals (and many of them were successful) and 90% were your typical goon/brony/Reddit "men's rights" enthusiast, and I doubled down on this by posting a lot on the sports/sports betting forums which were more like 100% these people. You know, people who would screencap girls they show in the crowd on TV, then other idiots who would say things like "her nose is lolhueg, 5/10, I bang chicks hotter than that every week" And you get a thrill out of it, being able to talk in terms that your average person (you know, the people who rejected you in high school or think you're strange) would never understand, about something they probably wouldn't be any good at. Yes I know this is a distorted view of the world. And I know that plenty of people here with frogbs.txt saved on their HD probably think "dude, you ARE that guy". But I always had good friends and people to drink with, and in all honesty that kind of saved my life in a manner of speaking. I was never really an outcast. I stopped being bullied in 4th grade. I always was kind of on the fringe. Like, I've always had good friends on both sides of the spectrum. I look at my stepbrother now and wonder about his future - he's 18, drives a Mustang his Dad bought for him, and spends his life on Reddit and Facebook posting about how much he hates Christians, how he hates his sister talking to her newborn baby "like a retard" while he plays Call of Duty, how his Dad (who has cancer!!) is an idiot, how the whole world is wrong and how people like him are the only ones with any real values. I don't know if he has a single friend that he knows in real life. It's just so much easier to dismiss other points of view than it is to try to learn something from them. Plus, it's good for your ego, and you've got dozens of online friends who will back you up. Like, this guy NEEDS to be a brony right now. Okay, what he really needs is to get wasted and get out of his shell and actually have fun interacting with live people, but in his mind, this is a big ass deal. If my brony-littered FB feed told me anything, it's that they do fetishize poor socialization because apparently to interact with them on a normal (or illogical) level is to sell out part of what makes you better than anyone else. If you do speak, speak only in memes that nobody understands, because that only reinforces how much more advanced you are. And so on.

who have strong logical skills but aren't very intelligent otherwise

???

it happens

idk but this is a nerd culture based specifically around the idea of socialization? it's right there in the show title: "friendship is magic."

it's a community thing

i'd love that general nerd thread

i work in a videogame studio

i got opinions

idk but this is a nerd culture based specifically around the idea of socialization?

socialization with other bronies, sure

I think we mean not "socializing" but "make (someone) behave in a way that is acceptable to their society" (New Ox. Am. Dict. via OS X)

tl:dr

you should r, it was intersting

As a huge computer nerd during my teenage years I really didn't give any thought to how i was perceived by society at large and really didn't give a shit, so long as i could go home from school and make Doom II levels and browse some BBSes then i was totally fine with it.

In a way, maybe i was living in a golden era, before the internet, before i could be friends with other people that shared my interests. Complete isolation and complete immersion in whatever minutiae i was obsessed with.

BBSes are internet!

Um no they aren't.

oh hm

now I'm curious about the networking protocols used by pre-TCP/IP BBS software

It isn't just about connection software though. The internet obviously is WAY more acceptable, more people use it, and it has so many social applications that BBSes just didn't have. I think the only person I ever talked to via a BBS was a SYSOP.

we had message boards on bbs, that's maybe why i like ILX, it's almost a bbs throwback

PRODIGY MSG BOARDS 4 LYFE

WWIV 4 LYFE

spent so much time on this in HS

http://www.iscabbs.com/index.php?doc=about

But yeah the world is pretty safe for nerds now. Even Bronies can go on FB right now and find tens of thousands of people just like them. It took more than a decade for me to find someone who had read that one txt file that tells you how to hack a Coca Cola machine or something.

brown boxing

ew

I was part of a weird community myself when I was like, 14 years old. I wanted to be a cartoonist but I was way better at drawing animals than humans. So I looked up a bunch of "anthro" art to help me with my own drawings and eventually joined an IRC community to get some pointers. Anyways one of them was a colorist and she offered to color in this strip I made and it was really good! Then I looked at her other work. Man, I wish you could have seen my face. Nowadays I don't think any of us would bat an eye at it because the internet has desensitized us all but the whole shock of "whoa, someone actually drew this, and you're one of them!" was tough to reconsile. Like, I thought some of the other art I had seen was really cool, but to realize that the end result of this whole thing was basically pornography? Like I said, I was 14. I didn't know any better. But there was really a sadness among everything there, nobody seemed overtly proud of this, and most of the chat steered towards stuff like clinical depression. Kind of a far ways away from the racism/rageface/sexism/"deal with it" culture of today. Actually, they seemed like pretty decent people. Nobody thought my cartoons were any good though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7h2F1gTpcE

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING SHITTING ME L:AKSDFHJI OUDHSF*(O&ITENW)FMO IDHSFNOUILJKS FPOISUDHFBNO:SDIHFGIKUSDHJLKF GJ SGUYSDNF

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9hwyfX0W81qaecjjo1_500.jpg

haha man chill that's upthread already. probably a hoax.

ok good i don't even know anymore goole...you just can't tell

if it floate it be a brownie