Someone criticizingly mentioned that Corrupt was "anti-nerd" in the comments section. This seems to a point of recurring misinterpretation: generally taken as an espousal of empty machismo. Based on my cursory understanding of Corrupt's take on "nerd culture," I have to venture that it comes under attack for being a perfect demonstration of deflecting individual responsibility -- a continuing consequence of liberalism.

Nerds, to me - and this just might be a semantic point - in addition to being intellectual, bask in their social victimhood status. I study on a campus of 60 000 people who mostly identify as nerds. They all have a quest to be different and they wear their social defects as a badge of pride. Being socially isolated, or awkward, is no longer a mark of distinction when 59 999 other people suffer from the same issues.

Being a nerd isn't even a form of social rebellion so much as it is a form of social acceptance. It is a perverse source of happiness only found in relation to society at large. If nerds were able to re-structure the world as they saw fit, a world where sitting in basements and playing computer games all day were the societal norm (even though I would argue it already is), they would invent new ways to further differentiate themselves, more cripples to rely upon as a personality crutch.

The few intellectuals here in Toronto who seem to be well-adjusted, happy individuals - and I suspect elsewhere also - are often accused of being intellectual populists, as if their happiness was a bad thing. I fail to understand why perpetuating, or worse yet, creating, social weakness is positive. It certainly is not inherent to being intellectual, which I think is an important form of personal development!

Note that being socially awkward is often used as a funny replacement for being actually intelligent. It's as if playing particular computer games, wearing certain clothing brands, enjoying certain technologies are substitutions for the essence of being a nerd -- being smart.

I say what Bill Hicks would have said: PIECE-OF-SHIT. This is really a garbage movie and the only reason I write this review is to explain why. The story is simple. A nerdy WoW-player lives an abandoned life on a planet invaded by zombies. This is our story teller. Few humans have survived. One of them is a tough-guy loner who is crazy about a certain brand of fast food. Two sisters, young and pretty, naturally, have also survived. The four of them team up and this is basically what the movie is about.

There are many things that make this movie a really shitty one. The soundtrack theme, Metallica's classic For Whom the Bell Tolls, is completely out of place. The casting and storyline is boring. We've seen at least a hundred zombie films, some actually worth watching, but this one is generic to the point where it gets ridiculous. To make this up, the directors have played "smart" and turned the zombie killing into an ironic video game with "rules" to follow. It doesn't work.

Yet, we all know Hollywood produces at least twenty of these useless flicks every year, so why does this particular movie bother me so much? Martin has kind of laid the groundwork for my commentary already. The main character is no longer a masculine super hero, or even a bad imitation of one. It's a nerd. A loser. Someone who spends his life avoiding family by playing WoW, eating shit food, pissing in a jar, and walking on pink clouds as soon as a girl comes over. He's not just a nobody, he's a perfect example of someone who is wasting his life.

This is supposed to be the character we all sympathize with. Are young guys in their 20s watching this movie and really connecting with this character? The loneliness? The desperation? The nerdiness? The weakness? If this is the best we can do 2010, we're screwed already. Only a minority of guys should recognize themselves in this character. Yet I have a strange feeling this is a universal, Westernized persona. And of course, the nerd smartens up in the end, beats down a zombie, and gets the good-looking chick in the end for it. Is that realistic? Of course not. He's still a loser. In other words, feminists must be cheering by now. They've already domesticated us on screen.

But in the eyes of WoW-players who no longer feel responsible for their families--for the people who actually pay money to go and see this shit--he's more than they could ever dream of. The fact that it receives higher IMDb rating than Dellamorte Dellamore and equal rating to Dawn of the Dead, proves my point. Never before has a movie about "hope" made me so turned off.

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Antidote: we're coming to take back what's ours.

HalfSigma likes to theorize about the principles which make certain activities nerdy or non-nerdy. Why is World of Warcraft so nerdy?

Perhaps Chess is perceived as an extreme mental challenge (although not necessarily as g-loaded as people think), while WoW is mostly perceived as vegetating in front of the computer monitor.

A list of other super-nerdy activities includes Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, and playing the game Magic: The Gathering.

Why is Magic the Gathering nerdier than Scrabble? I suppose because women play Scrabble.

Science fiction/fantasy involving spaceships or Hobbits is nerdy, but vampires are not nerdy because girls like Vampires. Nor is science fiction involving time travel.

In the comments to my last post about World of Warcraft (WoW) being nerdy, people have hypothesized that sports are manly and non-nerdy because they are proxies for physical combat.

But most video and computer games popular among nerds are also proxies for physical combat.

It occurred to me that painting isn’t considered a weird nerdy hobby like playing Dungeons and Dragons, or going to Star Trek conventions, or blogging about human biodiversity. Yes, painting, if somewhat introverted, is considered normal, and is not a big turnoff to women (and it’s women, not men, who get to determine what’s normal and what’s not).

And thus we discover the nerdiest activity of all: attempting to develop a unified theory of nerdiness.

You don't need a theory here. If you've got nerdy tendencies and (wisely) wish to destroy or at least conceal them, just avoid situations in which you have previously found yourself surrounded largely by nerds or can expect to be surrounded by nerds. Find somewhere else to be and something else to do. Head for a gym or a pub instead of an anime convention. If you're playing in five bands and need to quit one to free up some time, quit the one with the nerdiest fanbase. How hard can this be? Are some people so nerdy that they really do need a theory to guide them?