Pete Warden provides some insider thoughts on what has gone wrong with nerd culture. His points about the ingrained tendency to not listen to critics, to fall back on victimization, to become insular all provide thoughts for the types of fractures we are currently seeing in fandom, in general, especially along gendered and racial lines.
My first girlfriend was someone I met through a MUD, and I had to fly 7,000 miles to see her in person. I read a paper version of the Jargon File at 15 and it became my bible. Just reading its descriptions of the internet I knew it was world-changing, even before the web, and as soon as I could I snuck into the local university computer labs with a borrowed account to experience the wonder of Usenet, FTP, and Gopher. I chose my college because Turing had once taught there, and the designer of the ARM chip would be one of my lecturers. My first job out of college was helping port the original Diablo to the first Playstation, and I spent five years writing games. I’ve dived deep into GPU programming. I’ve worked for almost two decades at both big tech companies and startups. I’ve…
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It's Playing, Just With Research 