ConfessionA few weeks back, I wrote a bit for this blog about The Rabbit Hole of Geek. The main premise of this piece of writing is that deep down, everybody’s a dork about something, whether they know it or not.

Originally I was going to tack on a whole other portion — a confessional if you will — of my nerdiest and most awesome exploits, but the post was getting a bit long. These are things that not everybody knows about me, but I feel it’s best to come clean. They say that confession is good for the soul, even if it’s not good for the self image.

So, here it goes:

  • PS2 All Night Extravaganza. In October of 2000, I waited outside of a Circuit City for about 10 hours in order to get my hands on a Playstation 2. I did this with my brother and a few other friends and then skipped school the next day. There weren’t even any good games to play on it yet.
  • Fan Fiction. Next to cosplay or LARPing, this is about as deep down the rabbit hole as anyone can go, depending on the circles you run in. Fan fiction got its biggest run in the realm of Star Trek Kirk and Spock love stories, I suppose, but what I did was much more high brow: Dragonball Z and Halo. OK, the high brow thing was a joke. Worse yet, I even helped admin one of the bigger DBZ fan fiction sites on the Web at one point. I’m not really sure if I ever curbed this desire, as Leet World was fan fiction of sorts.
  • Writing about Japanese Animation. This was a college course I took in the Spring semester of my freshman year, and one of my favorites in my time at FSU. We talked about Evangelion, Trigun, Grave of the Fireflies, Ah! My Goddess and all kinds of other stuff. I’m proud to say that I was nowhere near the level of nerd of the rest of the class, but felt ashamed of this fact at the time. The funniest part of all of this is that I had to rent a few movies in order to catch up with the rest of the class. For some reason the comic book store that rented out anime would package them in nondescript black plastic bags that made them look much shadier than they were. I got back to my dorm after one such excursion and a group of guys spotted the bag and asked with ridiculous grins what I had in it. Too embarrassed to admit that it was anime, I simply said “videos”. They assumed I meant dirty videos, and I allowed it.
  • Final Fantasy Music Video. My sophomore year of college, I spent several weeks downloading and editing all of the FMV clips from Final Fantasy VII through IX in order to make what I deemed to be an epic music video. I think I set it to Aeris’s theme from FFVII. I remember showing this to two girls. I don’t know what I was thinking when I opted to do that.
  • Dance Dance Revolution On top of being the “guitar guy” in college, I was also the DDR proselytizer amongst my friends. I don’t even remember exactly how it started, but at some point I became obsessed with playing DDR, and would do this everyday for about half an hour or more. I would practice so that whenever we had parties, I could do it and look awesome. I am not joking about this. Why I ever thought that anyone leaping around like an epileptic on a small dance pad looked awesome, I will never know. But at least nobody made fun of me too much, until my roommates came home one day as I danced to YMCA by the Village People. The dance pad went away for good and never returned.



    • I’m not really sure if I feel all that much better by admitting all of that, but hey, what can you do? This is by no means a definitive list of my most ridiculous moments of nerdery, but it’s a good jump start into that long and sordid history. I’m sure I will have more to talk about later. What are some of the nerdiest things you’ve done?