Friday, May 4, 2012

Welcome to Nerdfighteria

I recently finished watching all of the videos on the Vlogbrothers youtube channel. It took me from the beginning of February to the end of April, but I did it. Well over 900 videos of the remarkable John Green and amazing Hank Green. During this time I also managed to read all the books that John Green is the sole author of (and I am ordering Will Grayson, will grayson, co-authored by David Levithan right now). They are awesome and I highly recommend them (more on that later)

I am now what one would call a "nerdfighter". What is a nerdfighter? You might ask. Well, uninitiated one, nerdfighters aren't people who fight nerds but fight for nerds (like freedom fighters only with less guns and more Awesome. Nerdfighters don't have internal organs, they are made entirely of awesome.) "Why do you get to be made of only awesome? I want to be made of awesome too!" well you can! Admission into nerdfighterdom is simple: if you want to be a nerdfighter you are a nerdfighter. We don't judge you for your nerdiness, we just like that you want to be part of the community.

A recurring idea is an island nation called Nerdfighteria. Hank Green wrote a song about it (Hank Green writes many songs and has 3 albums which you should check out). Fun fact about Nerdfighters and Nerdfighteria: if we assume every subscriber to Vlogbrothers is a nerdfighter (approximately 688,000 people when I write this) then the theoretically population of Nerdfighteria would be larger than %31.8 of recognised countries in the world. (That's somewhere between Comoros and Equatorial Guinea in terms of population.) OK so there are probably disused channels, and people who have fallen out of nerdfighterdom (*cough* Abbey *cough*come back to us *cough* - or is being a nerdfighter like being a Catholic? You can say you're not anymore but the church stills counts you as one of them. One of them.), or have two accounts subscribed, so if we knock off %10 of those people then that only makes us fall 1 or 2 spots down the list. So it's actually a viable thing to create a society and working economy with that amount of people.

If we pitched in a dollar each we could buy an island. 5 each and we could buy a pretty awesome one (I know, I researched this), though we'd never fit more than a small fraction of nerdfighters on the island at any one time. Oh well. The dream of nerdfighteria dies... for now... But we live on online. Online is where it's at man. The weather is always perfect and distance doesn't mean a thing, unless you're in Nerdfighterlike, in which case then distance sucks... because you'd like to touch and hug them (and nothing else, or something else, depending on which verse of the song stage of the relationship you're in), even though you have a date with your bookshelf you could stay up on skype all night and slow dance to music that's royalty free. Too bad they don't live anywhere near you...

But yes. If you haven't watched the awesomeness that is John and Hank Green then go! Go now! I guarantee that through this journey of watching their styles form and nerdfighteria grow from Brotherhood 2.0 to TruthorFail, to now, you will laugh, you will get excited, and you will most definitely learn quite a few things about thing you didn't know you would care about until they were explained to you by a man with peanut butter smeared all over his face. (yes, that happened, John Green - respected best selling author everybody!) Oh, and if you aren't happy with peanut butter on his face, then why not watch him scribble on his face with Sharpie? 

I swear he's a really smart...  like... really smart I swear.

Oh, and of course I must end this with the obligatory Nerdfighter sign off: DFTBA! (Don't forget to be awesome) (Imagine I am saying with with the "live long and prosper" sign on both hands facing the wrong direction and crossed over my chest).

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