Question of the Week: What’s the nerdiest thing you’ve ever done?

Look, we’re all nerds here. You’re reading a comic book/pop culture blog on the interwebs, for crying out loud. And hey, we’re all cool with being nerds, I hope, because we’re not living in the 1980s anymore and being a nerd doesn’t make you a social pariah as it used to. I’m typing this in a room where I am surrounded by trade paperbacks of comics, several art pieces by comic book artists, several action figures/toys of comic book characters and pop culture detritus, and cabinets full of CDs and DVDs. As we’re all nerds, we do nerdy things, right? So that’s the Question: What’s the nerdiest thing you’ve ever done?

I mean, it could be cosplaying at a con, although that’s really not toooooo nerdy. It could be arguing about comics stuff on the interwebs, although, again, not toooooo nerdy. I guess it could be the nerdiest thing you’ve ever done, but I would argue that if it, you’re not a very good nerd. But maybe it is!

I have often said that I wasn’t the biggest “nerd” nerd when I was growing up. I didn’t read comics, I didn’t play Dungeons & Dragons (and still never have), and while I read science fiction and fantasy, I wasn’t so into it that I fell into the worlds obsessively. I always felt bad reading Greg’s stories of his youth and how poorly he was treated by bullies and by his own family, but I couldn’t really relate as well as some of you because I never experienced it. I had plenty of friends, I wasn’t bullied (some people made some attempts, but it never worked out), and I didn’t hate school at all. My parents were strict, to a degree, but they never restricted what I read or watched too, too much (I mean, obviously, I couldn’t watch R-rated movies when I was 12, but my parents didn’t care too much about me watching Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was 10, even though the face-melting freaked me right the hell out), so I didn’t read things that were “forbidden” in any way. So I wasn’t the biggest nerd.

HOWEVER! I was a huge sports nerd, and as we know, sports nerds are just as nerdy as “stereotypical” nerds, possibly more, and while I’m still a sports nerd, I’m not as big as one as I used to be. I mean, I loved getting records books — my parents just visited over Christmas and brought me some old books that they had kept over the years, and I now have regained my NFL record books, so I can tell you the entire 1983 draft by consulting my book (instead of going on the internet), if you’re interested. I used to get books of weird sports facts and such, which is how I learned about William Shakespeare, the famous Notre Dame football player. I can still rattle off far more sports trivia than is probably healthy, although I have lost quite a lot of it over the years to make space for, you know, more important stuff. But yes, I was (and still kind of am) a sports nerd. So the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done has to do with sports. Back when I was a young teen lad, I created baseball seasons. I came up with players, I came up with schedules, and I wrote down — on reams and reams of paper — box scores of every game. Now, I focused on the Phillies, because I was a Phillies fan, and I set it far, far in the future — 2017-2021, to be specific (although I did some stuff on either side of those years, just not as focused). The Phillies in the mid-1980s were not good at all, so this was very much wish-fulfillment, and my Phillies of 2017-2021 were a super-dynasty — they won five (5!) straight World Series titles, including the first four (4!) by sweeps; only the 2021 team lost a single game in the Series, so they went 20-1 over that period. I wrote out their entire seasons as box scores, and they won 100+ games each year. The 2017 team won 112 games and had four 20-game winners, back when 20-game winners were still a thing, and every player on the team batted over .300, back when batting averages were still a thing (the actual 2017 Phillies turned out to be a big disappointment, as you might have surmised). Their big power hitter was from Tonga (yep, Tonga), and all of their four starters (they still used a four-pitcher rotation, but a fifth starter was used occasionally, and of course he was really good) ended up winning 300 games, back when winning 300 games meant something. One of the pitchers is at the end of his career, two of them are in the middle of their careers, and one of them is pretty early in his career, but they all ended up winning 300 games. In the 2017 season, they absolutely destroyed the New York Yankees in the World Series, as they scored over 10 runs in each game and their four starters all pitched complete games. I’m a bigger football fan, but doing box scores for baseball is easier and kind of more satisfying than doing them for football games, but I made up football seasons, too, except it was youth football and I played in them with people I knew. I never played football, just intramural soccer (and some baseball), but I wanted to, I just wasn’t good enough. So I did it for football, too, but it wasn’t quite as precise and fun as making up 162-game baseball seasons. I did put teams in Denver and Miami, which didn’t exist at the time, but I still kept two divisions, so there was only one round of playoffs before the World Series. Oh well! But man, I had fun doing those. Talk about filling a lot of hours that I might have otherwise spent playing D & D!

Ok, that’s, I think, the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve never cosplayed, I don’t really delve into fantasy worlds as much as some nerds, and I’ve never written fan-fiction. If you have and that’s your answer, let us know! No judgment here!