PierreTheMime posted:

Chicken McNobody posted:

I play a lot of Fallout. Until very recently playing as an "evil" character made me extremely uncomfortable. As in, I would feel like a bad person IRL if I <Lie>d to a character. In one F3 playthrough I blew up Megaton and had to quit and start a new game because I felt so awful.

Elephantgun posted:

gently caress I forgot about this.

We got a math book that there were problems and we picked maybe 30 out of 200 pages to work from over the course of the year. I spent the first 4 weeks of school going through all 200 pages in my math book and solving every problem during homeroom/studyhall. When people asked why, I replied "for fun".

I was also really excited at the start of every school year because I would get a fresh new history book and I couldn't wait to get home and read it cover to cover.

Pick posted:

From the ages of 14 to 20, I wrote a million(+) word fantasy novel. It drove a lot of my interest in artwork and writing during that time, even though no one ever read it or looked at the artwork I did for it. I realize why people weren't interested in hearing about it--hell, I wouldn't have been, and it was pretty stupid because drat, 14-year-olds are poo poo writers--but it basically drove me from ever pursuing a creative field. You can't expect other people to care about you or the things you do .

I still think about those characters quite a bit, though.

rinski posted:

I got a bunch of coworkers back into Magic: the Gathering and each one said the same thing: "I used to play, but I quit in high school because it was too nerdy." It made me kind of sad, because they obviously love the game. We stay late a few nights a week and play. Some of them have even started going to small tournaments. I haven't stopped playing since junior high, but for a few years it did feel like my dirty little secret.

Fortunately for all of us, we became adults and realized there's nothing intrinsically bad about playing a game we think is fun. Nothing mentioned in this thread is intrinsically wrong, and a lot of the less healthy stuff seems to have resulted in a good learning experience. Honestly, a lot of the more projects you guys brought up seem legit fascinating.

You can be a huge nerd and still be a perfectly functioning member of society. I still play a ton of competitive Magic, stream myself playing games, post on these very forums, and still maintain employment. In fact, later today my company is flying me all around Asia for a two week-long business trip. Well, technically the trip doesn't start for another week, but I booked an earlier flight so I could play in GP Taipei this weekend. With my wife. Who I met at a Magic tournament. Who plays Magic professionally.

Edit: To contribute embarrassing content, I used to draw shoe advertisements, made several versions of a bad Magic knockoff, and wrote a ton of bad, boring fantasy when I was a kid. At one point I had like 15 white notepads filled with what I can only describe as a slideshow of a made up video game. Featuring the Sun and Moon bosses from Kirby. My own bad fiction is probably what made me so interested in contributing to Horrors 2 and led me to start a project I barely ran with.

General Panic posted:

I understand Edmund Burke's Reflections on The Revolution in France is similar, but without elves or cannibals.

And knowing this is probably pretty nerdy in itself.