Wednesday nights at 10, you can bet there will be a crowd around the cable television in our building to watch Project Runway.
1) I prefer watching it on tape with you–that way I can fast forward through the commercials 2) you’re never going to develop a deep connection to Project Runway. Unless, I guess, you’re like really into fashion ;P.

They gots no appreciation for whats they got - no appreciation at all! Durn spoiled whippersnappers!

Now where’s my cocoa?!

I go back to the time before anyone outside of a handful of video nuts had VCRs. When being a fantasy or science fiction fan meant READING BOOKS - many of which required scouring speciality bookstores and mail order catalogs - and savoring the occasional non-shit movie that came along. When playing D&D meant making your own dungeons - not out of creative pride, but because there just wasn’t much yet published and DIY was pretty much it. (Unless you chose to abandon all dignity and use Judges’ Guild stuff ). Bah, where’s my soup?! NURSE!!!!

I think people get into sports more due to peer pressure than anything else. It’s an excuse to do things with other people more than something that’s enjoyed by themselves.

Over the last decade or two, I’ve watched several of my geeky hobbies step out of the shadows and into the mainstream limelight: comic books, videogames, anime, manga - you name it, it’s more popular now than it was when I first got into them a long time ago. The recent popularity of the new Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films mean scifi and fantasy are more mainstream than they used to be, too.

Now on the one hand, it’s nice to see your love of a genre or medium validated by having lots of other people love the same things you do: to know you’re not just some sad dork sitting alone in a dark room, but that you’re surrounded by dorks. :-) Plus it’s nice to be able to go into any Best Buy for my anime and gaming fix.

But on the other hand, if you’ve somehow tied your sense of identity to the things you love and to your outsider status, having other people intrude somehow diminishes one’s sense of self: like you’re being sublimated by the masses. And sometimes there’s a sense of elitism that goes with loving something obscure: to think you’re above the hoi polloi because you appreciate something the rest of them don’t or can’t. So once fandom gets overrun by the masses, you seek out new higher ground.

I remember the days of nth-generation fansubbed tapes; now I can find anime DVDs in Walmart and anime broadcasts on Cartoon Network. I remember the days when manga was just starting to broach the specialty comics market; now I can find the shelves at Borders stuffed with Naruto and Dragonball. I remember when gaming was just for kids and nerds; now it seems like everyone under the age of 30 has at least one game console. It’s strange to watch your personal space get overrun with philistines…