Today I hope to break this trend.
You see, just as the music that I feature springs forth from hundreds of talented and undeniably geeky individuals, my love of nerd culture is similarly nourished by others. Blogs are, by their very nature, cannibalistic; so, in the same way that MC Frontalot and Uncle Monsterface help feed my need for musical geekery, a cavalcade of other bloggers slake my thirst for true nerd culture.
You likely already have a stable of the standard geeky cultural destinations in your aggregator of choice – your io9s and your Topless Robots – but there are other, subtler options.
So where do I go when I want to read nerdy things written by nerdy people? Let me tell you:
Techland
The mainstream does not, as a rule, understand the nerd culture phenomenon. They can wax poetic about how Big Bang Theory represents a cultural paradigm shift where nerds can be legitimate protagonists, and they can drone on and on about the dreaded "geek chic," but they just can't seem to grok what we're really about. To them we are at best an unfathomable mystery and at worst another momentary oddity. The caveat to this statement is TIME magazine. More specifically, it's TIME's Lev Grossman. He's sort of our inside (outside?) guy, the one cat on the more conventional journalistic tip that speaks with our voice.
I originally began following Lev through his work at TIME's NerdWorld blog, a project that recently transformed into the newly unveiled TechLand. This new blog shares all the principle earmarks of NerdWorld, focusing on things like gaming, gadgets, comics and TV – all of which are core elements of nerd culture.
Lev manages to avoid the principle pratfall of professional blogging by walking that narrow line between analytical exploration and personal narrative, and along the way manages to craft posts that are both insightful and genuinely entertaining. Plus he and I share joint blog comment custody of a certain Church H. Tucker. So there's an additional bond.
The Life and Times of Jarvis Slacks
I have long held the opinion that a proper nerd can geek out about practically anything, and Jarvis Slacks is proof positive of this postulation. Whether he's sharing his impressions of Borderlands, trying to unravel the complex web of teen angst and poor decision-making that led to the popularity of Jncos or putting those snooty-ass cavemen in their place, he always comes across like a nerd's nerd: intelligent, sardonic and literate as fuck.
Jarvis is an educator by trade, and some of his best stuff comes from that well-worn but still totally serviceable "exasperated teacher "pastiche. (Holler at his Twitter for more info.) Still, for my money there's no one I'd rather see go on a political tear than Jarvis. His takes on subjects like Fox News and why you shouldn't trust the police are like perfectly polished nuggets of geeky genius.
If you're a fan of Halo, Battlestar Galactica or leftist politics, Jarvis is your man.
Wolf Gnards
Wolf Gnards is a blog for people who take their ridiculous pop culture minutiae seriously.
Wait; skip that. Wolf Gnards is the blog for people who take their ridiculous pop culture minutiae seriously.
For the uninitiated, I would describe this blog as a solid bitch slap to modern entertainment media. While most rags (both dead tree and digital) linger over John and Kate or can't seem to get enough of golf pros and their traffic accidents, Wolf Gnards is calculating how long Bill Murray spent in Groundhog Day's temporal loop and the proper bangs-to-face ratio for aspiring indie girls.
To break it down Wolf Gnards style, the blog is essentially snarky pop culture + math. And that shit always = nerd.
Plus, can you really go wrong with a blog that's name is a Monster Squad reference?
