In an recent interview with GQ, nerd superstar and host of The Wil Wheaton Project Wil Wheaton (gee, I wonder where they got the name of his show from?) had some really excellent things to say about what it means to be a geek. Or a nerd. Whatever puts your starship into hyperdrive, I guess:
I use ‘nerd’ and ‘geek’ interchangeably — I don’t make a distinction. I’ve said that being a nerd is not about what you love, it’s about the way that you love it. So you can be a nerd for football, and obsessively follow stats and player trades and figure out things that give you an advantage in, like, sports betting and things like that. Or, you can love Battlestar Galactica and try to work out all of the complex mythologies and get into things like blueprints of the ships. And then you can love things like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Winter Soldier, and love that so much that you end up going to a comic book shop and then reading all the way back through ten or twenty years of Captain America comics. Someone who I would describe as a ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’ is a person who loves something to its greatest extent, and then looks for other people who love it the same way, so they can celebrate loving it together.
GQ also tested out Wheaton on some nerd trivia (they call it a “test” but we know better than to gatekeep here, don’t we?) in another article that will also be appearing in the same issue of the magazine. Believe it or not, his all-time favorite fictional hero isn’t a Star Trek character: it’s actually Harry Potter. That’s ten points to what I’m assuming is probably Ravenclaw for Mr. Wheaton!
(via Comic Book Resources, image via Laura Kali)
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