You're not a nerd just because you like Dr. Who.

Sorry, but someone had to say it.

Let's do a test. Do you think you're a nerd? Good. What's your favorite Linux distro? Yeah, that's what I thought.

I will grant that being a nerd is more acceptable now. And that's nice, because I spent a lot of time in high school being ridiculed for it. That being said, liking an extremely popular television show doesn't make you a nerd. Liking Dr. Who these days is like enjoying chocolate. It doesn't exactly make you edgy.

I bring this up because today I had this brought to my attention. Someone on Facebook said it was the best nerdy thing ever. Is it?

What's wrong with putting an iconic ship into space? Well, for starters, this. I guess it's nerdy to put a TARDIS into orbit, but I feel like nerds generally don't enjoy endangering actual space operations. (And let's face it, there are better fictional ship designs.)

But hey, maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe this is a symbol. Maybe it's a message about how humans will one day travel the stars. (Though again, there are better role models.) Except, wait, here's a tidbit from the Kickstarter site for this project:

"These [real] satellites are designed to monitor weather patterns, and track migratory animals, and do zero-gravity experiments, you know, really serious stuff that's nowhere near as cool as launching a TARDIS into space."

So, basically, the designers of this project are nerds because they like a show about a guy who plays with his screwdriver inside a box all day, but they think that real-life satellites are lame. Yeah ok.

I bring this up because being a nerd or a geek or what have you has suffered a major setback at the hands of shows like Dr. Who and the Big Bang Theory. (The latter, I should point out, actively mocks nerds. If you don't see it, start actually paying attention to the characters, their appearance, their mannerisms etc. and see if they're actually anything like real nerds you know or simply the same stereotypes we've been fighting for years.) The real nerds aren't launching pointless shit into space; they're sitting at boxes running Arch and driving robots around Mars. I have a few things I'm nerdy about. Let's see if you can answer any of the following questions:

1. Do you prefer Ubuntu or Fedora?
2. What's your stance on standard manual vs. DSG?
3. Do you fall more in the Orlando Patterson camp, or more in the Ira Berlin camp?
4. Is "the Menagerie" one episode or two?
5. Can Modern compete with Vintage, or is Vintage simply too broken?

Yes, those questions are totally unfair. I intentionally left out keywords that would help you know what those questions were about and a very fair argument can be made that just because I'm a nerd about whatever I'm talking about doesn't mean someone else who can't answer those questions isn't. That's true. But that's not the point. The point I'm trying to make is that real nerds discuss issues in a wide variety of "in" subjects that usually make no sense to outsiders. There is a reason for this.

You'll notice that most of these subjects deal with either real life phenomenon (questions 1, 2, and 3), are meaningless except as a social indicator showing a more than surface level knowledge of the subject (question 4), or obliquely discuss the mechanics of something based in fiction as a mental exercise, particularly when the mechanics involved require intelligence (question 5). They rotate around two main subjects: belonging and thinking. Nerds were historically outcasts and also historically intelligent.

While there are real Dr. Who nerds who actually sit around and discuss Dr. Who in an intelligent way, I'd describe the majority of conversations I hear regarding the subject as shallow fanboying rather than actual discussion. It's the same problem I have with people thinking they're nerds for watching a show that's on HBO. The last show I watched on HBO was John Adams, so you'll forgive me if I don't think everyone walking around with a House Whatever t-shirt is a "huge nerd."

This is the problem with modern nerdom: it's being blurred, eaten from within. Anyone and everyone's a nerd now. We won the right to be open about our weird hobbies, but it came at the cost of losing our identities. I was there when being a nerd wasn't cool. Back then, being a nerd meant loving something at cost of your social life. Now it means not having to make that choice, and while that's awesome, and probably something we'd have loved a decade ago, it seems like being a nerd means less now that everyone can be one.

Sure, I'm a grumpy old man in a 23 year old body, but I have standards and I have ideas, and it seems to me that those ideas used to be shared by others and then were lost. And if I want to stand on my metaphorical porch with my metaphorical shotgun and tell those damn metaphorical kids to get off my metaphorical lawn, I will. Because I took shit for liking history and knowing how to construct a sentence correctly, and for liking Pokemon (which is cool now too btw) and all sorts of other things. And I feel like I was better for it. So while I don't really mind that people who aren't nerds in my mind get to use the identifier, and while I'm happy that no one judges people for their hobbies anymore, I still feel like there's a distinct line separating generations of nerds. I'm not saying you're wrong for watching Dr. Who. I'm not even saying you might not be a nerd in other areas. All I'm saying is please, get your TARDIS off my lawn.