Mission Statement

It’s the time we live in.

Maybe they should call it the entertainment age….

Everyone from every age has that one thing they love doing, maybe it’s that show they have to watch every Thursday night, the game they have to tune in for every Sunday, the book that they have to read as soon as it’s put on the shelves. If you ask them, they can tell you all about it. They can tell you who won the last 7 seasons of Survivor or the last 30 Super Bowls. They can tell you how many children Brad and Angelina have or all about those angsty teenage vampires. So much information, floating around aimlessly in their brains, and yet if you know that the Starship Enterprise runs on Dilithium Crystals, or the names of the first 151 pokemon or that Han Solo shot first, you will instantly be labeled “nerd!” “geek” “fanboy/fangirl”.

And why? It’s because sometime between our last Saturday morning cartoon and our first cup of coffee we lost the ability to tap in to our imagination. We lost our capacity to accept new things, to branch out. Yet some people call this maturity. Perhaps it’s because they don’t play with action figures anymore or because they don’t wonder what it would be like to have their own spaceship or be in the midst of a war with magical creatures.

So we keep ourselves hidden, and whisper our conversations in secrecy. We throw in words like “frak” just to indentify each other. When people ask us what are hobbies are, we are quick to say something like “mountain climbing”, anything to avoid telling people you paint Warhammer figurines. It seems like they won’t ever understand. It seems as though the mainstream will always enjoy the fat on the top of their milk, more than the protein rich nutrients that lay underneath.

Yet it is also important that we “nerds” branch out as well, not allowing ourselves to get tunnel vision for one particular obsession. Whether you think Neo is the chosen one, or Harry Potter, whether you think that Dr. Strange could take on Dr. Who or that Buffy is a better vampire slayer than Blade, you must be open to new horizons and new experiences.

Honestly, if you asked me in high school what kind of a nerd I was, I would tell you all about the newest anime I watched or video game I played. Yet what I grew up on was television sci-fi. My earliest memories were filled with Star Trek Next Generation or X-files. I have vivid memories of watching the remastered Star Wars movies in theaters for the first time, then the Prequel trilogy came and I was huddled in the theater at 12:00 A.M. just me and my parents. I loved it, and yet I didn’t label myself, I didn’t tell myself I was a nerd or a sci-fi fan. And I certainly didn’t write off anyone else’s interests off as being too “nerdy”. I was happy to be in another world, to enjoy the beauty that someone else meticulously put together.

And yet some time between my last Millennium Falcon model and my first Hayao Miyazaki movie, I couldn’t open my mind to anything new, anything outside of my spectrum of imagination. In 2009 I had a wake-up call.

I’ve been attending Dragon-Con, the most important science fiction and fantasy convention, since I moved to Georgia, which had been 10 years as of 2009. I’m not sure what draws me in about the event, it could be the open atmosphere, discussing personal interests with odd and unusual people. It could be the costumes or the late-night parties. Either way, this year was much different, I wandered around talking to people of all different kinds throughout the night until I met an old man dressed in some sort of ceremonial robe, he wore a great pointy hat and was combing his fingers through his bushy, snow-white beard.

If you attend conventions regularly, this is quite the normal site, yet if you had half the blood-alcohol level I had, you would still find this unusual and interesting enough to spark a conversation with. The man began to talk to me in-character as most do, he spoke of great wizarding legends and lore. I tried very hard to get him to have a real conversation, asking him what he did for living, yet he replied that he was a wizard by trade and that he was personally responsible for keeping treasures hidden inside the “valley of lost souls”. My face turned more and more red as the conversation went on, whether it was frustration or the rum and coke disappearing in my glass, I wanted to get to a straight answer from him. Finally, just when I was about to give up on the old crazy bastard, he got up and looked me in the eyes, with a wise, wizardly stare. His beard danced as he raspily muttered “you should take yourself more unseriously” with that, he hit me on my forehead jokingly with his staff and walked off. I was stunned.

Perhaps I should be a bit more unserious, especially at quite possibly the most unserious place to be. My thoughts turned inwardly and even in the loud, bustling room, I was alone, silent, ashamed. I couldn’t find my imagination anymore. It had been so long since I connected to the part of me that wanted to live my life as a Jedi or use magic.

I felt like throwing up, I had almost gone over the edge, I had almost gone to the mainstream, I was probably only days away from picking a favorite sports team, or watching a romantic comedy. I had to change things quickly.

At the time, I was living in Atlanta, I came home from Dragon-Con with a new outlook. A new hunger, a hunger for NEW! I made trips to the library, exhausting their science fiction section, their fantasy section. I made several trips up to Borders every day to read the newest comic books. I vowed to myself that I would hold on to these things, these things that would allow me to connect so freely to my inner-child. And I did.

I devoted a year to it. And even when I found myself thinly spread in responsibilities, I kept my thoughts floating around in the clouds. Even when the stress seemed insurmountable I kept myself grounded in the unreal. And when I felt my feet starting to stick too far in to the mud, I picked myself up and found something new.

From Isaac Asimov to Tony Stark, from Battlestar Galactica to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, from 1984 to Spiderman 2029, I found happiness in every nook and cranny in our wonderfully nerdy universe.

This is simply, my journal of all of the majestic sights to see in this ever growing and always interesting world of being unserious.