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In Defense of the Fanboy
An anonymous reader writes "Ran across a great article over at TV Squad regarding obsessive internet fanboys. It's funny and pretty dead on about how we all benefit from the monomania of the typical fanboy." Where would my own useless mental database of knowledge about Green Lantern and Mobile Suit Gundam be without fanboys? Probably out on a date, but for now, thank a fanboy!
Where would my own useless mental database of knowledge about Green Lantern and Mobile Suit Gundam be without fanboys?
I think you can stop talking about them in the third person.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Some things are awesome and deserve fanboys. But some of those fanboys are way off...
My obsession with PDP-11 computers (well, actually, all things DEC) and Valerie Bertinelli is OK now? :-)
So I can actually speak in public about my pilgrimages to Maynard Massachusetts, 31736 Broadbeach Road, Malibu, and 3361 Coldwater Canyon, Beverly Hills California?
ummm...not that I know those addresses by heart or anything...
TDz.
1) hmmmm...I wonder...should I hit the "Post Anonymously" button?
2) yes, my wife does know about my obsessions
3) how many Slashdotters can guess my age from this post?
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Being a fanboy of Dark Angel is nothing to be ashamed of!
I'd imagine that the /. fanboi's are going to tear TFA apart.
Of course, I haven't read it, so I could be wrong.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
It is typical of the male to concentrate on things that most females (as in the guy's wife in tfa) don't understand. I think it's something like the same kind of attention my cat pays to a mouse hole. Maybe it comes from the same place, ie. the ability to stalk prey. Men are hunters, women are gatherers. They're different skill sets and different personality traits are rewarded. Most of our technological progress probably comes from the fact that males are willing to concentrate on things that are just stupid to the average female. All that is good.
On the other hand, part of the definition (according to wiki) of the Fanboy is the tendency to ignore facts that don't fit said fanboy's conception of reality. That sounds a lot like the kind of fundamentalist religion (Christian and Moslem and Jewish for that matter) that are currently making much of the world such a miserable place.
So, should we thank fanboys or not? Well, if you include scientists and religious fanatics as fanboys, I think it's pretty much a wash.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanboy
So who would win in a fight: Hal Jordan or Char Aznable?
Of course there are. They are usually called metrosexuals. Or gays.
Not to mention other names.
But see? every kind of fanboy, including soap and shampoo fanboys gets dissed by everyone else, including other fanboys.
Truly, we never grow up.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Great article!
Fanboys are a national treasure. Their diligence to spending hours/days/years nurturing and cataloging their obsession provide a useful function for the rest of us. Like a beaver spending its life building and maintaining a dam, or an oyster taking a piece of dirt and slowly making a pearl, we benefit from the years of their hard work for the few short moments when we care.
I'm sure we all go through periods when we run across something cool and it keeps our interest for a few weeks. We develop an interest and we're grateful to find the web site of some guy who has obsessed about our new subject for most of his life. We satisfy our desire for learning about whatever the subject du jour is, and then we go about our lives. I for one appreciate the effort they put into their obsession.
For example, over the years, I've developed or rekindled an interest in random topics: the show "The Prisoner" (from the 1960s), Magic the Gathering (which I hadn't played for 10 years), the musician Donovan, and other oddball things. I thought it was cool that one quick search on the Web revealed information that probably took all of someone's free time for several years (reading biographies, attending fan conventions, and talking to other hardcore fans):
1. I know that from the opening sequence from the Prisoner describes both the desire to get secrets from the spy named Number 6 but was also a pun for conformity: "What do you want?" Was he saying "Information" or "In formation"? Neat.
2. I know that the rules for "banding" were changed three times for MTG. Nifty.
3. I know that Donovan sang on the song "Billion Dollar Babies" by Alice Cooper. And Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin may or may not have played guitar on "Hurdy Gurdy Man", but John Paul Jones (the bassist from Led Zeppelin) did play bass on the song. Neato.
Could I have lived my life having never learned this info? Sure. Am I glad to learn this trivia? Yes. With fanboys, I can do both! Fanboys are like the Cliff Notes for millions of subjects, albeit disproportionately on Hobbits, lightsabers, or even Billy Joel.
I'm not mocking them, of course. I think it's funny because we're all obsessed about something or another -- they're called hobbies. For example, I probably seem to be a fanboy about some topics (I'll let the bored Slashdot reader sift through my previous posts to figure those out).
Anyway, here's to you, fanboys! Keep up the good work!
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation!!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation!!!
We have assumed control.
We have assumed control.
We have assumed control.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
And you can be a fanboy of the Oakland Raiders and noone blinks an eye...
It is a great method of birth control
A fanboy fanboy !
Tell 'em, Steve-Dave!
-Peter
Check Google... ah, that's what I'd thought... a football club.
Though in Europe football is the name of a completely different game, let's pretend that they're the same for all practical purposes.
If I see a football fan, I usually immediately think "what a moron" or, more often, "what a bunch of morons".
Seeing quite a lot of people wearing war^H^H^Hface paint, honking like mad and singing badly and, most importantly, heavily intoxicated somehow doesn't put any nice imags in my mind.
So yes, there are people who not only blink their eyes, but sometimes even prudently take cover when that particular kind of fanboy comes in their general vicinity.
It's just that it's a minority, so it seems reversed.
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Seeing quite a lot of people wearing war^H^H^Hface paint, honking like mad and singing badly and, most importantly, heavily intoxicated somehow doesn't put any nice imags in my mind.
that's funny because nice images are exactly what i get. when the world cup was in the u.s. and i lived in chicago it was awesome having fans walking about in big groups, singing, honking, etc. i'd never seen anything like it and haven't since, it was a lot of fun. maybe seeing it too much is the problem. for me it was a really novel and cool thing.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Well, I live in Croatia.
We have probably the worst-behaved fans in the world, second only to the English.
And the UK plays nice with the rest of the world, so they don't export their misbehaving fans.
But even without that, I don't understand football, and neither do many of my friends.
So whenever somebody starts talking football, we look at them just like they'd look at us if we started discussing Indo-European linguistics or Windows vs. Linux.
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... Clearly fangirls have better things to do.
Whatever your bag, the internet has the ability to promote it beyond whatever was possible prior to having such a simple medium of information exchange.
The best part is you aren't judged for your expression beyond the content of that expression. The worst part is the empowerment by way of obscure unity provided to the "fan boy" who reads without question of credibility. It's a problem when righteousness ensues a night of staying up till 6am washing down caffeine pills with ballz soda.
Media hasn't changed folks, only the medium.
Ever done a `man` on `top` ?
I was just reading that same artical last night. :D
For some reason I mostly meet serious engineers and family people but it once happened that
I went to a conference in California with some of my colleagues. There we were sitting in a hotel lounge fuzzing around with our laptops trying to get WLAN to work. Some girl sat nearby and said out of the blue that she didn't have any problems with her MAC to get trough their 'firewall' and that only pc people like us usually have problems with it.
I was taken aback, speechless, well I probably mumbled something. I have a MAC myself and was maybe a MAC fanboy as long as they used PowerPCs as CPUs, yet I didn't say anything.
There she was:
1. female
2. geeky
3. audacious
4. MAC fangirl (maybe convertible to a PowerPC fangirl?)
She might have been the last crazy woman out there for me and I didn't say anything.
Damn!
Je me souviens.
Thanks - cuz I can't remember the bootstrap loader address for our 11/35 running RT-11SJ off dual RK05j DecPacks - can you hook a brother up?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The article makes a reference to a literal avalanche of pornography. but provides no link or further information about it. I would like to see this literal avalanche of pornography. If anyone is aware of any historical record of this literal avalanche, please post more information so that we may track down this unusual literal occurrence.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Beware when you use the term fanboy.
One sense refers to the focused and deep-delving geeks/nerds which are the radiant source of geek chic.
Another sense refers to unreasonable and often belligerent adherence to favored ideas.
Earnest exploration and revelry: awesome.
Sectarianism, jingoism, groupthink, witch hunting, xenophobia, and shoddy reasoning catalyzed by wishful thinking and cognitive dissonance: not so much.
"How come there are no fanboys of soap and shampoo?"
Shampoo?
And, as he even said... Wiki will work fine too!
Hal Jordan, of course. After all, even without his ring some of his most important...err...attributes are still present.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I keep a fanboy chained to my server for when I need him. I think I'll feed him this week, out of appreciation for this article.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Shampoo?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Am I the only person that has noticed a significant rise of the use of the "fanboy/fanboi" word in 2006? I cringe at every post where I see someone using this word and I feel like I am surrounded by kids (mostly on digg). It's plain stupid. No one uses this word in real life, do they? I can never imagine myself using this word in public. Me: Hello, sir.. thanks for coming to assist me. Best Buy CSR: Oh, no problem Me: I want the PS3, could you get one for me? BBCSR: Sure. Wait one sec, BBCSR: Here you go sir... so, you're a Sony fanboy, huh? Me: WTF did you call me?
The typical Fanboy usually has some level of OCD and that needs to be addressed.
Disclaimer: mod scores were not used in calculations.