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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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Ignore this signature. By order.
... 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 believe fanboyism is fine, like most things, in moderation.
I'm an obsessive gamer. And Otaku. And... well, okay, I'm a lot of varieties of nerd/geek. And I do spend a lot more time involved in these activities than most people would consider "normal," but I keep boundaries.
As much as I love some particular items that have come from the Japanese culture, I have no intentions of moving to Japan, learning the language (it'd be sweet to order things that won't come to America/get it early, but it's an extremely complicated and, in my opinion, somewhat archaic language. English may be complicated grammatically, but we still only use 26 characters, most of which are identical to Romance/Germanic languages. And, as a multi-lingual friend has said to me, other than our grammar, English's biggest problem, if anything, is that it's overly simple in structure.). I don't believe the Japanese are a superior race. (I believe they're people. Which means I believe them capable of amazing things, but most of them are still as stupid as the average homo sapien)
I guess what I'm saying is the difference between a good and bad fanboy is, at the end of the day, the good fanboy keeps his obsessive hobbies in check. He might like to dress up as a Jedi or a Star Fleet Commander for fun, but that's all it is: fun.
And here we have an example of a fanboy vs whiner "debate".
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.
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.
i've been reading more and more screeds against people using the word "literally" in situations when they actually mean "figuratively." i think what's happened is that people started using the word "literally" as a way to ironically create hyperbole (i'm so hungry, i could literally eat a million pounds of pizza). it became a popular way to create hyperbole but since it's devilishly difficult to communicate irony through text a lot of uninformed readers began to infer that "literally" actually meant "figuratively." the result of this is that there are now approximately eleven million blogs out there using the word "literally" incorrectly (and unironically).
(this is probably as good as time as ever to say that my own little grammar nitpick is when people use the word "ironic" to mean "coincidental." it drives me crazy. but it's likely that in a generation or two the words will be synonymous. today's mistakes are tomorrow's rules, as they say...)
all this being said, i'm enough of a geek to be honored that something i wrote has been nitpicked on slashdot.
now, if you'll excuse me, i literally have a million things to do today...
all the best,
--jayblack
www.jayblackcomedy.com