(no subject)

[sorcyress]

There was post on the Am I The Asshole twitter today that boiled down to "Am I The Asshole for believing this girl who has been part of my SUPER NERD friend group for two years has been faking it and giving her a "nerd test" to show that she's not worthy".

(The answer is, of course, yes. Apparently he asked a question wrong and she schooled him on it, then the whole friend group found him annoying and when he demanded of his friends "her or me" they all went with the non-gatekeepy asshole. He is very angry that AITA reddit does not think he is in the right rather than this terrible imposter-girl.)

ANYways, one of the things I find dearly annoying (besides...all of it) is the assumption that "nerd" has a clear canonical set of information which you can test on. One of the things that I like about nerds is how "nerd" implies passion in niche interests and there are _so many_ of those you have no idea.

To that end, I've written my own test. I expect this "king of the nerds" to be able to answer every question 100% correctly! Please feel free to add your own nerdy test questions, so we can have as broad a representation of nerdship as possible!

1) How many years has it been since the Abrasax Matriarch was killed, and which of her heirs did it? (I'll even give you a hint and say this is from Jupiter Ascending)

2) On http://fanfiction.net, who are the three men most likely to be shipped with Hermione Granger? Bonus points if you can identify the name she took on in My Immortal. (And does it differ on Archive Of Our Own?)

3) When knitting a cabled sweater such as the one worn by Chris Evans in Knives Out, how many yards of yarn can you expect to need for each sleeve? (NGL, I don't actually know the answer to this and I do know it depends on size and cables, so assume you're knitting for Chris Evans. But then again, I've been calling myself a fake geek girl for *years* so I have no ego lost in not knowing the answer to this very nerdy question!)

4) Hooper's Jig is well known for its "clap". On what bar should the dancers clap? (oo, this one is a trick question! I hope I don't lose my own nerd card for wording it badly!)

5) Primrose is almost identical to another bellringing method. Which method and what is the difference? (This is the most recent bit of bellringing lore I have learned, so I'm excited about it)

6) The most recent Animal Crossing game has almost four hundred villagers. Name ten who have stuck through the series since the first game! (This might also be a trick question, I don't know how often villagers "retire")

7) Name the five most common animals used in fursonas. For bonus points, name one of the three most common hybrids. (my roommate has linked me to an entire broad research website about this, with datasets in the thousands, so uh, this is probably pretty close to the answer)

8) The harvestman is an arachnid but not a spider, despite being commonly assumed to be. What's another (less badass) name for this spindly-legged beastie?

9) To date, how many characters from the October Daye books have we met who are named for months of the year, and which months are represented?

10) Name five webcomics that have at least 1000 comics in their archives.

***

Note that while the topics were about as broad as I could make them (with an absolute minimum of thinking work), the questions within those topics were trying to be relatively simple --I'm sure you can answer most of these with a couple minutes on a search engine. I would love to hear your additions --a broad-but-not-deep nerd test for all!

((also, the humour here should be *mocking* gatekeepers, not *being* gatekeepers. I am not upset if you cannot answer my questions! I can't even answer all my questions! Nerdship is _so huge and broad_ that no one can hit all of it, that's the point! To that end, I have put answers to all the ones I know in the first comment¹ to this post.))

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Okay, unless one of y'all is real quick.

Comments

[sorcyress]

1) I'm pretty sure that it's Balem who kills her, and that they give a rough "how long ago" in the movie, but I don't actually remember. A year ago? Five? Hundred? Whatever.

2) I am *not* going to research a real answer, but it's gonna be between some combination of "Harry, Ron, Draco, and Snape".

3) hahahahahhaha Veronica might know? I wrote this question to be a nerdy knitting question I could actually write (which is why it has no specialized knitting vocab).

4) On bars 1 and 9, unless you're a curmudgeon like jere7my who answered "none".

5) Cambridge! Only you hunt at the lead ends! I have been getting increasingly good at Cambridge (it's what I was working on when ringing in-person stopped) so "do Cambridge but fuck up the lead ends" is a fascinating challenge!

6) Iunno, but the internet does. Gimme a sec, I'm just gonna hit "random" on villagerdb until I find ten. Goldie, Stu, Eloise, Nate, Pudge, Candie, Aurora, Rowan, Jay, and Cashmere.

7) If you didn't click through, Hybrid is actually the most common, but then in single animals it's "Wolf, Fox, Dog, Big Cat, Dragon". Most common hybrid fursonas seem to be "Dog/Wolf, Fox/Wolf, and Dragon/Wolf"

8) Daddy Long Legs! I had to throw myself a softball after writing questions I don't actually know the answer to!

9) I'm not positive, despite loving the books, but we've definitely heard of October, April, January, Maye, and August. If you guessed September, then you have mixed up Seanan McGuire and Cat Valente --September Morning Bell is the heroine of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making.

10) 1/0, Leftover Soup, Freefall, Sluggy Freelance, Real Life, Kevin and Kell, Schlock Mercenary, Homestuck, Dumbing of Age, Questionable Content, Something Positive, Narbonic, Skin Horse, xkcd, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, El Goonish Shive, Order of the Stick. That's where my brain stops giving rapidfire answers, sooooooooo yeah.

[landofnowhere]

9. As well as the Cat Valente September, September Torquill is a character from Tobyverse backstory (Simon and Sylvester's sister, and IIRC January's mother?) I don't think she appears in the books, but does in some of the Tybalt backstory stories that Seanan has written. I don't know any other month names, though there's definitely been speculation about why Marcia's name is so close to March.

(I'm very good at trivia -- though I'd fail a Star Trek quiz -- but don't think it's a test of character; rather, whether/why you care about people knowing trivia is the real test. I could come up with questions, but am not sure I can hit the 'mocking gatekeepers' note correctly, but won't try.)

[sorcyress]

Ah! I have been hoisted upon my own nerd petard! I mean, I haven't read most of the short stories, but I do vaguely recall September being mentioned somewhere in passing.

I totally did not have any Marcia speculation ever, and then at some point I saw some post where Seanan or a commenter made a comment like "why is there Marcia speculation" and my brain went OH THAT IS A THING ISN'T IT?! and paid a _lot_ more attention to her on my next reread. I'm terrible at guessing though, I just will look forward to the satisfaction of finding out what happens!

Agreed about trivia! I've never been particularly interested in seeking out trivia contests, but I often tend to do okay when I am accidentally in them. I have enjoyed things like my work holiday party "trivia" where the trivia is all specific questions about a colleague who is retiring, or receiving a big promotion or whatever. Obviously I don't know what kind of car Dr. SonSo drove in the 1980es, but it's a cute community-connection thing to find out the answer afterwards!

(And for what it's worth, I don't know that my questions successfully hit that "mocking" note right either, but it was really fun to try and pick a wide breadth of things to ask about!)

~Sor

[landofnowhere]

My partner A is even more into Tobyverse than I am, and also into puzzling out plot clues in general. So we've been through many variations of Marcia theories -- for the past 5 books we've been assuming that "this will be the book that explains Marcia!" but not yet -- and I still don't know what to expect.

I enjoy trivia games as a way for awkward nerdy people to socially interact -- but I don't seek out specific "trivia" events. I do like social games and puzzles with a trivia component, but it's better if there's something else to it too.

It occurs to me that for me, part of growing up nerdy with a weird upbringing was not just about knowing lots of stuff about my special interests that I wasn't expected to know, but also not knowing various cultural references that I was expected to know. So "nerd gatekeeping" just feels like perpetuating the cycle of abuse.

[lefty]

Very surprised you didn't include One over Zero in your answer to #10. Why else would you have worded the question as "at least a thousand" rather than "over a thousand"?

[sorcyress]

Read my answer more carefully, 1/0 is literally the first comic I include. It's between 10) and Leftover Soup.

[lefty]

I think if this question was numbered anything other than question 10, I would have seen what was right in front of my nose. But the 10) and the 1/0 just blended together as part of the question numbering. Glad you included 1/0, as I expected you would.

[sorcyress]

I am a fake geek many things, but the *only* person who gets to put me on blast for fucking up Tailsteak trivia is the man himself! I didn't put all that work into becoming his number one fan for nothing! ;)

~Sor

[jducoeur]

10) 1/0, Leftover Soup, Freefall, Sluggy Freelance, Real Life, Kevin and Kell, Schlock Mercenary, Homestuck, Dumbing of Age, Questionable Content, Something Positive, Narbonic, Skin Horse, xkcd, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, El Goonish Shive, Order of the Stick. That's where my brain stops giving rapidfire answers, sooooooooo yeah.

Oooh, comics I don't know! I know Sluggy, xkcd, OOTS and Narbonic well, and I just picked up Dumbing of Age in collection. (And I've read a modest amount of Kevin and Kell, SMBC and Something Positive, but kind of bounced of them. And surely Girl Genius is well past 1000 by now -- that's probably my fave, but I get it in hardcover.)

Don't know 1/0, Leftover Soup, Freefall, Real Life, Schlock Mercenary, Questionable Content, Skin Horse or El Goonish Shive at all. Any particular recommendations of what's worth checking out?

[sorcyress]

Depends on what you like!

Skin Horse would be the first I'd recommend based on what you've said --it's illustrated by Shaenon Garrity, who did Narbonic, and co-written by her and Jeffery Wells, who is an ascended Narbonic fan (he wrote the Madblood Anthem and the Yogurt Fanfic, among other things). Canonically takes place in the same world as Narbonic, has a little more soapy/romancey plot, and focuses on the travails of a non-human sapient social work organization.

1/0 is by my favourite ever webcartoonist, Tailsteak, as is Leftover Soup. 1/0 has no fourth wall. Leftover Soup is a slice-of-life comic about young adults hanging out, making/playing games, and developing relationships. Both are extremely philosophical and have lots of weird conversations about morality and the like. Both are complete (at 1000 comics each!), and if you like the style but more AIs and utopian settings, you might also be interested in Forward, Tailsteak's current project. (Warning about 1/0: it ran from ~2000-2003, Tailsteak's opinions and humour (and art skills) have all developed a lot since then. There are some...pretty rough edges here, not gonna lie)

***

More generally, Real Life and Questionable Content are both nominally "slice of life" comics with science-fiction elements (QC far moreso than RL). I like them both, but neither has me absolutely raving.

El Goonish Shive is "high-schoolers-with-magic-powers", and it's also *definitely* "transformation wish-fulfillment trending into fetish fuel" (and if it helps, the artist was a *lot* closer in age to the characters when he started it, and it has shown a *huge* amount of development in becoming Much Less Creepy about its content over time, but it is deffo not for everyone). Currently it is "high school seniors with magic do cool shit and have Srs Heavy Plot in between Transformation Funtimes, also basically everyone's queer hell yeah!"

Freefall and Schlock Mercenary are both sci-fi *epics* each of which started around the turn of the millennium -Freefall is still going, Schlock just ended a couple weeks ago. Both have lots of medium-to-heavy science fiction explanations for their space travel and AI and other exciting scientific breakthroughs. In general, Freefall is more character driven and slower paced (its first major storyline was completed about 3/4 of the way through its run --lots of smaller stories within!), Schlock is a mostly family-friendly romp through Blowing Stuff Up (but with a hugely spiraling political/war/action plot along the way)

I cried for both of them when they reached the end of their major plots (like I said, Freefall continued, Schlock is taking a break) just because I was so impressed by the scope and worldbuilding and embrace of humanity and hope. To be fair, it is pretty easy to get me to cry, but I really enjoy/ed both of these. Schlock does books if you prefer paper reading, I think Freefall is solely online.

~Sor

[jducoeur]

New toys!

Thanks for the reccs. I'll probably check out Skin Horse first -- I have a soft spot for Shaenon's work. (I wrote a Girl Genius LARP a fair number of years ago, which wound up crossing over into Narbonic because really -- how could I not?)

But overall, this sounds delightful!

[harena]

Hah, you got a knitting one in there, goodgood! I'd add:

How many yards & what's the best weight, & fiber of yarn to knit a Nardole hat? ^_^

[sorcyress]

Well yeah! Knitting is totally an activity for nerds, it requires incredible passion, precision, and creativity! You have to be able to read arcane diagrams and count endless rows of not-quite-identically-repeating numbers! Plus there's all the nerdery about different colours and dye batches and weights and softness and SO MUCH COOL THINGS TO LEARN AND NERD ABOUT!

~Sor

[harena]

It's clearly what i'm nerdiest about... well, along with soap making and various scifi franchises ^_^

[songbird_becca]

About 180 yards of dk I’d reckon? Less or more depending on head size.

[sovay]

Apparently he asked a question wrong and she schooled him on it, then the whole friend group found him annoying and when he demanded of his friends "her or me" they all went with the non-gatekeepy asshole.

I mean, good for the friend group.

To that end, I've written my own test. I expect this "king of the nerds" to be able to answer every question 100% correctly!

Hee.

1) Haven't seen Juiter Ascending, have no clue.

2) Harry, Ron, and Snape?

3) Don't knit, have no clue.

4) Don't country dance, have no clue.

5) Don't ring, have no clue.

6) Don't play Animal Crossing, have no clue.

7) Know a variety of furries but have never considered the statistics! I'm going to assume foxes are popular and shrug at the rest.

8) Daddy-long-legs.

9) Haven't read the October Daye books, have no clue.

10) Don't read that many webcomics! Er . . . Narbonic, Girl Genius, Skin Horse, xkcd, I imagine Pokey the Penguin since I was reading it in college, definitely not Lackadaisy even though it's been running for literally ever.

Yeah, I feel bad about myself for none of this. You must have asked the questions wrong!

[sorcyress]

Yeah, I feel bad about myself for none of this. You must have asked the questions wrong!

*laughs!* Oh nooooooose! I have failed in my mission! ;)

I am a little surprised you haven't seen Jupiter Ascending, but I think that's because my broad assumption is "Sovay has seen all the movies" rather than the more accurate "Sovay enjoys movies and has seen many of them, and seems to specialize in things from the pre-70s or so". At any rate, I will casually recommend it if you enjoy goofy sci-fi wish-fulfillment (but for girls), and not at all be upset if you never get around to it, for any or no reason at all.

~Sor

[sovay]

I am a little surprised you haven't seen Jupiter Ascending, but I think that's because my broad assumption is "Sovay has seen all the movies" rather than the more accurate "Sovay enjoys movies and has seen many of them, and seems to specialize in things from the pre-70s or so".

I have very definitely not seen all of the movies, even from the first half of the twentieth century! I also see more than I review, and this year reviewing has been rather negatively affected by the entire pandemic, massive financial insecurity, physical health trash fire thing. Jupiter Ascending was one I missed in theaters and then never followed up on. I fully believe I would enjoy it; it has always sounded like gonzo space opera of the first water.

[genarti]

It is absolutely gonzo space opera of the first water. Someday, when we can do such things again (or when somebody conveniently located rigs up a backyard outdoor projector for socially distanced watching), skygiants and I will show it to you if you like, and you can see what you think of its gleeful kitchen sink approach.

[sovay]

Someday, when we can do such things again (or when somebody conveniently located rigs up a backyard outdoor projector for socially distanced watching), skygiants and I will show it to you if you like, and you can see what you think of its gleeful kitchen sink approach.

I would, honestly, love that.

[(Anonymous)]

On a lark once I entered a Star Trek trivia contest at a con and it was incredibly HARD. The only question I got right that nobody else knew was the names of the whales in Star Trek IV.

[crystalpyramid]

I don't know any of these but your selection of topics is really delightful.

[keshwyn]

Clearly, I am not a nerd. I think I know the answer to one of these. Max.

That's ok, I don't need to be that flavor of nerd. I can quote the lyrics of about 4 dozen Broadway musicals from memory!

[sorcyress]

Ooo, I didn't even think of broadway nerding as a question! Maybe "Who played the Balladeer in the 2005* broadway revival of Assassins, and what other role did he double up with?", as tribute to the Cringey But Still Enjoyable fandom of my misspent youth.

(to be clear, it was the fandom that was cringy, not Assassins itself).

~Sor

*Also, fake nerd alert on me, because when I looked it up to double check, the revival was 2004. Alas!

[sovay]

Who played the Balladeer

Neil Patrick Harris, who does "The Ballad of Czolgosz" like a double-time patter song and I adore it. I believe he doubled Lee Harvey Oswald, as is not strictly canonical but often done, like the casting of the Narrator and the Mysterious Man in Into the Woods.

[sbrackett]

Another question to add:

In conservation/museum collections management, what are the 10 agents of deterioration?

[sorcyress]

!!!

I have no idea! But I am so delighted by this question because dang, what a wonderfully specific nerdery!

(I would assume "light" is one of them, and "dust". Time? Oil (specifically finger, but in general)? Is there anything that deteriorates from noise? Oh, vibration though! Please drop an answer if you get a chance, I am totally curious now!)

~Sor

[sbrackett]

Hmm let’s see what I can remember offhand

1) light yeah
2) forces (things being dropped, things moving around and bumping each other)
3) temperature fluctuations
4) relative humidity fluctuations
5) pests
6) theft
7) disassociation (ie the object has an accession file but the number associating it with that file has worn off)
8) water
9) uh maybe off gassing? I’ve kinda forgotten the last two let me find a link

Ok that was semi accurate. Fire and pollutants are the last two.

https://www.conservation-wiki.com/wiki/Ten_Agents_of_Deterioration

[sbrackett]

I thought of another!

How many regularly tiling pentagons are there and who is the woman who secretly discovered many of them?

Secretly in that she was a stay at home mom (I think she was a mom? She may not have had kids but I'm pretty sure she did) and she invented her own ways of tracking which pentagon was which and discovered a bunch of new tiling pentagons and her whole family had No Idea.

[lefty]

I was trying to come up with a good math question, but hadn't come up with one yet. This is a great one! I get only part credit, because I can't spell her last name correctly.

[sbrackett]

But you know her and her story, which is best of all!

And now more people know her due to my question.

[joshuazelinsky]

Hmm, I got 2/10. Does this mean I'm allowed to tell people I'm a fake nerd boy then?

[sorcyress]

I would genuinely find that delightful, actually!

To be fair, my personal delight in embracing "fake geek girl" is at least half the ambiguity between whether fake applies to geek or girl (it's the latter, natch). But I love the title just as a reminder that it's okay to like things and you don't have to be SERIOUS about a thing to just...casually enjoy the thing.

~Sor

[joshuazelinsky]

Well, to that extent, I'm sure I can find at least someone who thinks that real men eat steak and like football and cars. (I suspect that at some level this is the exact same mentality which leads people to decide that some people are not real nerds/geeks/whatevers.) But that isn't "fake" modifying both in the same sense. In this context, it would be that someone else might label me as not satisfying the criterion for a category, whereas in your case it would be other people deciding you do fit a category that you don't identify with. Does that make any sense?

[genarti]

1) Balem and... some absurd number of thousands! I'm pretty sure! That is as specific as I can get here, because I don't track the timelines in JA, I just laugh at them.

2) Gonna guess it's Ron, Harry, Snape. I can't remember the My Immortal answer, though! Mi?? It's probably something more ridonkulous than that.

3) I am a knitter and I have no idea. :p I only calculate yardage if I have to. It's lots of cabling, though, so the answer's gonna be higher than for a non-cabled sleeve of equivalent size and gauge.

4) ...One? I think? To be honest my answer is "none, I secretly hate clapping on a set bar in dances unless it's for a tempo change or when petronella-ing out of hello-goodbye," but I recognize that is not the correct answer here. :p (Not that right answers are exactly teh point.)

5) No idea! Bellringing is a loud mystery to me!

6) No idea! Animal Crossing is a cartoony mystery to me!

7) Gonna guess wolf, fox, leopard, cheetah, eagle? That is very much a guess.

8) Daddy longlegs!

9) ...September? May? August? I only ever read the first two books and that was years ago.

10) xkcd, Order of the Stick, probably Narbonic? Maybe Sluggy Freelance? Probably not Wondermark?

Answering these is not really the point either, but I felt like taking a stab at it, mostly since I was amused by how many I was like, "ah yes! I can take an educated wild swing-and-a-miss at this!!" about. Anyway, obviously, I totally agree with all your broader points. :D

[sorcyress]

Catching up on old comments and I found myself laughing at "bell ringing is a loud mystery", which I know I also did the last time I read this comment. Very good!

Wondermark is over a thousand! I only know because I get it emailed to me (the only comic I read that way, I'm genuinely not sure how/why that happened only this once and never since) and the strip number is in the subject line.

Your enthusiasm for Jupiter Ascending makes me very very happy.

[songbird_becca]

I’m a little miffed that you would assert that “Daddy Long Legs” isn’t a badass name. Imagine one with leather and a paddle. Mmmmmphh, more like Zaddy long legs!

[lefty]

Questions from some parts of nerddom you missed.

11. What board game is widely but incorrectly thought of as having originated the worker placement mechanic in 2005? Name at least one worker placement game published earlier than that.

12. What line occurs at the end of John Cleese's tirade in the "Monty Python Live at Drury Lane" version of the Parrot Sketch that is not in the original televised version?

13. Of the 6 calls 1/4 Thru, Swing Thru, 3/4 Thru, 1/4 Mix, Swing and Mix, 3/4 Mix, which one is the odd man out, and why?

14. When and why was the official marathon distance changed from 26 miles to 26 miles 385 yards?

15. What is the primary technique difference between American and International Style Rumba? (this one is probably too easy, but I'm not enough of a ballroom nerd to come up with a better question here).

16. What quirk of Pippin's speech, impossible to render in the movie version, causes the people of Gondor to think Pippin must be an extremely important personage in the Shire?

17. (because of all the nerd genres, the one that must be on the test is the meta-genre of nerd tests!) In the scene in the movie Diner where Eddie requires that Elyse pass a test of football knowledge before he will agree to marry her, what question is actually incorrect?

[sbrackett]

I'm not sure I know the answer to any of these and I even ballroom dance! I'm most curious about the marathon one though.

[lefty]

I think if this question was numbered anything other than question 10, I would have seen what was right in front of my nose. But the 10) and the 1/0 just blended together as part of the question numbering. Glad you included 1/0, as I expected you would.

[lefty]

Answers to my questions:


11. Caylus; Bus, Keydom, Aladdin's Dragons, Ys (extra nerd points for claiming that some of these "aren't really worker placement because...")

12. "'e's fucking snuffed it!"

13. Swing and Mix can start with either hand; the other 5 always start with the right hand.

14. At the 1908 Olympics, in London, Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VIII, requested that the race start on the lawn of Windsor Castle (so the littlest royals could watch from the window of their nursery, according to some accounts) and finish in front of the royal box at the Olympic stadium—a distance that happened to be 26.2 miles (26 miles and 385 yards).

15. In American style (Rhythm), weight is taken on a bent leg which is then straightened, In International style (Latin), weight is taken on a straight leg.

16. Westron, like modern French, has a familiar and a formal. This distinction is lost when it is translated into English. In the dialect of Westron used in the Shire, the formal has died out, and the familiar is used exclusively. So Pippin tutoyer's Denethor, Steward of Gondor, using the familiar, as though he is of similar rank. (I don't own the DVDs, and would be interested to know whether the people who wrote the French subtitles got this right).

17. The question was "The Colts signed him. A Heisman Trophy winner who decided to play in Canada. Now, however, he plays for the team. What's his name?" The intended answer, of course (:-)) is Billy Vessals. But DIner is set in 1959, and Vessels played for the Colts in 1956.