This week on Nerdworld.com

This week's newsletter features a story of Nerd pride from Jaime Hampton

"Let's face it. There are many different types of nerds out there. I'm one of them. I'm part of a rare breed called newspaper nerds. You may have heard of band geeks, math nerds, art weirdos. They make up some of the population at school, but being a newspaper nerd couldn't be better. We get to carry around press passes. One flash of those babies can get you into the most coveted of events. But being a nerd and all, I don't usually feel the need to get into a coveted event. Unless it's a 'Fact's of Life' convention. In which case I bring out my Blair costume and have a ball! Us newspaper nerds also stay at school until all hours of the night. The other day, I got to school at 6:00 (when it starts at 7:30) and left at 8:00 (when it ends at 2:30), just to work on the paper. Selling ads, designing pages, writing the stories, attending state and national conventions: These are all part of the newspaper nerd agenda. But there's one thing that is our trademark. When people see one of us with our little hand-held notepads, they run. That means interviews! "Can I have just a quick quote?" we say, and it ends up taking 20 minutes. "Oh no, here comes one of those newspaper nerds." they say. I guess when it all comes down to it, it's nice to have a place to fit in. Newspaper is what makes me unique, even if it does make me a nerd. Our advisor is grooming me to be editor. And thanks to my nerdly capabilities, I'll be a great one." Brings a tear to your eye, doesn't it?

Steve Bosson writes about his good friend Eric "Eric is a very pathetically geeky and nerdy guy. He loves both hardware and software. Last year Eric was in the hospital for 3 or 4 days due to surgery. He missed his 8 pc's at home so much that he called me and asked me to reboot one of my pc's over and over and to hold the phone up to the pc so that he could savor the sounds of the pc as it went through the POST hard drive spin up. If that doesn't make Eric one of the geekiest guys around I don't know what would." At least Eric didn't ask Steve to change his hard drive!

Thomas Davidson explains why he is a Nerd "Anyway, I'm in the 9th grade at Wren High School in South Carolina. Almost everyone here is obsessed with sports, and defines a nerd as "someone like Steve Urkel." Throughout the years, I have changed this school for the better by far, but there is much more to be done. I am the only real nerd who admits it, but I go step further and am proud of it. A few other people claimed to be a nerd, but only when they heard the word "intelligent" in my technical definition, and they still make the occasional F on an easy math quiz. I've got a lot of stories to tell, but I'll keep it short for now so I can see how everyone reacts before I go on.

In the 8th grade I used my brother's TI-85 to make games that everyone played at lunch, whether I knew the calculator had been taken or not. Speaking of calculator games, you might know of my brother--Patrick Davidson, inventor of ZKart 3D, galaxian, luniod, Phoenix, and many more. I later got my own TI-89 and at the end of the year a handheld computer. I make it a point not to follow along with any of the styles of people at school and became decidedly not conformist, so I don't even try to act like a normal nerd. I wear a fancy black suit with tie (NOT A CLIP-ON!) to school every day, and always had my black HP 620 LX handheld computer ready to be whipped out for everything from notes, to programming, to playing some Sinclair Spectrum games on an emulator, that is... until a video chip wore out and half the screen turned permanently bright orange.

I'm apparently right brained and very skilled with art, which makes sense, since I really don't like the actual code writing of programming, but love to design software and games. I have lots of powerufl ideas and projects I'm working on, but it always goes slow. My brian dominance test gave me 2 points for the left and 83 on the right. Still, I'm pretty good with my left brain, and am in all honors classes. I would have made all A's last year if it weren't for Art, ironically since I am artistic, but I was absent the first day and was inadequately informed about what I missed. The previous year I made all A's, and I hope to do it again.

I've been typing longer than I meant to alreay, so I'll just tell you a few of my hobbies and quit: art (on paper and computer generated), program design, fictional writing (especially science fiction), desgining games (besides the computer ones--I created a long series of "TinyGames" in nice little illustrated pouches (printed from the computer) that are always extremely popular the first week I release them, and then fade out of interest, as well as several unique ideas I'll get into another time), singing (not boring chorus-style things, but more lively things like Hair and Secret Agent man, featuring live accompaniment and etc. everyone loves it, I'll have to tell some stories about that too), contortions (I can get in the Yoga Lotus Position, and then flip up my my legs, balance on my knees only, and walk around like that, as well as several other things that I'll have to tell you about later), playing computer games (I have colleced 115 full-version commercial games, all legal (NO WAREZ!)), and more" Imagine what he will look like in college!

Do you have a story you would like published in a newsletter or on Nerdworld? You can submit it here!

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Coming Next week: My Blackberry and ME

Les Laynor
Contributing Editor
Nerdworld.com