THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 115 - AMONGST THE NERDS

I first discovered Games Workshop in 1985 when I bought a couple Dragon magazines in Twin Falls, Idaho. My parents always let me spend a little more money on vacation & I was stoked to get these. I think I got a set of Steve Jackson Cardboard Heroes as well. I had fallen head-first into the world of fantasy role playing-games, but. This is a big but. I always felt like they were missing something, that they were too nerdy. I was always on the outskirts of nerd culture, into Monty Python, original Star Trek, comic books, video games, Dr. Demento, Dungeons & Dragons & all of that sort of thing. I’m also just really smart & analytical & fast at mathematics, so you gotta have that kind of brain to keep up. The thing is, when you live in the brain world so much, you forget about the cool world & all the non-brain things that play into that world. Whatever my attraction to & understanding of cool was, was the ideas that fill out the music world, doing drugs, smoking, drinking, tattoos, muscles, fast cars, girls, live fast, die young, sunglasses, that sort of thing. The very real division between hip & square. The split is nowhere near so pronounced today as it used to be, the rules barely exist. Metalheads with cats is an old trope, even if why I was attracted to Heavy Metal initially, besides the music was the “posers must die” attitude, the skulls, the mushroom clouds. Anyhow, Games Workshop was really combining the yobbish mentality of 2000AD comics with the Heavy Metal flair of Kerrang! Magazine as a way to distinguish themselves from TSR. This distinction got me & I’m sure got a lot of other people, where the touch point was Iron Maiden, not Terry Pratchett. I can remember going to my first zine event & feeling similar, “These zine people are all nerds!” I’ve never looked like a typical zine editor or writer, probably now that I dress low-key, use a walker & have done mindfulness practice for years! I understand that these distinctions are probably not useful, but they were larger & more profound when I was coming up & I would be lying if I told you that things were otherwise.