earthdad:

someone: what do you want to be for Halloween?

me: loved and appreciated

road2nf:

It all started with books. Or more precisely, the lack of books. I was on a life long mission to find new and fresh reading material, when I discovered Booktube. This was coincidentally a few months after The Fault In Our Stars came out and became an instant success and everyone on Booktube was talking about this mysterious “TFIOS” book without feeling the need to say anything else. It was literally a universally acknowledged fact that this is THE best book written since Hamlet. When my curiosity finally overcome my embarrassment of lacking such a fundamental piece of knowledge and I expressed my confusion, some kind commenter shared a link to the Vlogbrothers channel.

I watched a few videos and liked what I saw, so I subscribed. Little did I know, that I was stumbling into a rabbit hole I would still be falling through almost five years later. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me first recall the first few odd and wonderful months as a Vlogbrothers subscriber, when I was, for the first time, experiencing the collected accepting nerdiness of the Nerdfighter community. I was learning “who the eff is Hank” and how to be unironically exited about science and classic literature, how to have intelligent conversations with real people from all over the world whose opinions I valued and they in turn listened to me.

I wanted to be part of this community so badly, but it wasn’t until I read TFIOS the following winter (I had to order it from England because it hadn’t been translated into Czech yet and therefore wasn’t available in local bookstores or libraries) that I felt I could maybe describe myself using the honorary title Nerdfighter. As time went and I became immersed in more and more nerdfighter projects, Crash Course, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, The Art Assignment, The Project for Awesome and many more. I now have an amazing nerdfighter pen pal and I’ve been to a nerdfighter gathering. The identity of a nerdfighter has become an inseparable part of my personality. I couldn’t name any other influence from my early teens to my current attempts at adulthood that would have had an impact comparable to that of Nerdfighteria. I can’t imagine the person I would have been if I hadn’t fallen into that magical rabbit whole all those years ago, but I do know that the qualities I am most proud of in myself are ones I’d learned from Nerdfighteria, so I believe it is safe to say I needed someone to remind me to DFTBA.

-Illy

(via @illyriareads)

borkyno:

borkyno:

have i told you guys about the time that i classically conditioned my kindergarten class

I got like 4 anons asking about this so I guess I didn’t:

     omg. okay, so basically, I was a “gifted kid” which was code for fucken nerd ass bitch, so i would constantly just stare off into space during class while everyone else was tryna figure out what the fuck our teacher was tryna say. Anyway, I was learning about chemistry and biology outside of school(i know what a fucking nerd amirite ladies), and my dad got me a book that talked about all these famous psychological experiments.

    So chapter one was, would you have guessed it, Pavlov’s dog. I thought it my be fun to try something to that extent with my classmates. Now, keep in mind, being a nerdy ass brown kid in a school full of white ppl meant that I wasn’t exactly popular, and no one really talked to me in class or cared what I was doing.

   Everyday, at 9:45 am, our teacher would announce that it was snacktime, and everyone would fucking sprint to their cubbies to grab their lunchboxes like it was the goddamn hunger games. Kindergarten kids didn’t really have a concept of time, so i used this to my advantage. At 9:45 as my teacher would walk up to announce snacktime, I would knock on my desk really quickly three times. It was rly subtle, and I wasn’t sure that it would work.

   So after two or three weeks, I decided to have some fun. Thirty minutes after school began at like 8:30 or something, I tapped knocked on the desk. Half the class turned their heads and looked straight at the cubbies. 3 boys got up and were about to run to get their lunchbox. One girls stomach started growling REALLY loudly. The teacher had to take 5 minutes to get everyone to calm down and one kid started crying because he thought it was snacktime and he was so shocked and destroyed.

   Realizing that I had basically dog trained the whole class, I burst out laughing so hard I fell out of my chair and cut my head on the tile floor and got sent home early because I was laughing so hard they thought I had a concussion or something. When I explained what happened to my dad he left the room, but I could hear him losing it in the hallway. 

   So everytime now that I learn about classical conditioning in my Neuroscience classes, I have to fight to keep a straight face

I love how this isn’t illegal yet despite the several stories of the Pavlov dog experiment in real life.

Because I haven’t done it yet. And I really want to.