My name is Sabah.
I’m from Florida.
I joined Nerdfighteria in 2014.
My younger sister sent me a Vlogbrothers video while I was in college and I watched the video,
and then proceeded to watch multiple other videos of Vlogbrothers.
Very quickly kind of was enamoured by the community that had already formed around Hank
and John and Nerdfighteria.
This is the first time I’m coming to any Nerdfighter gathering that happens in real
life.
Prior to this convention I spoke with a lot of people who are coming here and have made
a lot of friends already.
And it feels natural to connect with these people who share these values and share these
ideals with you.
And that’s what I appreciate most about Nerdfighteria is like, this is something that
I and my sister have like bonded over, and then most of my friends because I always kind
of push everyone to watch Vlogbrothers.
I’m Octavius Perrington.
I live in Orlando, Florida.
And how I found Nerdfighteria was, I had a buddy of mine whose house we were playing
board games in and we got super hungry.
So we were on our way, it was the four of us, on our way out the door and Crash Course
World History was playing, in the background on the big screen TV.
So the four of us stood by the door, just hungry college kids, and then but we stopped
and watched the entire Crash Course video.
And then, I paused and went, “We’re all hungry, what just happened here?”
And then my friend was like, “Oh this is Crash Course.
You should totally check this out.”
So I went home and I watched all of the twenty that were out at that time.
And then, at the end of it, I remember going on Facebook, being like, “Why isn’t there
more right now?” and then a friend of mine was like, “There’s Vlogbrothers, you can
watch the whole thing.”
And I was like, “What is this?”
And then I ended up going home and watching all of the Vlogbrothers.
So that’s kind of my journey into that.
Fast forward four months, The Fault in Our Stars comes out.
So I’m on my way to my first GenCon, which is this big board game conference in Indianapolis.
Basically I had friends in Colorado, California, other places in Florida, where it was like
sixteen of us meeting in this one location to like share a love of board games and go
to GenCon for the first time, just have a really good time.
And I make the expert decision to read The Fault in Our Stars on the way to the convention.
So everyone shows up at, ya know, the location from the airport, like excited to see each
other and I had just finished the book about fifteen minutes before I landed.
So I get off the plane and I see like half the people and I’m like, “I’m so happy
to see you guys” and like just bawling my eyes out because of the book obviously.
So I just thought, that’s like funny because it like, everyone was like, “You’re a
crazy person.
Like shouldn’t you be happy we’re here.”
And it’s like, “I just need a second because this book just happened.”
Nerdfighteria means to me never having to prove myself to a community of people that
love the same things I do.
I spent a lot of my formulative years proving to people, like, my nerd-cred or my geek-cred,
because they just didn’t expect someone looked like me to be into those kinds of things.
So, um.
And that was always kind of like a terrifying transition for me because it’s like, if
you guys don’t accept me I literally have nowhere to go.
So please, like, believe that I play YuGiOh for fun or whatever.
Like I just needed, I needed that energy, so...
The cool thing about Nerdfighteria is, while I definitely had a more formulated identity
at the time, anyone that I ever met that loved Crash Course or loved John Green or thought
his books were great, everyone just kind of accepted that I wanted to be here and was
into that thing.
The coolest thing to me that John Green ever said is that, you know, if you think you are
a Nerdfighter, you probably are one.