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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7738981" data-attributes="member: 4937">Male self projection into an idealized character is usually called Marty Stu, but generally I agree.Let me make a comparison with this level of tribute that I think worked.  In Kevin Smith's "Clerks", the two friends engage in a impassioned nerd argument about a minor point of Star Wars lore.  The reason it worked is that not only could I see myself in that argument, the actual point that is being argued is original, interesting, and relevant.   The only way you could come up with that argument is if you were so deep in the fandom, that you'd actually had that conversation yourself.  And the real world contractor who then enters into the conversation, has a very interesting perspective on the topic.   That scene earns more nerd points for me than all the "I've Been Everywhere" name drops in a Hank Snow song (or Johnny Cash cover), because you know that the author isn't just rattling off names.  For me, one of the several reason it was an OK book rather than a favorite book, is the book itself felt like a watered down treatment to make it palatable to general audiences, written by someone who was largely mining 80s nostalgia for useful material rather than recalling their own experiences with nostalgia.   I mean, there are I think a few exceptions to that.  I don't think anyone just doing research would have featured "Black Tiger" centrally to the story.   But that's a video game from right at the end of the 80's, where as most of the rest of the material strikes me as stuff the author encountered in the '90s and knows mostly second hand.  He does not strike me as someone that say the original theatrical release of Star Wars 5 times in the theater, really was a 12 year old DM to a band of geeks on bicycles, tried to write video games on his C64 (peek and poke anyone?), and got his soul sucked out in the Tomb of Horrors when it was run by an older cousin of the group.   Heck, he doesn't strike me as someone who has the slightest technical background at all.  His economics sucks.  His understanding of computers is negligible.  The OASIS game design would have been considered obsolete by the late 1990's, and his Easter Egg would have been uncovered in 5 days by an army of geeks considering how trivial most of the elements are.I liked parts of the story, but I'm not the audience any more than I'm the audience for 'Big Bang Theory'.  There are geek consultants on that show, but the humor is mostly of the, "Look how weird nerds are" variety.   Future young geeks aren't going to be nostalgic for "Big Bang Theory".  They are going to remember "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog", and "Standupmaths" and/or probably a bunch of nerdy things I don't really know about because I'm too old and have my own geek world already.  What are the young geeks doing these days?  (Hopefully, they've moved on from 'Star Wars'.)   Senator, I know autism spectrum.  I live with autism spectrum.  The austism spectrum is a friend of mine.  And Senator, he is no where on the autism spectrum.</blockquote>

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