That is certainly my story. I look at how physical education is taught here in Japan, and I appreciate it much better. The kids practice kicking the soccer ball back and forth to each other repeatedly, then later they play an actual game. In my childhood, we always went straight to the game playing. I couldn't kick, and I couldn't throw a ball. They would laugh at me and make fun of me, and by the time I was in junior high, they started accusing me of being a "fag" and it went downhill from there. There ought to be a focus on sportsmanship as well as sports, I think.llj wrote:A lot of geeks hate sports because it stems from their childhood of being poor at sports or being picked on by more sporty kids.
As for cyclical hobbies, I certainly have them. I have rarely played any video games for quite a while now. I've mainly been building models in my free time. I do tend to cycle through my obsessions, though.
I certainly got burned out with anime by the late '90s, while I was further along in my college years. I just stopped watching much of it, and the only anime I was exposing myself to was the cutscenes in import Sega Saturn games. It was after I moved to Japan the first time in 2000 when I started connecting more with students, and they helped respark my interest in anime.
As for the lack of intelligence, I think that with the decay of general education in the USA, you're getting far more dorks attending cons and such than actual real nerds. I found a Venn diagram that illustrates the differences of various personality types. It consists of three circles: intelligence, obsession, and social ineptitude. A nerd exhibits all three, while a geek has the intelligence and obsession, but are "cool." A dork, on the other hand, has the social ineptitude and obsession, but lacks intelligence. Reading a video game walkthrough for an RPG and you'll see tons of spelling and grammar errors. That's a good sign of a lack of intelligence. Go spend some time on a typical video game forum too (or an anime forum, for that matter). You will see plenty of examples of dorks.
When I was in school, if you ask a nerd what the Doppler effect is, they could give you an answer. Nerds have a pretty good grasp on stuff like physics and mathematics. Nerds can come in various flavors, such as literature, anthropology, entymology, and the like. I have a coworker friend who is a nerd: he is an introvert like myself, and he excels with plants and cultural studies while he is bad with computers and technology. He knows who Hatsune Miku is, but probaly can't name a single member of the X-Men team. He's more of a nerd though than any given con-attending dork who is into nerdy stuff yet lacks intelligence.
...because the alarmists like to have it both ways. 