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Are we now just posting songs with black in the title?
I can only think of one off the top of my head…
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Same here. Especially if you couldn’t afford it, even if you could land on one.
I remember reading about “grunge” in the early 90s. The description was something about torn clothes and Salvation Army finds. I think I probably prayed that very night for it to come true (who am I kidding, I never prayed). It’s not often that fashion catches up to the poor kids.
ETA: Actually…
That I had a handle on!
Which also served to solidify that I was part on no group at all. EETA: Comics shirts weren’t nearly this cool or comfy-looking back then.
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I’m rebellious enough about the idea of wearing items that will telegraph my interests that i don’t like wearing nerdy or gaming related tshirts. Closest thing i get to that is i do like to buy band tshirts when i go to concerts, but its more to support them than to make a statement. Yeah i know i’m boring 
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Given that this new show is based on an old show that ran on American TV in the 1960s, and that itself was based on a series of cartoons that ran for decades in the New Yorker before that, it’s hard to say that the Addams Family was ever not mainstream.
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Also in their store window was this:
Appropriate for a place with barely 5 hours of daylight at the moment!
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Totally. I never actually had an X-men shirt. And I certainly wouldn’t have worn it to school! Why feed the trolls? Somehow, they all still knew, though.
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I recall that, in my high school, what now goes as “goth” was more “this is what you’re going to look like after Reagan nukes the planet”… 
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There was for, for sure, a little Road Warrior in there…oddly most of it based on the look of the fictional bad guys of the movie, rather than the look of the actual bad guy starring in the movie
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Dude - I still have a well worn (it was thin with a thin print to begin with) Aliens vs Predator by Mike Mignola shirt from the 90s which is my comic geek cred I’ll bust out on occasion.
It is this art with a more basic color scheme.
I made the mistake my freshman year… i got into TMNT - not the cartoon per se (well I did watch that too) but the original B&W comics. And I found on sale a Donatello shirt (my 3rd favorite, but it was on sale) that had a more comic booky look - less cartoony. I remember going into the bathroom and some old kid laughed at me. I assumed it was the shirt (well I assumed it was at me, maybe it was bad timing.)
Sigh - my penchant for “feminine” colors like teal (which, in the 90s, was more unisex!) didn’t help.
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Freshman year? Oh, buddy…
What’s funny about that is the kids who were shittiest about ragging kids for liking TMNT were the rich brats with the most TMNT toys.
Hellboy was a little late for me (class of ‘96), but if I saw that shirt it would have stopped me in my tracks.
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I’ve been there!
Oh, wrong island.
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I think I would say rather that the 20th century is when “nerds” were vindicated (Revenge of the Nerds is from 1984), and the 21st century is when we got to discover how malignant and dysfunctional a culture could become when nerds got power and influence. We’re slogging through the aftermath of a Rise Of The Nerds, and it’s led to the Rise Of The Trolls, led by ignorami and thugs. If I ever had any pride about being a nerd, it has flattened out into a general sense that any “type” of person can become a monster.
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Well, when your liberation and rise to cultural power are predicated on a movie that makes a joke of sexual assault you are going to have a few bumps down the road…
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Nerds? Sounds like the description of a select group of tech bros who buried/abused the accomplishments of women, POC, and other marginalized groups; “disrupted” entire industries using shady labor / legal practices; enabled the erosion of privacy / security for billions of people; and embraced grifting to increase profit for themselves and their friends.
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Well, as someone who sees himself in hindsight as a school nerd, you’re not far off. I think the thing about “nerds” in school is that they were shunned not so much for being weird but for lacking social skills. This in a lot of cases led to those social skills atrophying even more and the nerd becoming more resentful.
And yeah, nerds were often white boys, rarely girls, rarely anyone already stamped a minority. Well, at least where I grew up, where anyone who didn’t have a Czech, German or Irish name was considered exotic.
Those who become TechBros were, to be honest, not often actual nerds when in school, as they rarely suffered the actual defining ostracizing. They were more the preppies who pretended to be friends to the nerds—they were looking for people to exploit even back then. And many nerds fell for them, happy to be noticed.
Just because the trappings of Nerddom have gone mainstream due to former nerds now having money to buy them and no longer the awkward shame of school days, doesn’t mean there aren’t outcasts.
Sorry, I kinda lost track there. Apologies. I was just ruminating out loud (figuratively).
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These were the people who essentially went into business and pretended to be geeks…
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