I heard this clip on CBC Radio on the way home today, and to my great surprise, I cried. Okay, maybe not so much surprise. It’s all over the Internet right all of a sudden, but if you haven’t seen it, you *must* watch it.
This is Wil Wheaton at the Denver Comicon, replying to a little girl who asks him if he was called a nerd when he was growing up and how he dealt with it. I have two favourite bits: the part where he says you should never make fun of someone for something they didn’t choose, and the part when he talks about how much better it gets once you get out of the school ecosystem. That might be the bit that made me cry.
Trust me, it’s worth the 3 minutes, and then some.
I really wish someone (other than my parents, because who listens to those?) had been sending out this message when I was in school. Because, among other things, I may have started hanging out with some of the other geeks. For one thing I would have been less lonely. For another, I would have figured out I liked computer science before second year university and gone through the whole messy major-change thing :P. (Mind you, not everyone ends up with a degree in Computer Science & Anthropolgy, so that’s something)