#Wake up time to die blade runner free

The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling. The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun.

And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan's. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I'd consumed so many single-issue guest-writing stints of Gaiman's that when he was finally given The Sandman title all to himself, I was first in line and knew the language.įast-forward to now: Boba Fett's helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. I'd also read the individual issues of Miller's Daredevil: Born Again run, so when The Dark Knight Returns was reviewed by The New York Times, I could say I saw it coming. And like my music-obsessed pals, who passed around the cassette of Guns n' Roses' Live Like a Suicide and were thus prepared for the shock wave of Appetite for Destruction, I'd devoured Moore's run on Swamp Thing and thus eased nicely into his Watchmen. Another started reading William Gibson and peppered his conversations with cryptic (and alluring) references to 'cyberspace.' I was ground zero for the 'new wave' of mainstream superhero comics-which meant being right there for Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Neil Gaiman. Our respective nerdery took on various forms: One friend was the first to get his hands on early bootlegs of Asian action flicks by Tsui Hark and John Woo, and he never looked back. What once set us apart, we hoped, would become a lovable quirk. So we each built our own otakuesque thought-palace, which we crammed with facts and nonsense-only now, the thought-palace was nicely appointed, decorated neatly, the information laid out on deep mahogany shelves or framed in gilt.

#Wake up time to die blade runner free

Money and cars and, hopefully, girls would follow, but not if we spent our free time learning the names of the bounty hunters' ships in The Empire Strikes Back. By 1987, my friends and I were waist-deep in the hot honey of adolescence. So, yeah-I had time to collect every Star Wars action figure, learn the Three Laws of Robotics, memorize Roy Batty's speech from the end of Blade Runner, and classify each monster's abilities and weaknesses in TSR Hobbies' Monster Manual. I was never going to play sports, and girls were an uncrackable code. But in order to do so, we're going to hang out in the '80s.) (Of course, now all America is otaku-which I'm going to get into shortly.

Or, at least, their lives follow patterns that are well outside the norm. It comes from a term for 'someone else's house'-otaku live in their own, enclosed worlds. In Japan, the word otaku refers to people who have obsessive, minute interests-especially stuff like anime or videogames. The terms nerd and geek were convenient shorthand used by other cliques to categorize us. I had a circle of friends who were similarly drawn to the exotica of pop culture (or, at least, what was considered pop culture at the time in northern Virginia)-Monty Python, post-punk music, comic books, slasher films, and videogames. I can't say that I ever abided nerd stereotypes: I was never alone or felt outcast. Except for the multiple-player aspect of D&D, these pursuits were not 'passions from a common spring,' to quote Poe. I entered the '80s immersed, variously, in science fiction, Dungeons & Dragons, and Stephen King. I used to be one, back 30 years ago when nerd meant something.