You know your life is going to be amazing when the first major pep talk you receive as a baby is from Wil Wheaton.  At the Calgary Comic Expo back in April the King of the Nerds was asked by an audience member to talk to her child about why being a nerd is awesome.  The resulting speech is more than just a one-sided conversation with a newborn, it's a call to arms about nerd-dom and what it means to love something so much that it defines who you are.  

What he says here is so important I wrote it out for you to read.  I did remove a couple word whiskers and the occasional sentence fragment for the sake of clarity.

What you're about to hear is a message that speaks to the core of what Game Geex is all about.  We are here because we love games so much we can't stop talking about them.  We live and breathe games, and we are proud of our geek status.  Celebrate your nerdiness and realize that your passion is what makes you so very special.  This is required watching for anyone who calls themselves a geek or a nerd.  

 

Hi Violet.  My name is Wil Wheaton.  It’s 2013, and you’ve just recently joined us on planet Earth. So welcome.  

I’m an actor, and I’m a writer, and I’m a dad, and your mother asked me to tell you why it’s awesome to be a nerd.  That’s an easy thing for me to do because that’s who I am.  

I don’t know what the world is going to be like by the time you understand this.  I don’t know what it’s going to mean to be a nerd when you are a young woman.

For me, when I was growing up, being a nerd meant that I liked things that were a little weird, that took a lot of effort to appreciate and understand.  It meant that I loved science, and I loved playing board games, reading books, and really understanding what went on in the world instead of just kind of riding the planet through space.  And when I was a little boy people really teased us about that, and made us feel like there was something wrong with us for loving those things.  

Now that I am an adult, I’m kind of a professional nerd and the world has changed a lot.  I think a lot of us have realized that being a nerd -- or being a geek is another word you’ll hear and I sort of use the terms interchangeably -- it’s not about what you love, it’s about how you love.

So there’s going to be a thing in your life that you love, and I don’t know what it’s going to be.  It might be sports, it might be science, it might be reading, it might be fashion design, it might be building things, it might be telling stories or painting pictures.  It doesn’t matter what it is.  The way you love it, and the way you that you find other people who love it the way you do is what makes being a nerd awesome.  

The defining characteristic of us, of the people in this room -- and I’m going to ask your mom to turn this camera around, go go go Mom -- the defining characteristic that ties us all together is that we love things.  And some of us love Firefly, and some of us love Game of Thrones -- these are things that you’ll be able to go see when they’re in your history book -- and some of us love Star Trek or Star Wars or Anime or games or Fantasy or Science Fiction.  

Some of us love completely different things, but we all love those things so much that we travel thousands of miles -- which is probably easy for us, but it’s still difficult for us now.  We’re still on fossil fuels -- I don’t know what you’re going to be on -- and it’s difficult.  We come from all over, and some cases all over the world so we can be around people who love the things that we love the way that we love them.  

And that’s why being a nerd is awesome.  

Don’t let anyone ever tell you that that thing that you love is a thing that you can’t love.  Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t love that, that’s for boys; you have to love this because you’re a girl.  You find the things that you love and you love them the most that you can.

Listen, this is really important:  I want you to be honest, honorable, kind.  I want you to work hard, because everything worth doing is hard, and I want you to be awesome.  

 

And I’m going to do my very best to leave you a planet that you can still live on.