melsar93's submitted and shared nerdfighter story in celebration of this year's Pizzamas! -Matt
"As with many people my first contact with the Vlogbrothers was Hank Green’s Harry Potter fan song “Accio Deathly Hallows.” I heard the song for the first time sung by my daughter at a high school event. At the time I looked upon it as something for the young people with their YouTubes, NeoPets, and Phone Texting.”
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Published by melsar93 on October 9, 2025
Tomorrow is the last day of Pizzamas 2025.
Pizzamas is an annual, hard-to-explain, Nerdfighter fundraiser selling even-harder-to-explain, Pizza John merchandise to raise money for Partners in Health. John and Hank post a vlogbrothers video to YouTube every day for two weeks and I’ve been enjoying every part of it.
For many of the people reading this I am going to guess that last paragraph was mostly nonsense, but bear with me. This is a post that has been rattling around in my brain (and in my drafts folder) for a few years. With Pizzamas upon us (and not being able to come up with anything else to blog about tonight) I decided it was time to share.
I am a nerd. This blog’s first year included weekly themes of math, wizards, and Weird Al Yankovic (just this year I blogged about Wesley Crusher and geeked out when Wil Wheaton left a comment on the blog). There are references to science fiction, epic fantasy, zombies, and robots scattered throughout and also my other blog is about databases. Growing up (and probably as an adult too) I often attempted to hide my geekiness. It is unlikely that I fooled many people, but it has taken me a long time to get to a place where I’m willing to make a geeky joke on my first day in a new office. My family moved about every four years during my childhood and it meant that I could reinvent myself a little each time. The pieces I usually stripped away were the geeky bits that I didn’t want others to know about. I couldn’t hide my lack of athleticism, but I didn’t need to brag about my 14th level paladin. I might still be a little shy when meeting new people, but I knew not to open conversations with plot holes in episode thirty-two of the original Star Trek series if I wanted people to talk to me. I took all of the hard academic classes, but I was clever in the ways I showed they weren’t important to me.
Something I have marveled at as my children got older was the ability they had to show their geeky side. One of the geeky things that my oldest shared with us when she was in high school was being a Nerdfighter. As with many people my first contact with the vlogbrothers was Hank Green’s Harry Potter fan song “Accio Deathly Hallows.” I heard the song for the first time sung by my daughter at a high school event. Like most of her generation she was a huge Harry Potter fan and I wasn’t surprised by the topic of the song, but I remember asking her where she got it from. I later added it to a ripped CD of geeky songs that we used on family road trips. There were a few other references to vlogbrothers and Nerdfighters during this time – most of John Green’s books ended up in our house and I have a clear memory of her hopping out of the car to flash the Nerdfighter sign in front of a polling place during the 2008 US presidential election. At the time I looked upon it as something for the young people with their YouTubes, NeoPets, and Phone Texting.
After my daughter left for college, I mostly forgot about the vlogbrothers and I believe her participation as a Nerdfighter waned as she got older.
I rediscovered the Vlogbrothers in the fall of 2016. We moved to Tokyo Japan in the fall of 2015 and without American television the internet became a place where I got a larger portion of my entertainment and news. I began watching quite a bit more YouTube. I mostly watched portions of late night talk shows or SNL skits that made it onto the platform. Sometimes a cooking video would sneak into my feed, but for the first year it was mostly Stephen Colbert and John Oliver.
In the days after the 2016 US Presidential election I googled something like “How do I process the election results?” and it returned a Video from John Green called My Post-Election Thoughts. What he said made sense to me and even more it was hopeful. And then I think I started getting Vlogbrother videos recommended in my feed. I watched each video as it came out over the next few years and I enjoyed them. I became an avid fan of John Green’s Anthropocene Reviewed podcast and I enjoyed Hank Green’s scifi novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, but I didn’t consider myself a Nerdfighter. For the next several years I continued to watch the new VlogBrothers videos as they came out.
In March of 2020 John released a video called “Let’s Take a Walk.” It was exactly what I needed during the early days of Covid. I watched that video every day for a week. I remember seeing an article about people turning to religion during the pandemic and I had the half-serious thought, maybe Nerdfighter is my religion? The views Hank and John talked about were what I wanted to aspire to and the Take a Walk video had an almost spiritual feeling to it. So I decided if I was going to join The Church of Nerdfighteria I should know all of its “sacred” texts.
In the spring of 2020 some people made sour-dough bread, some people watched Tiger King, some people adopted a puppy, I watched all of the VlogBrothers videos starting from the beginning. In 2020 they had been making videos for 13 years. And the first year they made one on every weekday.
It was a long journey (there are hundreds of videos), but enjoyable. Some of the videos feel dated (it was interesting to travel back through history to 2007 and see the changes in technology and world politics), but many of them are timeless. For the most part videos about science and philosophical musings stay relevant regardless of the year. In addition to videos from John’s calming videos about existential angst I learned about giraffe sex and the nearly defunct Rax fast food restaurant chain, heard many excerpts from John and Hank’s novels and an interview with Obama, discovered that Hank wrote songs about other things than Harry Potter, became a fan of the Mountain Goats, debated the merits of Batman, followed a digital scavenger hunt that led to a live feed of John rambling while he signed copies of his book (that was in 2020 so it felt very normal) and watched John and Hank’s families grow up off screen. And also, I now know the meaning of Pizzamas.
Since that binge of videos in 2020 I have kept watching John and Hank most every Tuesday and Friday (sometimes they take a day off, sometimes I do). It is a nice constant and, while the topics sometime venture into the uncertain state of the world we are in, they usually provide a nice distraction. Yesterday Hank posted a new song (his first in years) and today’s video from John has him rambling about the meaning of life while walking through the forest – which I have to admit is one of my favorite vlogbrother genres.
I’ve watched a few videos of people’s Road to Nerdfighteria and I see them say how it changed their lives. I don’t know if it changed my life, but it definitely adds to my life, in a good way.
Nerdfighteria isn’t just about John and Hank and their YouTube channel. It is a community of people who go out of their way to accept people as they are. For me this community helps to answer the question, if you don’t believe in god what do you believe in? It helps me to believe in humanity. While I appreciate all they have created I’m not very good at engaging with the community. I do comment on videos occasionally and I’ve supported the annual Nerdfighter charity drives to decrease world suck – The Project for Awesome and Pizzamas, but I’ve always been a bit of lurker on the internet. I don’t anticipate that will change very much, but who knows? Either way I will still be watching the vlogbrothers as long as they keep making videos and I will still get hope from the only comment section on the internet that is full of positive people.
“Nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. We don’t have to be like, “oh yeah, that purse is OK,” or like, “yeah, I like that band’s early stuff.” Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself, love it. Hank, when people call people nerds mostly what they’re saying is “you like stuff” which is just not a good insult at all, like, “you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness.”
- John Green, Nerds Win at Life
Don’t Forget To Be Awesome ↩︎
