Nerdin' it up!

I adore puzzles.  I spend a bunch of my free time doing crosswords, sudoku puzzles, kakuro puzzles, hanjie... pretty much any type of puzzle is cool with me.  When I was studying for the LSAT, I actually really enjoyed doing the Logic Games sections (questions like "6 people have to sit around a table, A can't be next to B, C has to be by E, etc.).

I really like math.  Since I'm not actually studying it in university I don't get to do very much interesting math any more, which makes me sad, but when I was in high school I was in the Math League, and it was so much fun, no joke.  We just had the best time.  Plus, my team made it to Provincials!

I think puns are hilarious, and we all know that puns are the nerdiest type of joke.  I'm not particularly good at coming up with them, but I always feel like I laugh way more than is appropriate whenever someone else makes one.  I also tend to catch unintentional puns even when no one else notices them at all.

I like to learn about really obscure/bizarre history.  For example, I've read a ton of Wikipedia articles about historical elephants, cryptids, feral children, conjoined twins, and sideshow performers, amongst other things.

I read some pretty nerdy fantasy novels.  Aside from the standard ones like The Lord of the Rings or Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, I have read a ton of Dragonlance books, as well as many from Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series.  Possibly my most obscure fantasy novel obsession is Robert Holdstock's Ryhope Wood series, which I read most of when I was in high school, and was always upset that my local library didn't have all the books in the series.  Since then, they have gotten rid of some of them, rather than acquiring the missing ones, and it upsets me that I can no longer even re-read them, let alone finish the series.  I realize this is probably for a good reason like they were lost or stolen or damaged or something, but still.  Still.

Also I am a huge nerd about board games.  I love board games!  Some of my favourites are Ticket to Ride, Scattergories, and Identity Crisis.  This past summer I played a bunch of retro games from the 70s that one of my friends borrowed from his grandfather, and they were fantastic.  Stop Thief was especially good, it has an 'electronic crime scanner' and it is just endlessly amusing.

I have two nerdy pursuits where I am definitely out-nerded, but I really enjoy them and would like to become better at them: Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering.  I played DnD a little bit in my first year of university, but my group was kind of disorganized and awful, so it wasn't that great, but this past Christmas one of my friends from back home put together a game for a few of us, and it was a lot of fun.  The same friend also has gotten really into Magic lately, and he's been teaching the rest of us how to play, and I've enjoyed it so much that it has made me want my very own deck!