I wasn't gonna post about the whole Patton Oswalt says nerdom is over thing (he should know better), but this response to it is marvelous.
"A warning: it's 2 a.m. and I'm in a strange mood. Over the holidays, we received the news that my mother's thyroid cancer is back. It's been a heavy boots kind of time.
But you know what? My mother and my husband and I watched the Doctor Who Christmas Special on Christmas while my cool sister (though I love her) texted her friends and pretended she was elsewhere. And the the three of us sat around talking about it, ranking the Christmas Specials (we all think this one is tops) and then we somehow ended up talking about MST3k, my mother and I reminiscing about the summer I was 13 when we spent all of Sunday afternoon watching it, after my sis went off to art school. I've facilitated both of these interests in my mother--whining that we get cable so we could get the Sci-fi channel, which my mom, to this day, watches tons, lots of bad monster movies, and I burned her Who DVDs when I realized she'd love it.
Maybe I should be sad about the ubiquity of this, that I'm not this isolated geeky loner in my family. But mostly I'm glad that the world we live in lets me share these things with people I love, or find people online who love these things too (my husband and I, ages ago, met on a dating site because Zorak was my profile picture). I don't know. Is my mom a lame poseur otaku because she wouldn't have geeked out over Matt Smith and a flying shark if it weren't for their commonness now? I don't know. Maybe. Does it matter?"