That One Person - Two Flavors of High School Nerds

(Written during November 2024 for the Eggbug Memorial Rotator)

How grand it would be to be able to point to a single person who said the right thing to me at the right moment during my childhood, changing my life forever. Alas. I suppose I'll have to settle for people I remember.

A couple guys I knew in high school tend to crop back up in my thoughts from time to time, where I go "oh yeah, that guy" and look back (mostly) fondly upon those days. As far as I recall, they never interacted with each other, and yet they're somewhat connected in my brain.

For the sake of storytelling and anonymity, let's call these two people Seth and Alex. Like most people I knew in high school, they knew my older brother, who was a very popular senior when I was a freshman. They were both juniors at the time. I never saw either after high school and I wouldn't say I learned any real life lessons from them, but I was an impressionable teen and looked up to them. They shaped some of my tastes in media and therefore the trajectory of my life. That counts, right?

I first met Seth when I went to fetch my brother after school and they were playing Mario Kart DS together. He was the son of one of the teachers, a former Soviet physicist who taught calculus and the other high-level math courses. Mr. L was infamous around school for being a bit of a hardass; if you were ever late he would make you dance the Macarena up in front of the class.

Seth was pretty thin and frail, suffering from multiple life-threatening chronic illnesses. He lived near a local landfill (no, not that landfill) and I suspect that had an effect. I'd like to think had a more agreeable relationship with him than my brother did because I was not constantly proselytizing to him with empty promises of faith healing, but I was pretty annoying back then. We used to regularly chat online at least.

Alex played the same instrument as me during my brief stint in marching band. I would to this day describe him as an asshole. Is it gauche to say that someone had light school shooter vibes? He was pretty quiet with everyone else but surprisingly outspoken and loudmouthed when I hung out with him. I guess he would've probably just started throwing hands if he got really pissed.

At some point Alex declared out loud that I was to be his protégé. He'd buy me food at away field shows and tolerated me watching when he'd play video games. He would sometimes say things in an exaggerated Japanese accent because he genuinely thought it sounded cooler (he was lily white). If Alex had owned a trenchcoat, he would have worn one; instead he wore denim jackets.

Seth and Alex were the only two people I could talk to about certain things. Even with how widespread the internet has become, I think it can still be difficult to find people who share your interests. Rather, people who share your interests to roughly the same degree, people who are the same kind of nerd as you.

The more specific something gets, the more hardcore the fans get, and I don't feel as though I'm particularly hardcore about much. I definitely wasn't back in high school, plus I liked weird Japanese stuff instead of American Idol or Chuck. I enjoyed Halo at the time, but I didn't enjoy it to the extent that I could keep up a conversation with The Halo Guy. I could find people who watched Naruto, but nobody else in school was playing Contact on the Nintendo DS.

Alex had an appreciation for stuff that was slightly offbeat at the time. He loved Boktai to the point where he imported the manga so that he could finally get good quality scans. He played a lot of Monster Hunter on PSP and made it look like the most boring game in the universe because he would just stand at the other side of the arena and plink at the monster from far away with Heavy Bowgun. I consequently never touched Monster Hunter until 2024.

He used to give me build advice for Mega Man Battle Network and Pokemon, like making me a really cool Knight Soul / Tomahawk Soul chip folder in Battle Network 5 that was great at pinning enemies in tight quarters and blasting them with short-range multi-hit attacks. He taught me about IVs and EVs, concepts that nobody who wishes to truly enjoy Pokemon should ever learn about.

Aside, because I cannot help myself: in Pokemon games, each Pokemon (even among the same species) has a unique spread of IVs, or Individual Values, that range from 0 to 31 for each stat. By the time a given 'mon hits the level cap, each stat will have a number of extra points equal to its IV value; in a competitive setting, this can be the difference between life and death. EVs (Effort Values) are rewarded for defeating other Pokemon, with every 4 EVs leading to an additional point in a given stat. A Pokemon can only accumulate 510 EVs total, so you're usually looking at some kind of 252/252/4 spread, maybe slightly different depending on the exact kind of role you're considering for that given Pokemon.

These values are largely opaque, though newer games have made them more visible and more easily manipulated. Back then, if you wanted to play optimally, it was time to bust out the spreadsheets, track your EVs, and chain-breed until you had eugenicized your perfect little Pokemon for something like a plus-minus 5% difference. This is now information I will never forget.

On Mondays, the marching band had to play at school football games, and it was often simply more efficient to hang out for another three hours rather than go all the way home and then back, so we'd just sit around and talk. Alex would squat on top of a concrete parking bumper and sort of stream-of-consciousness detail his ideal Final Fantasy game, which now that I think about it is weirdly similar to 2022's Stranger of Paradise on the mechanical end. For whatever reason, Alex loved the dragoon class specifically and would take the time to pose as if he was holding a spear behind him, with a hypothetical cape billowing in the wind. He did this entire thing enough times that I remember him doing it.

"Or," he'd say, "I'd use a whip." He always followed up with an exaggerated whip sound and accompanying groan of pain, pointedly imitating That Scene in the second episode of Roots. He did this entire whip bit at least once a day for most of the time I knew him. To my memory, Alex never actually said the n-word out loud, but he sure did make a lot of super racist "jokes". Like I said: an asshole. His supposed protégé sure learned what not to say.

The last time I saw him was when he stopped his car in the middle of the road to shout hi at my brother when we were walking to In-N-Out one day. No clue what happened to him after that, and he happened to have the same name as a famous person, so I can't exactly Google him or anything. I hope he became less racist.

Seth was more chill, or perhaps simply had less energy. Once, I messaged Seth on Google Talk (yeah) to tell him that I'd finished Fire Emblem (in modern parlance, FE7 aka "The Blazing Blade") on the GBA. He asked me whom I'd given Afa's Drops, an item with the description: "gives a little treat to the unit that uses it". His reaction when I told him was some flavor of bafflement mixed with confusion, and after he explained my folly the conversation turned to him complaining about how beating the Black Knight in FE: Path of Radiance was basically down to pure luck.

Aside, because I cannot help myself: in Fire Emblem games, each character/unit has a unique spread of stat growth rates. When a character levels up, the game checks their growth rates and determines whether any given stat goes up or not. For example, if a unit has a 70% growth in Speed (really good), then that's the chance that stat increases on a level up. This has always been a contentious random element; nobody likes getting an unlucky empty level. On the other hand, if you got lucky, units that were meant to be lacking in certain ways could end up as comically powerful all-rounders.

Afa's Drops were a late-game one-time-use item that increased a given unit's growth rates by 5% across the board. Using them on a unit like Lyn, who was already approaching (perhaps even at) the level cap, was simply inefficient; there wouldn't be time enough to reap the benefits. This is now information I will never forget.

Seth ran a Super Mario fansite, back when people did such things. It had a quiz for every single Mario game that you could take to earn points that you could then spend on unlocking new features of the site. Every month he would run a poll about which character from wider pop culture should have a showdown with which Nintendo character (I'm talking like some "Yoda vs Link" type shit), and then he'd write a little fanfic of the battle.

The website had a forum with maybe... three to five active users? The memories are fuzzy, but there was a roleplay thread with a bizarre mishmash of Mario, LoTR, Fire Emblem, Golden Sun, and more. It had a homebrew magic system with spell charges and an element triangle, but no dice were ever rolled.

Seth played some paladin/Lord guy who had a phoenix familiar with an elvish name from LoTR and some kind of legendary blade that definitely ended in -calibur but I cannot for the life of me remember what it started with. I, being roughly At That Age, had some kind of DARKNESS-using ninja-like edgelord character. There was a third person who played a stoic, time-manipulating wizard... who was a talking Yoshi. He had a spell called Chaos Flare. It was goofy.

It was also the first real creative writing I ever did, a pure round robin freeform improv. Whoever posted next simply took what was there and ran with it, with the unspoken rule that you couldn't control another person's character other than for basic blocking or scene transitions. At least once I got scolded for ruining Seth's plans for an epic lighthouse dungeon by not putting in enough puzzles or traps (he improvised an inscription explaining that the traps would all disappear for the Chosen Hero). Eventually the Yoshi guy just stopped posting entirely and Seth tried to reboot the thread. It didn't go anywhere.

When I was a junior in high school, my brother was living at the college dorm. He'd bus back for the weekend a couple times a month. During winter break, my parents and I went on vacation for a week. When we got back, my brother was sitting on the couch playing Smash Bros by himself. What was he doing home on a random Thursday?

"A friend drove me up so I could go to Seth's funeral," he said. "I got to be a pallbearer and everything. I had to find my old white gloves from band."

Like I said: never saw either of them after high school.

When I think back, I remember these two before most of the people my own age. I remember the two guys who each showed me both how to be and how not to be a high school nerd. Thanks, guys.