#How to be a Nerdfighter

[adainesfuriousgun]

Broke: Hank is hot now

Woke: Hank has always been hot

Bespoke: Who the eff is Hank?

[achillesapple]

in honor of pizzamas here's a text my gf (who is not a nerdfighter) sent me when she saw mbmbam live earlier this year

[galadariel]

tuning in to the p4a this year realizing how much of a sacred time this is. it's an invitation to turn our full attention to injustice and those fighting against it. it's a time to celebrate & support people doing real, concrete good in the world. it is a time for radical hope and community action. it is soul-healing

[merlions]

Yesterday my anat & phys teacher called me, personally, a Nerdfighter, during lecture, in front of the entire class. And today I held a real brain from a deceased creature in my hands. I poked a stick into one of its many tubes and found a beautiful plexus there.. Thus was loosed forth some Gunk, which dripped onto my drawing of it - does the mind contaminate itself? What homogenized muscarinic tissues might we find in the spinal cord? What vital arboreal geodes comprise the cerebellum!

Prenursing school is getting . Good

[some-murmurings]

@dryingpanzer sure! I also had a moment of trouble finding things, SEO washes stuff away so fast these days.

Back when the US protests against the genocide were ramping up after Hamas was allowed* to commit the October 7th massacres, John posted this to reddit which is extremely both-sides-y & otherwise tasteless for numerous reasons. Hank did not say anything or even publicly react afaik, and continued his silence for months and months, also weird for several similar reasons.

Both the Greens are budding scholars of Israel's colonial regime, given their crash course lectures on the subject, and both of them purposefully run massive leftist & social justice platforms. Yet, when given opportunity and explicit organizational momentum neither one invested any of their considerable resources! And have since been slow to act!

Since then their pre-existing charity work has shifted to include aid to Gazans but a bad taste stays in the mouth for me. I'm glad they're helping now but the pretty serious hesitation on both brand & organizational levels feels disingenuous, somehow.

Not Trying to cancel them like a credit card or anything, Hank's recent standup special on Dropout was very good but, also, blech. Weirdchamp. Etc. White dudes running a prolific social justice platform who balk at well organized social justice. yikers.

i was in Missoula last week and i heard how often people run into Hank Green and i kept being terrified I'd run into him like he was fucking Goro Majima

[marxistlynchist]

Well damn, Happy decade!! 🥳🎊

[find-felicity]

John Green has this amazing talent to say things that will echo in my head for days (sometimes weeks even), and make me feel just a tad bit more hopeful about my life and help me understand our strange and wonderful world just a tad bit more, all while sounding like the most natural thing a person would come up with after sitting quietly for a while. And I think we should all be grateful that he also shares these with us:)

His little pebbles of wisdom kept me holding on in the past few months, so here are 15 of my favourites:) Go ahead and pick some to help you get through whaterver that is happening in your life

"Sometimes things that don't kill you make you stronger. Like exercise!" — "Utter Chippy Butty Chaos", vlogbrothers video, 2022.

"You don't even know how loud the noise is, until the noise goes away." — "Mid-Morning Existential Crisis: The Format Returns", vlogbrothers video, 2023.

"I can even feel the pain in my jaw, but in a way that feels survivable as things only can once you've survived them." — "New Partner", "The Anthropocene reviewed" podcast, 2019.

"I don't even know what it's like to be other people now! The only person I can claim to know at all well is myself and I don't even know him that well." — "On Writing", vlogbrothers video, 2024.

"People will say everything happens for a reason or it'll all work out in the end which are very hopeful sentiments, it's just that they're also you know, bullshit" — "How to have hope that life can get better", johnschannel1007 video, 2022.

"The ideas don't come from having an extraordinary kind of life, they come from paying an extraordinary kind of attention to life." — "I am an artist.", vlogbrothers video, 2020.

"It's easy to forget how wonderous you are, how strange and lovely..." — "Consciously Experiencing Human Dignity", vlogbrothers video, 2020.

"Love is the fuel that burns both bright and clean, and love is not forged only in the good times, it is also forged in surviving and turning around the bad times together." — "Motivation in Hard Times", vlogbrothers video, 2022.

"Humans are nothing if not wildly, utterly dependent." — "the world is gonna roll me", vlogbrothers video, 2020.

"And one thing about a pick-me-up is that you never actually pick yourself up, you're picked up by people around you." — "Gastrointestinal Hypermotility in Tuatara", vlogbrothers video, 2025.

"In fact, I can't do almost everything tomorrow, right? And the constraints of our lived reality are not generally our fault, even if our social and economic stuctures would sometimes tell us that they are."— "how we spend our days", vlogbrothers video, 2021.

"And I thought I had failed. In fact, though, I just hadn't succeded yet."— "How I Made Friends", vlogbrothers video, 2018.

"We do not yet know the end of the story, and as such, we have cause for hope and also we have work to do."— "The ANXIETY IS PALPABLE", vlogbrothers video, 2025.

"Destiny is not something that happens all at once, it's something that happens only in retrospect."— "Who I Was in High School", vlogbrothers video, 2015.

"The point is to gather, the verb that gave us together." — "What to Love and How", vlogbrothers video, 2019.

Feel free to add you're own favourites, dear Nerdfighters! I'm so glad that you're here, that we're here (because we're here)

[ruffboijuliaburnsides]

idk if it's still considered "cringe" to be a Nerdfighter/fan of Hank and John Green, but man, if you think it's cringe, you need to take a long look at why you think that.

Nerdfighters are some of the most legit folks out there, and that is in no small part due to the mindset and attitude of compassion, kindness, a hunger to learn, a drive to help others, and a goal to make the world a better place in at least some small way that Hank and John have actively encouraged and cultivated over the last 16.5 years of their channel. Neither the Greens nor Nerdfighteria are perfect, but they all try, in my experience, and literally no one in the world is perfect, so that's all any of us can do.

I appreciate Hank and John and the Nerdfighters so much, and I'm so proud to have, even if it was often absently and from a distance, watched both the brothers and the community grow and develop since those first daily vlogs in 2007.

And if you still somehow think there's something embarrassing or "cringe" about being part of a community that on the whole so embodies and tries to live by the ideas that you can always learn and grow and it's never too late to start, the philosophy of "what we owe to each other" and how we're all in this together and therefore we should try to help each other however we can, the dream of repairing the world and leaving it better for those who come after us than it was when we got here, and the idea that each of us has inherent worth and value simply by being alive?

IDK man, that sounds like a you problem. Might want to consider why that makes you want to cringe at it. Just a thought.

Don't forget to be awesome, y'all.

[hamlets-bootycheeks]

Hello! I'm Tesh! (My previous URL was phantomspren.) I'm an adult, aroace, American, use any pronouns, and am going to school for literally like five different things.

I crochet, do HEMA (smallsword mostly, though a bit of rapier and longsword too), and write! I'm also a Nerdfighter and involved with the TBFighters, as well as being a mod with the Podcast Book Club. And theoretically I'm learning Welsh and German.

I mostly reblog things I think are silly, but also plenty of serious stuff and fanart and things.

Media I am currently working my way through:

Books: The Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin

Games: Slay the Princess, I'm always playing Hollow Knight on and off

Shows: Doctor Who (season two), Arcane (I will get around to season two eventually), Owl House (17th rewatch I think)

Audio dramas: Welcome to Night Vale, Hello From the Hallowoods, Hi Nay (very slowly on all of the above)

(Last updated 6/18/25) (In case I disappear or forget to keep this fairly up to date.)

DMs/asks: I really love talking to people. I'm kinda shit at asking good questions to facilitate conversations, but feel free to DM me or send me asks and tell me about your projects or to talk about media we both enjoy or anything like that. Or ask me what I think the meaning of life is, I do have an answer and like talking about it and hearing other people's thoughts. :) I will probably not DM you first because my social anxiety is quite bad with that, but that does not mean I do not want you to say hi.

Media I really enjoy and occasionally post about:

Books: The Cosmere (my first real fandom it is forever in my heart), The Locked Tomb, Lord of the Rings (also the movies), Phantom of the Opera (musical and other adaptations as well), Percy Jackson, Septimus Heap, The Raven Cycle, The Anthropocene Reviewed, The Wayfarers series, House of Leaves, The Dark is Rising Sequence

(My favorite genres are fantasy, gothic horror, older dystopian/sci fi/speculative fiction (I am a HUGE Ray Bradbury fan), history, and sociology. I have books recs. Ask me for book recs. Unless you want romance, I don't really read romance.)

Games: Hollow Knight, Outer Wilds, Slay the Princess

Shows/movies: The Owl House, Amphibia, Gravity Falls, Psych, Good Omens (fuck Gaiman), the 1996 Hamlet, Over the Garden Wall, The Muppet Christmas Carol (I kinda wish I was joking but I'm fucking obsessed with this movie), Barbie in the Princess and the Pauper (I am mostly joking but also it's so funny)

Audio dramas: The Magnus Archives, Welcome to Night Vale, Hymns for the Road, Camlann

Musicals: Les Miserables (also the book), Come From Away, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (I have not read the book yet), Hadestown, The Count of Monte Cristo (also the book), Wicked (not the book), Treason, The Clockmaker's Daughter (there is no relation between the book and the musical), Frankenstein (also the book), Jekyll and Hyde (only portions of the musical, but also the book), Epic (I haven't read the book since I was fifteen but I enjoyed it)

Other music: The Mechanisms, The Amazing Devil, The Mountain Goats, The Narcissist Cookbook, The Crane Wives, To Kill a King, Sparkbird, Fish in a Birdcage, Poor Man's Poison, Bug Hunter

Some things I know a weird amount about: Phantom of the Opera (a lot of the adaptations and the original book), tuberculosis, The Owl House lore, the Cosmere, Louis Le Prince (the guy who took the first video), and parrots

A note on tags: I tag all Locked Tomb stuff with "The Locked Tomb," not tlt (it's short for a different thing in a different community I'm in). My personal tag for when I talk about shit is "Tesh talks." Other than that I think I do pretty normal things when it comes to tagging, feel free to let me know if you'd like me to change how I do stuff to make it easier to avoid spoilers or anything like that.

[the-resurrection-3d]

Re: that post about fandom wars and local politics, I actually am reading an article right now on how the Green Brothers have helped push and enable their collective fandom (Nerdfighters) into doing tons of charity work. Very interesting stuff.

[chungledown-bimothy]

Top 5 guest d20 cast members (aka non intrepid heroes or DMs)

I'm not going to make the joke, but you do see what you set up for me by not including a question mark, right? <3

Aabria has been in the dome as a player as many times as she's been behind the gm screen, so if she counts, she's #1 for sure (I think she should, and I've been very vocal about why she's my favorite). But my top 5 if she doesn't:

1- Erika Ishii. I don't need to explain, right? Like, pick any aspect of what makes someone perfect to play ttrpgs with and he's got it in spades.

2- Izzy Roland. Truly one of the funniest people on the planet. Whoever decided to put her and Zac next to each other in Coffin Run was a genius. And I love how unafraid she is to take absolutely wild swings with character choices or mechanical asks in combat. She givesn't a fuck, and it's iconic.

3- Hank Green. I was a huge nerdfighter back in the day, so that was fun. But also I loved that he didn't try for a second to hide the Huge Dimension Twenty Fan Living The Dream energy or waste his chance to flirt with Brennan.

4- Carlos Luna. All of the characters of his I've seen (Cheese, Wetzel, I forget which Ken he was in the Barbie oneshot) are so funny but then casually drop things that are DEVASTATING. I think about Cheese and Ayda's conversation at the end of Pirates regularly. And he does such incredible work off camera as well. Everything he touches turns to gold.

5- Jasper William Cartwright. He's got an energy that is just so much fun. I didn't even know who he was before Burrow's End, but he's so damn funny. Idk how to explain it, but his energy is just so damn Good.

[surrexi]

as a longtime nerdfighter, time is never more incomprehensible to me than when i see john's kids or hank's kid during P4A and i am forcefully reminded they aren't babies anymore, or when john says something about henry STARTING HIGH SCHOOL THIS YEAR?

like how is that a thing that is happening he was just a tiny baby who john was singing an increasingly absurd rendition of "hush little baby" to!

[road2nf]

I thought this story was worth sharing, and whether it is read by none or one or twenty five, I’m glad I wrote it down, and I’m glad my brother read DFTBA from a bumper sticker on the highway. I hope someone smiles at the words on this page, before they are swallowed by the deluge of love and care sent by people all over the world with stories just like my own.

To be up front about it, your videos saved my relationship with my brother, Donovan.

He was my absolute best friend growing up, the person that everyone else had to live up to in order to be even considered a decent person.

He was my hero.

He’s three years older than me, and he was a protector as I went through the struggles that “high potential” kids have which aren’t always understood by those in authority positions.

All my teachers wanted to move me up a grade, which ruined the friendships I had cherished as ten-year-olds do. Fast forward six years, and my brother and I grew apart pretty quickly.

I was president of a couple of clubs at school and he was off to Vanderbilt that fall. We stopped telling each other everything, and I didn’t know what to do to keep talking.

We were driving to visit our grandmother who lived an hour away, and it was getting late.

We were keeping each other awake, blaring music and singing at the top of our lungs.

It was one of the best memories I had with him, and then it got better.

As a car passed us on the highway, my brother (pointing, reading a bumper sticker) yelled, “DFTBA!” And looked at me expectantly. I thought he was crazy, and he just kept repeating,

“Don’t forget to be awesome!...Vlogbrothers...John... Hank...none of this rings a bell?”

When I still didn’t understand, he just told me to go on YouTube on my phone and search “John Green pennies” because he couldn’t remember any specific title.

That was it.

Three minutes and fifty seven seconds, and I was hooked. We sat in my grandma’s living room until past 2:30 that morning watching any video that came up.

The most popular, related to the current one playing, and all of Hank’s songs. Since that day, we would run into each other’s room and talk about the videos for hours.

I also have a (totally healthy) obsession with Jane Austen, and watching all the Pemberly Digital projects with him has been second only to reading them in the first place.

We have read John’s novels together, and cried for hours.

This Christmas, my brother made a donation in my name for the P4A and it was the most amazing thing anyone could have ever done for me.

Without ever watching a video, our parents soon picked up on who we were speaking about when ‘John and Hank’ were mentioned, which is astonishing when they can’t even remember the names of our closest friends. I could list off one hundred other things about being a Nerdfighter, but most importantly is saying thank you.

Thank you for doing this and putting yourself out there which is so difficult to do.

Thank you for leaving your children something to be proud of when so many are left with nothing.

Thank you for turning Nerdfighters into Nerdfighters by decreasing world-suck.

And thank you to your wives and families who support you as you change lives on a daily basis.

Thank you for inspiring me personally, and showing me how easy it is to be passionate about writing and words. I thought this story was worth sharing, and whether it is read by none or one or twenty five, I’m glad I wrote it down, and I’m glad my brother read DFTBA from a bumper sticker on the highway.

I hope someone smiles at the words on this page, before they are swallowed by the deluge of love and care sent by people all over the world with stories just like my own.

Many good wishes and blessings.

-Kate Elizabeth

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Object permanence

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

#20yrsago Orrin Hatch is head of new IP subcommitee https://www.technewsworld.com/story/hatch-to-lead-senate-panel-on-intellectual-property-41548.html

#20yrsago Hollywood stars look like crap in high-def https://web.archive.org/web/20050324045011/http://www.onhd.tv/thelist.htm

#20yrsago Self-replicating 3D printers https://web.archive.org/web/20050410074636/https://www.newscientist.com/article.ns/?id=dn7165

#20yrsago Andre Norton, RIP https://web.archive.org/web/20050318045717/https://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/books/03/17/obit.norton.ap/index.html

#15yrsago YouTube: Viacom secretly posted its videos even as they sued us for not taking down Viacom videos https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/

#15yrsago Entertainment industry sours on term “pirate” — too sexy https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/piracy-sounds-too-sexy-say-rightsholders/

#15yrsago Is the UK record industry arrogant or stupid? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/18/digital-economy-bill-calculated-loss

#10yrsago J. Edgar Hoover palled around with a suspected commie spy https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/feb/26/fbi-files-congressman-dickstein-show-close-relatio/

#10yrsago DRM for woo: “light therapy” mask’s LED only works 30 times https://www.techdirt.com/2015/03/18/drm-how-to-make-30000-hour-led-bulbs/

#10yrsago Canadian court hands a gimme to copyright trolls https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/03/defending-privacy-doesnt-pay-federal-court-issues-ruling-in-voltage-teksavvy-costs/

#10yrsago Clinton’s sensitive email was passed through a third-party spam filtering service https://web.archive.org/web/20150317223142/http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2015/03/16/breaking-news-spam-filtering-service-had-access-to-clinton-classified-emails/comment-page-1/

#10yrsago Following the key Trans-Pacific Partnership senator with a 30′ blimp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDKzwB8GhN0

#5yrsago Plague precautions from 1665 https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#hello-1665

#5yrsago How to make your own toilet paper https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#diy-tp

#5yrsago If nothing is for sale, how will covid stimulus work? https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#covid-stimulus

#5yrsago 3D printed ventilator hero got a patent threat https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#patently-absurd

#5yrsago Epidemiology and public health in 14 minutes https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#explainer

#5yrsago Bigoted Republican Congressjerk votes against coronavirus relief because it might cover same-sex partnerships https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#repandybiggs

#5yrsago How to split a single ventilator for four patients https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#ventilator-sharing

#5yrsago John Green's mutual aid manifesto https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#nerdfighters

#5yrsago American Airlines blew billions, now it wants a bailout https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#aa-crashes

#5yrsago MAGA firefighters dismiss coronavirus as Democrat hoax https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#trump-virus

#5yrsago Charter orders all workers to keep showing up https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/18/diy-tp/#sociopathy

[vlogbrothershistory]

June 04 in Vlogbrothers History

2008: VEEPSTAKES!

2013: A New Nerdfighter Baby

2019: On Sharing the Walk

2021: Is Twitter Redeemable?

2024: how it all ends

[entity9silvergen]

Last night I had a crazy revelation about the mcu snap.

Let me bring you down my thought process.

Ant-Man read The Fault In Our Stars, meaning John Green exists in the mcu.

If John Green exists, Hank Green probably also exists.

If the Green brothers exist, their podcast Dear Hank & John probably exists.

There's an episode of Dear Hank & John where Hank claims that the human body has about 8 pounds of bacteria.

This is not quite true (source).

John believed this true be true so it was discussed at length over many episodes (source).

It is reasonable to believe that fans of the podcast did not fact check this and therefore believe that the human body contains 8 pounds of bacteria.

It is confirmed by Marvel writers that half of all life vanishing during the snap includes half of all bacteria inside human bodies (source).

It is likely that the people in the mcu are aware of this.

Conclusion: Nerdfighters absolutely weighed themselves and obsessed over how much bacteria they lost.

Hank and John, assuming they both survived, definitely discussed this on the podcast. Perhaps even replaced part of the news section with status on our bodies' bacteria?