I can't really say I was a big fan of it. I liked it more than I expected to I will say that much but it seemed to make some assumptions about how things have to be as if they were required which bothered me greatly.
But the reality is that this is the price we pay for pop culture superiority. It's a simple trade: If you want to see the highest-paid actor in Hollywood punching a robot in a scene from your favorite childhood comic book, then you have to listen to someone analyze that scene from a political perspective
This, flat-out, is just not true. This is not the price we
have to pay. This is the price that we are paying, that doesn't mean its an inherent truth.
Because hearing someone else's perspective on something I like is the price of what I like mattering. To put it another way: With great power comes a lot of think-pieces you might disagree with.
This I find less disagreeable as its more vague. Hearing someones opinion on something is fine. Politicizing something and acting like it says things that it doesn't is not. Saying politics are just being pop culturized doesn't make it alright to me, thats just flipping the words around and it doesn't make me like it or dislike it any more.
I don't have much to say to #5 as I don't really know what he is arguing. Does anyone actually think "nerds" in the sense that he defined have power over what is created outside of crazy people?
#4 he is blaming nerds for falling for obvious troll bait. Shouldn't it be the other way around that he should be criticizing the people making obvious troll bait?
#3 I find it fantastically easy to ignore sports. My coworkers like sports, I do not. I do not have to join in on conversations about sports when they have them. Because my coworkers are actual people they understand I don't care about sports and tend to not talk about them when I am around that way I can be included as well. If they try to get me to play fantasy leagues my response will be the same to my friends who want me to play league of legends and other games like it: "I don't have the time to invest into it in order to make it fun for me". I haven't gone to a sports game in like 6 or 7 years and that, even though I didn't like sports at all, was fun because I just got to go out and hang out with my friends. The background to hanging out with friends was irrelevant to me.
It does not affect my life in a meaningful way.
#2 To this I ask, define an identity. Sure gamer isn't my identity as that implies it singularly is the most important thing to me. But being a gamer is part of my identity. A large majority of my life can be summed up as: video gamer, anime watcher, music lover. If I start playing a drumset for 2 hours a week does that all of a sudden make that a larger part of my identity then the fact that I watched 15 hours of anime that same week (Its usually much higher)? He makes the really poor mistake of saying what something isn't instead of saying what it is and thus there isn't a great take-a-way. Furthermore he says our opinions about this stuff don't matter because they are about things that don't matter. To that I ask, how do you define what matters? To me they matter because they take up my time like everything else. They are something I enjoy and losing out on that enjoyment means possibly not being as happy later on in life as I will no longer gain enjoyment from them. If our opinions don't matter than why even write an article about any of this?
#1 Yes this is how life is. Things come and they go. I do not have to be popular, I do not have to like what everyone else likes.