Backstory

So my knowledge is very sketchy and I'm sure this is going to leave out a lot and possibly even contain errors, but here's my attempt at introducing you to the Nerdfighters. I read Looking for Alaska a couple of years ago, really liked it, and was thrilled when it won the Printz Award. A little while after that I learned that author John Green was doing this fun little thing with his brother Hank that they called Brotherhood 2.0: they were going to spend an entire year only conversing through short videos posted daily to YouTube. I watched a few and was entertained and liked the two brothers, but am not much of a YouTube junky and didn't start following like many did. When John's second book came out I never quite got around to reading it because of some mixed reviews and worries that my expectations would be unrealistically high. So that was about the extent of my knowledge until a couple of months ago, when I learned they were coming to our area as a sort of book tour for John's latest.

Here's what I have since learned. They are no longer award-winning auther and his brother from the videos, they are now the founders and heads of the Nerdfighters, with a credo something along the lines of nerds fighting for awesome and fighting against suck. You see, the Brotherhood 2.0 thing started as a fun little thing the two guys wanted to do. But they had a lot of fun with it and posted it publicly, and eventually it caught on. I'm not sure the exact origination, but "my pants" has become an ongoing joke. At the event John said he'd never heard Hank sing and didn't know Hank could play an instrument, yet one of the days he was flabbergasted to find Helen Hunt. Pretty soon Hank's songs were a regular occurrence. By the end of the year John and Hank had one of the most popular channels in the history of YouTube, with a huge community of followers. So they decided to continue and expand what they were doing, wanting that community to not just enjoy connecting with fellow nerds but to become a force for good. One of Hank's passions is the environment and he's working to fight environmental suck, but they encourage the Nerdfighters to take initiative on their own. One of them started working to help the poor in Bangladesh and they have now contributed thousands of dollars to his cause.

So, anyway, that's all I'll say about that except for one more video:



Oh, I'm gonna kill you
And possibly your whole family, too.
All I want is some courtesy,
Some kindness, and maybe an apology. . . .
I'm usually a very peaceful person,
But I'm gonna kill you.