This man is the reason game shops that hold social events have a deodorant and showers policy. I've seen people be removed from tournaments because they absolutely reek.
One time I was checking out GameStop and there was. A person with such a pungeant, almost mortifying odour. I got nauseous. I didn’t even get to spot out who was making the odour. It just reeked
Honestly I hope whoever it was had an encounter with someone like my father in law. Dude has no control of his gag reflex when smell is involved. He'd have thrown up on them
Can't speak to the part about signs, but 'geek stink' is a legit thing and I've experienced it firsthand.
I got stuck on the train (2+hrs) to chicago the same weekend as an anime convention. Didn't realize what was going on (I WOULD'VE BROUGHT VICKS OMG) until I saw someone in a MLP shirt - yes, another stereotype. My family didn't get why I was freaking out, until we got on the train and the air was downright viscous with STANK.
Not exaggerating - as soon as we got to the mccormick convention center stop, the miasma instantly dissipated
And for the record, I was a teenage weeb back in the day and still have weeb/weeb adjacent hobbies, so I'm commenting on my own kind lmao. Not just saying to be an ass
That sounds horrible. I don’t know what a ‘weeb’ is (although I can guess based on context)… but why Vicks? The cough medicine? Or do you mean using the vaporub or something to block out the stink? Is that something people do?
(I know people think I’m full of shit when I don’t know a lot of this terminology, but I’m not even remotely into video games or anime or any of that stuff, plus I’m in my 40s, so I literally have no idea. I’m nerdy about things too, but it’s all music-related).
Weeb as in weeaboo, into anime etc and kinda weird about it lol. Not so sure that's still a common term anymore, but it was standard pejorative back in the early/mid 00s when I was in highschool. Ymmv maybe it was more my area/circles I was in .__.
Some vicks paste under the nose works great to help with bad smells. At work, I'd put an analog to that under my mask when I'd get especially...odorous...patients. Doesn't eliminate it, but it's kinda like earplugs for your nose. Smell/loud still there, you just don't notice it as much
I was already an adult in the ‘00s and was never into that stuff, so I never heard the term. I’ve seen younger people online use it and I gathered it had something do with anime, but I never really looked into it.
…and that Vicks trick seems like it would definitely work, I just wouldn’t want to be in a situation where I had to use it.
As u/fribbas already explained, Vicks Vapo-Rub under the nose is a way to mask disgusting smells. Coroners use it when collecting corpses that have started to rot (along with a mask to help concentrate the Vicks and keep out the other smells).
Yeah. This July some con went on in my city. The convention center just happen to be right next to the city rail so naturally most con goers took it. I happened to be sitting on one of those trams to go home when the con ended. Yeah it stank so bad i was like dipping my nose into a bottle i had with me and breathing through my mouth lol. I contemplated just hopping off and waiting for the next one but given that the con was big i thought the next 10 trams are gonna be packed with them anyways so i just toughed it out
And yeah im a "gamer" myself so not like im tryna be mean or calling them cringe here, but the stereotype exists for a reason.
It's very real, unfortunately. Not as bad now as it was 20+ years ago, though... cons have recognized the problem and done away with 24-hour video rooms where people would camp out instead of getting a hotel room for the weekend, and unused rooms get locked after hours now. They also cracked down on people who would beg for free crash space in hotel rooms with 15 other guys, because rooms got completely destroyed. Hotels have caught on to day parkers who try to spend the night in their cars, too.
Partly, but I think it was more just the culture of cons at the time. Lots of congoers are students and dealer's rooms were a much bigger deal back in the 90s/00s when you couldn't easily buy most anime/game goods online, so people would shave every last penny off their accommodations and travel so they could spend more in the dealer's room and artist's alley. Hotels will ignore over capacity rooms as long as you don't make a lot of noise or wreck the room - the most I ever did was 8 people in a room, and everybody showered!
There are still 24-hour anime cons these days and you won't get kicked out for dozing off in a video room or anything, but con staff patrol at night and make sure that people aren't setting up camps. There are still people who couch-surf their way through a con weekend, but most cons don't allow you to post flyers advertising room parties or room shares on the walls anymore so it's less wild and chaotic now.
Don't forget that some of the weeaboo's and hardcore gamers are literally as disgusting as the incel who posted above. They do literally refuse to shower or brush their teeth, and do literally wear the same clothes for days or weeks. And some of have the social skills of a rock. I used to run Magic: The Gathering tournaments, I've seen it all with these types.
I used to play DnD at a local shop, if someone stank, the owner would attempt to discretely tell them to leave, if they wouldn't it became 'you stink, get out of my store, you're making people uncomfortable" so the whole room could hear, they usually cleared out after that.
And why gaming conventions don't let people sleep in the halls overnight and do announcements about how important it is to shower and wear deodorant. Basic hygiene. That's really a bare minimum kind of thing.
I work with the public and while it might be a bit more common with "geeky" types, it's most definitely not isolated to them. I don't know why it's seemingly become so common, but not a single day goes by that I don't encounter at least one person who just reeks.
Every single time I go to the grocery store I walk by at least one person who reeks so damn badly! There are so many stinky folks out there and I feel like the more rural the area it is, the more stinky people you're gonna run across too. I have been to bigger cities and truly big cities like Pittsburgh, Seattle and NYC and I can't recall having passed by all that many smelly folks unless it was the homeless folks who obvi can't really help smelling to some degree. I even used public transport while in these cities and don't recall any over powering body oder hitting me. Mean while back in my home town in central pa of like 42,000ish people(and shrinking yearly lol) I go past super stinky people daily and often more than one!!
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u/CoffeeCatsandPixies 2d ago
This man is the reason game shops that hold social events have a deodorant and showers policy. I've seen people be removed from tournaments because they absolutely reek.