The Sophisticated Nerd's Simple Style Guide - Part 1: The Battleplans

You can spend most of your money on videogames and computer parts, just don't dress like you did.

 Outfit level 99

When you build your PC master race gaming computer, what is the most important factor (aside from the ability to play Crysis) that you consider? In my opinion, that factor is efficiency. You wouldn't pair some SLI Titans with an i3 processor and shitty 7200rpm hard drives and bargain bin ram, would you? You wouldn't build a media center running an AMD APU and stick a 1000w power supply in the case along with it. That's just plain inefficient. 

Now think about what you wore leaving (or not leaving) the house this morning? Did you toss on some baggy carpenter jeans, a t-shirt, an expensive belt buckle with the Thundercats logo, and a pair of boat shoes? Did you wear sweat pants out every day this week? Do you own and still wear a pokemon shirt from the late 90's? If you answered yes to any of those questions then maybe it's time to upgrade.

I'll admit, I like this t-shirt.

The nerd renaissance man should be able to approach building his wardrobe the same way he tackles building out his gaming battlestation. His main concerns should be:

1. Purpose
2. Efficiency
3. Budget

Purpose

The underlying purpose of you putting on clothing in the morning is to cover up your disgraceful birthday suit. I'm going to take a gamble and assume that you're currently not built like an Adonis. That is the most basic purpose of owning clothes. Now, you have to think more specifically about your clothing when you dress. When you are building a computer, you have to think about what it's main use will be. If you're building a computer primarily for gaming in your home, you would tend to lean towards a full tower, spending more on the GPU(s), adequate CPU, enough memory, and a solid state drive to load Crysis faster. You're worried about frames per second, and not as much about portability and mass storage capacity. If you're building a media center, you would probably avoid the SLI setup and possibly opt for a low profile GPU or use an APU. You build your systems out to suit an intended purpose. You should look at your wardrobe the same way. You need to build your wardrobe and outfits out to suit different purposes. You can't wear Chuck Taylor's to a nice restaurant and you don't want to be the only tool at a kegger wearing a cummerbund and bowtie. You have to setup different builds with interchangeable parts in your wardrobe to suit different necessities. Think of it as being "modular".

 Efficiency

Nerds should strive for efficiency. We don't like wasting power in our systems. We don't like doing manual labor when we can automate processes. Some of us don't even like to brew coffee because we can just spray caffeine directly onto our skin and absorb it directly into our blood stream.

We can approach our wardrobes with the same efficiency mindset that we carry in our nerd lives.

You don't need to try on, compare, and buy 15 different types of dress shirts for a few different situations when you can figure out a brand, cut, and fit you like and just buy a few of the same shirt (different colors of course). Once you start figuring out what works and fits best for you, you can efficiently slap your "modules" together and get out the door quickly without looking like you just came from a 10 hour Dungeons and Dragons marathon session.

Budget

This is pretty self explanatory but it still needs to be addressed. You have to purchase what you can reasonably afford. However, don't a suit from Walmart and expect to be ready to impress. When you're purchasing hardware, you already know which products have the best quality for the price because you did your research. Clothing works the same way. When you're dealing with the low end, you have to be reasonable and expect to get what you pay for. When dealing on the high end, you definitely should put some due diligence into research and reviews. Why buy an i7 extreme when the 4770k will work just fine? You don't have to (but you definitely can) blow your money on some expensive boutique clothes, but you can get away with spending much more reasonably.

The Next Level
Now that you have the basics down, the next part of the series will help guide you from lvl 0 to lvl 10 in no time.

To Be Continued....