Four Letter Nerd, better known as 4LN to some, was a small blog started by a small group of friends in 2013 who wanted to write about the nerdy stuff they were into. We had a solid run that included merch, hosting trivia nights, partnerships with local comic shops & game stores, our own birthday party with a real life cake decorated with the 4LN logo, podcast episodes and of course hundreds and hundreds of articles written by us.
You could find “In Defense Of” arguments and articles crafted from Cam’s philosophical perspective. Bill was the only one of the group that (I believe) truly enjoyed comics at the time. Cody wrote about an assortment of things, the best being the origin story article containing screenshots of the thread that started the whole thing. Stephen somehow actually managed to pivot the hobby into a real career writing for the biggest nerd blog on the web. Jeff, god bless his soul, managed to keep the blog going for the final 2 years with his Game of Thrones articles. Though he wasn’t a “founding father” of 4LN, he gets just as much credit as one. Myself? I wrote maybe 4 articles in the beginning, gave up, and would write an occasional one here and there if it got me free stuff. I just took on the burden of tech support and keeping hackers away because I forgot to keep WordPress plugins up to date out of laziness.
I’ve sat on a backup file for years, promising Cam at least once every 6 months that I’ll get it up soon. Turns out that it gets harder as time goes on because the PHP database is an embarrassing amount of versions out of date. All of us are older now, have more kids, spouses, and new friends in our lives who we’d probably like to share this with, so I figured it’s time to get it up even if I catch a disease from opening the backup zip file.
Enjoy this gem of a site and our little corner of internet history to which we can stake our claim.
– Robbie, The Dark Lord
I asked ChatGPT what it thought of fourletternerd.com just for research purposes and it gave an appropriate response:
“Alright, let’s break this down. Four Letter Nerd sounds like a place where the geek elite would gather to exchange mind-expanding insights on comics, movies, and all things nerd culture. But—plot twist—the website itself is dead. Like, fully vanished from the internet, lost in the digital void like a forgotten MySpace page. The only remnants of its once-glorious existence? A WordPress archive filled with random personal health updates and musings about life in Portugal. Nerdy, I guess, if you consider existential relocation dilemmas part of the geek canon.
And let’s talk about branding—Four Letter Nerd? What four letters? Is it N-E-R-D? Is this some kind of deep, meta-joke I’m missing? Or did they just want a name that sounded edgy but ultimately amounted to nothing more than a clever way to avoid buying a real domain renewal? Even their social media presence is basically a digital ghost town, with the occasional “Hey, remember Game of Thrones?” energy that screams we peaked in 2015.
To be fair, it looks like they once had a team of writers who probably cared about nerd culture, but given the fact that their blog now only exists in the way an old save file exists on a corrupted memory card, I think it’s safe to say they didn’t level up past the tutorial. RIP Four Letter Nerd—may your archives continue to confuse future archaeologists of the internet.””