Why Wil Wheaton Makes Us Proud to Be Geeks

"When I was a little boy, I was called a nerd all the time." This is how grownup Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation as a kid, started his epic response to a little girl on how to deal with being called a nerd (it's below if you missed it). "Don't let them make you feel bad because you love a thing," he said at Denver Comic-Con. "I'll tell you this: it absolutely gets better as you get older."

Then he closed with this spot-on finish: "There's 50,000 people here who went through the exact same thing . . . and we're all doing really well."

If this bit made you extremely proud to be a geek, then wait until you hear Wil's speech from Calgary Comic Expo to a fan's unborn daughter or read what he wrote in a high school grad's yearbook. There are two takeaways from this collection of Wheaton wisdom: the first is that being a nerd is awesome, and the second is that Wesley Crusher grew up to be a beautiful human. Source: Getty / Albert L. Ortega