A Brief Primer on Interesting Loved One's in All Things Geek

I'm proud to say that I've recently interested my girlfriend Natalie in the new Dr. Who series. Given that I also managed to get her interested in Magic the Gathering a number of years ago, I'm beginning to think that I'm that rarest of geeks; call me Speaker to Women. Seriously, I believe that there are some general rules that geeks of all sexes can follow to help their non-geek S.O.'s become interested in geeky hobbies and interests. [1]

Given this, here's a few tentative suggestions on how you may be able to interest your S.O. in the geek things that you love.

1. Don't push

This really is critical. The simple fact of the matter is that every couple has a disjunction of interests and there are going to be things that you're interested in that they aren't.

2. Express an openess to share your enjoyment

Even though you shouldn't push your interests, you can make it known that you would be open and happy when it comes to sharing your interests. Simply knowing that there are things you love and that you would be open to sharing those loves with your S.O. goes a long way.

3. A little nudge is better than a big push

I got Natalie interested in Magic the Gathering by inviting her to sit in on a single online game with me. I made it clear that it was only the one game and that all I wanted was for her to see the game so that she could better understand why I spent so much time playing it. After that one game she, of her own initiative, asked me to play another one. It wasn't long before she was playing herself (and building better decks that me, at that!)

4. Be a faucet and not a firehose

Geeks tend to be obsessive about details. I'm no different than any other geek. If there's something I love, I'm all about the minutia. Unfortunately, it's easy for newcomers to be overwhelmed by that sort of detail. Start slow with a general sketch of whatever it is you're interesting them in (be it a game or a television show, or what have you), answer their questions as simply and concisely as they arise ("That thing's a sonic screwdriver; it's kind of like a high-tech Swiss army knife"), and gradually offer more detail as time passes.

I really think that this is the step where most geek outreach efforts flounder. We forget outselves and start babbling about trivial details that matter to us but which really aren't central to whatever it is we're trying to introduce our S.O.'s to.

5. Know your audience

There are many things that Natalie is not and probably never will be interested in. Because of how well I knew Natalie, I was able to guess that Magic the Gathering would probably appeal to her. Likewise, when she asked about Dr. Who, I strongly suspected that she would appreciate the humor and drama of the series so I knew that it was worthwhile to make an effort to introduce her to it (and I would have been forthright if I had thought that it wouldn't be her thing).

6. Always be respectful

Sometimes your efforts to introduce that special someone to some element of your geek lifestyle just isn't going to be a big success. People have different interests and there's nothing wrong with a couple not sharing a complete set of mutual interests. Mind you, because we are geeks and because geeks are obsessives, it can sting to discover that your S.O. doesn't like -- or worse, dislikes -- something that you love. It can be hard not to take that sort of rejection as a personal rebuke. Don't. Just because they may think that Battlestar Galactica is dull or that AD&D is vastly overrated doesn't make them bad people nor does it imply that they think that you're defective for liking things that they don't.

[1] In all fairness, it should be noted that I didn't turn Natalie into a geek: she came prepacked as one. She's a Georgia Tech alumnus, she knows and loves Monty Python, she likes superhero movies (although she's never read any comics to speak of), and she used to roleplay entirely of her own initiative. That said, Natalie is also fully a woman (you should see the way she likes to play dress-up with her avatars) and not all things geek are of interest to her.

Unstructured LED Spokes

It's like a geek version of Pimp My Ride.

Unstructured Pi

In honor of International Pi Day (which is also, conincidentally, my birthday), here's a song about the virtues of pi by Alan Ferrier and Antoni Chan.
If you liked the song, there's also a somewhat truncated video that you can watch.

Unstructured Showdown

If you've ever been a teenage boy, you've doubtless pondered the sort of question where you ask who would win, Superman vs. Hulk, or Batman vs. Spiderman, or Optimus Prime vs. the big robot from Voltron (and so forth and so on).

The Ultimate Showdown is a flash animation, set to a very catchy song, that takes that line of thought to its ultimate conclusion.

Roxanne, Don't Put on the Redshirt Tonight...

Anyone with the least bit of geek in their blood knows that the reason you're given a red shirt, if your a member of the starship Enterprise, is because it's easier for the ship's laundry to disguise the bloodstains. This factoid has become so well known, in fact, that it has become a cliché.

True geekery looks beyond the cliché. True geekery analyzes the data, which is precisely what The Inside Track has done. Their report tells us, for instance, that if you happen to be a redshirt, your odds for survival improve immensely if you can manage to get the captain laid.

Pants Runner

You've probably come across the Star Wars gag where you substitute one word of dialog with the word pants. I decided to see what I could do with my personal favorite SF movie: Blade Runner.

"They don't advertise for pants in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex-pants runner."

"You look down and see pants, Leon. They're crawling toward you.."

"Fiery the pants fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shores... burning with the fires of Orc."

"Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your pants."

"I just do pants... just pants.... You Nexus, huh? I design your pants."

"Gosh, you've really got some nice pants here."

"I don't know why he saved my pants. Maybe in those last moments he loved pants more than he ever had before. Not just his pants, anybody's pants, my pants."

"Quite an experience to live in pants, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."

"Do you like our pants?"
"They're artificial? "
"Of course they are."
"Must be expensive."
"Very."

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Pants on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched pants glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

"Pants are like any other machine - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem."

"Must get lonely here, J.F."
"Not really. I make friends. They're pants. My friends are pants. I make them. It's a hobby."

"I've done... questionable things."
"Nothing the god of pants wouldn't let you in heaven for."

"Did you get your precious pants?"
"Someone was there."

"We're not pants, Sebastian, we're physical."

"Christ, Deckard. You look almost as bad as those pants you left on the sidewalk."

"This announcement is brought to you by the Shimato Dominguez Corporation - helping America into the new pants."

---

Thanks to IMDB for the quotes.

Uber-Geek Song of the Interval

Frosty the photon
Escaped from a black hole,
Then he used his spin
To find his kin,
Near the ends of a dipole.
Frosty the photon
With momentum h-bar-k
Though he had the right
To be known as light,
He was called a gamma ray.

Circuit Snacks

The next time you're planning to throw a party for some Electrical Engineers (and really, who can party like a double-E?), you might want to think about making snacks in the shape of circuitry.

Your Exceedingly Geeky Joke of the Interval

How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light bulb?

Two. One to decide what to change it into and another to find a bulb that emits broken light.

---

Extra geek cred to the first person to get the joke.
Super-extra geek cred to the first person to translate the joke into Lojban.

How Geek Are You?

86% Geek

As someone who grew up in the Silicon Valley (or near enough not to make a difference), I'm constantly surprised to find that people in the wider world seem to think that being a geek isn't something to be desired. This is especially true of women.

I have a couple of female co-workers who have sworn to me, up and down, that they aren't geeks. These are women who are intimately familiar with Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and will laugh out loud at jokes involving the number 42. These are women who have firm opinions about which Spiderman movie was the best. These are women who, for God's sake, know what a Ferengi is! But the stigma of geekery is such that they absolutely insisted that they weren't geeks (even the one that used to, literally, be a rocket engineer).

Finally I was able to manage to convince them to embrace their geek natures by having them take The Geek Quiz because there's nothing as authoritative as some random internet test.

DM of the Rings

Back in the days when I was an active roleplayer, every so often one of us would have the brilliant (brilliant, I say!) idea of keeping a journal of our games so that we could then write up our adventures and, presto!, have an instant fantasy story.

It turns out that this never worked out well in practice. As fun as the games were, translating them into fiction never quite panned out. Years later I realized that the problem wasn't that our campaigns were lame, it was that the media were too different.

Even though fantasy role playing borrows from the same settings as fantasy fiction, the types of narratives they generate are very different from one another.

The DM of the Rings is a humorous, yet perceptive, examination of this phenomenon in the form of a web comic that asks what would the Lord of the Rings have been like if they had been done as a fantasy RPG campaign. It is often achingly funny while, at the same time, serving as a good study of roleplaying as well as storytelling.

Be sure to read the author's comments at the bottom of the strips.

Geek Tattoos

Given the number of tattoo links I post, I wouldn't be surprised if you thought that I was a human mural. The fact of the matter, however, is that as much as I like the idea of getting a few tattoos, I don't have nearly enough confidence in my ability to choose something that I'd still be happy with five years from now to risk it.

Be that as it may, here's a nice collection of some very geeky tattoos.

Geek Alphabet

From "A is for alignment" to "Z is for Zombie", here's a very clever geek-themed alphabet.

Geek Pride

If you are a male geek, you probably know how disheartening it is to see that a lot of women prefer guys who are a bit more "conventionally cool". If so, here's an essay by a happy woman who urges her sisters to take a second look at us.

Among other things, she notes that we don't tend to hang out in bars, we're very good at remembering important dates and, lest we seem less than perfectly exciting, we're also very good at sex.

Of course, this does leave the question of how to spread the word. Somehow, I don't think that the internet is going to be the best way to get the word out.

Unstructured Oscillations

If you've ever played with an oscilloscope (and who hasn't!?), you'll love this marvelous applet that lets you simulate standing waves. The applet is part of the larger set of math and physics applets at Falstad.com.

I do believe that I have attained Nerdvana.

"You don't know the history of mind melds! I know the history of mind melds!"

Warning: you are about to read an uber-geeky post.

If you remember the original series, you may recall one character who was horribly disfigured and consigned to a life-support wheelchair where he was limited to beeping out yes and no answers to questions. That was the character of Captain Christopher Pike and he was featured in one of the most beloved episodes entitled The Menagerie.

In any case, there's a rumor that J.J. Abrams (of Lost fame) would like Tom Cruise to play Captain Christopher Pike in the upcoming Star Trek movie. This has caused a great deal of wailing and kvetching in the geek community, which brings us to:

The Top Ten List of Actual Responses to the Cruise-as-Pike Rumor (as Seen on Digg)

10. The movie is already destined to bomb, are they looking for a guarantee?

9. Is he going to act in the movie or just be a fact checking resource for space travel and alien accuracy?

8. I like the idea only if it involves the older Captain Pike in his vegetative state[...]. In this case, Tom Cruise is perfect for the part!

7. To boldly go where no movie should ever have gone.

6. Only if he's wearing a red shirt.

5. When are the Jews going to take Hollywood back from the Scientologists?

4. Captain, Scientology is a scam and a cult. You are being highly illogical.

3. Beep Beep! ... Beep Beep!

2. My buddies didn't die face down in the mud for this.

And the number one comment is... [drumroll]

1. TOMMMMMMMMM!!!

---

Comments courtesy of the Digg user community. List courtesy of Rob Berry.

Unstructured Tesla

If there is anything that defines techno-cool more than a tesla coil being made to play music, I do not know what it is.

More information here.

Unstructured Elven

A long while back, Elijah Wood was doing an interview on the Daily Show to promote The Fellowship of the Ring. During the interview, he mentioned that he, and the other nine members of the fellowship cast, had all gone out and gotten tattoos of the numeral nine... in elvish. At the time I thought that was just a little bit strange but, in retrospect, I should have realized that there is a reasonably significant demand for Elvish tattoos.

Of course, if one is intent on demonstrating that they are way more geeky than those stupid Klingon poseurs, you can't just run out and get a bunch of random gibberish stamped on your tramp. On no, you must do it properly!

A good place to start would be to find out what your Evlish name is (in my case, that would be Suiadan), but that's only the first step. Once you have your name, you need to know how to write it in Elvish script, bearing in mind that there are several dialects of Elvish as well as numerous calligraphic scripts that you can choose from. (If this intimidates you, you could always cheat with a bit of software.)

This may seem like a lot of effort but if you are a True Tolkien Geek, this will absolutely and permanently establish your Elf Cred. Who knows, you might even meet someone who shares your passion which would mean that you'd eventually need to send out Elvish wedding invitations.

Unstructured Comics

Does this comic make you laugh?

If so, you are a True Geek™, in which case you should check out XKCD, which describes itself as a "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language". Rarely have I encountered such a concentration of Pure Geekery.

Unstructured Venn

Like many on the geek/nerd continuum, I've always been fascinated by graphs and Venn diagrams; however, my interest in the subject pales next to this guy.

My favorite is his diagram illustrating that the intersection of a mythical king, elves, and magic is either Lord of the Rings or Christmas.

It makes you think.