On a somewhat related note, I stumbled upon a post on Star Trek cufflinks, titled “Not Just for Geeks,” describing how geek fashion can still be quite elegant as well as a philosophical statement. (Despite noting that this fashion statement is not just for geeks, the author does describe himself as a geek and a nerd, in case you were wondering.)

Personally, I find myself stocking up on less geek apparel ever since I took on the assistant professor job and cut back on convention visits following the dissertation research. I just have fewer situations to wear the stuff, now. (That said, I wouldn’t mind replacing my old “Magneto Was Right” t-shirt, my original homemade one since destroyed in the laundry. Maybe without the text this time, for the love of cryptic imagery.)

1. Gaming clothing seems to be the largest category of overtly geek-branded apparel.

Sure, just about every comic store you go into has Punisher t-shirts, but those shirts aren’t necessarily being sold on “nerdy clothing” websites, or actively being linked to by websites that tend to broadly market themselves as geeky/nerdy. (I’ve always been fascinated by how commenters react when gaming blogs dish up posts on gaming shirts.)

Why gaming? I suppose it’s the geek activity that has the most crossover appeal into mainstream audiences, especially thanks to broader nostalgia value that 20- to 30-somethings find in retro gaming merchandise. That sense of nostalgia fits very well with the trend in contemporary fashion to make pre-worn “vintage”-looking t-shirts—the “Salvation-Army-cum-Urban-Outfitters” look.

Sci-fi movies also have crossover appeal with mainstream audiences, but I guess there are fewer sci-fi “classics” known to the general populace in film than video game “classics.” I do know that Urban Outfitters currently has some vintage-looking Star Wars shirts in stock, though.

2. Geeky tees seem a good match for user-generated content.

I’ve noticed that Threadless has always had the occasional nerdy product, but a bunch seemed to pop up in rapid succession for awhile. They also seemed, to me, to take on a similar tone to the shirts at more specifically geek-marketed sites, like ThinkGeek and J!NX.

Sites like J!NX have always promised some reward if you come up with an idea for a shirt and they use it, but isn’t really as built into their business model to the same extent as Threadless. Now, though, Nerdy Shirts is apparently adopting the Threadless business model, more fully embracing the idea of selling user-generated clothing.

This model kind of makes sense for geek stores, in some ways, considering that it’s often the most hardcore fans who both want clothing proclaiming their interests and want to make stuff related to their interests. The question, I think, is whether other sites can provide visitors with the feeling that even those whose shirts don’t get picked still get something out of participating and submitting. Threadless, being more designer/illustrator driven, at least offers the promise of feedback and communication with fellow designers. Fans who don’t feel like being a designer is part of their identity might not care as much about this element.

3. ‘Geek’ is sometimes used to refer to a hipster with a certain style.

Or perhaps I should say that a ‘hipster’ is a geek with a certain style..? Anyway, I have noticed a few online stores that mention somewhere in their written copy that they are for “geeks,” but have a much more fashion- and trend-conscious bent than that term might normally imply. See, for example, Your Eyes Lie (“For Freaks, Geeks, Jocket Sluts and Suzy Creamcheese”).

Some sites, meanwhile, kind of straddle the lines between hipster stores, joke tee stores, and more narrowly branded geeky tee stores, like Tees My Body” (for “dirty, nerdy geeks” in search of a “vintage-looking funny tee”), Noisebot (which has an entire “geek” category alongside “sports,” “politics,” and others), and Busted Tees (which has a “geek” shirt and a “lambda lambda lambda” shirt referencing Revenge of the Nerds).

I guess this is further evidence for the oft-claimed point that “anybody can be a geek nowadays.” Is there any tension there, though? Do some geeks resent that anybody can be a geek, or just that jocks can now claim to be geeks? (I know there is some resentment there. Ask me sometime about the “jock simulator” pitch at PAX.)

4. Nothing says “I’m a geek” like getting some ink.

For the young hipster geek afraid to commit (or just looking for a lark), Geekadelphia reports that Urban Outfitters now offers temporary tattoos for geeks. In the comments following that Geekadelphia post, however, Alex of Dangerously Awesome reminds us that “real geek ink” is cooler.

I’ve linked to some geeky tattoos here before, but I think I missed Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium. It features a mix of contributors; as one the tattoo-owner in one post notes, “I’m not a scientist by trade, but I am, in fact, a huge nerd.”

I feel like the geek tattoos I see more than any others are science tattoos and gaming tattoos, perhaps in descending order. That makes a certain sense to me: Science notation will likely remain unchanging for the duration of the tattoo owner’s life span, and most of the gaming tattoos I see are of retro games already, so they too have a claim to a certain sort of timelessness. And both, of course, make a sort of bid for authenticity of the wearer—”I have this special knowledge” or “I was there before games were big.”

Then again, I haven’t seen a lot of comic book tattoos, but something tells me there may be more Superman “S” shields inked on people than gaming tattoos of any sort. Does it “count” as a geeky tattoo if you weren’t doing it out of geek pride?

Comics and Closets: Fellow Annenbergers Cabral and Paul F. send along an NYT article alerting me to Comic Book Club. The article begins:

At a recent performance of “Comic Book Club,” a weekly stage talk show at the People’s Improv Theater in Chelsea, an audience member declined to give his name. “I have family and friends,” he explained. “I’m a closeted geek.”

Alexander Zalben, 30, the show’s moderator, understood completely. Talking about being a comic book fan, he said, is “like coming out of the closet.” In fact Mr. Zalben only discovered that Justin Tyler, 28, another host, was a fellow aficionado when he spotted Mr. Tyler with a Midtown Comics bag. Pete LePage, 31, who rounds out the three, had a similar experience. “Justin busted me reading a comic,” he confessed.

The show, which celebrates its first anniversary Tuesday at 8 p.m., covers all things comic book, which these days also includes the worlds of video games, television and film. As that anonymous audience member put it, “It’s great to be in an atmosphere where you can sit and discuss these things without getting strange looks.”

I had thought the success of the “graphic novel” might have done away with this fear to some extent; when I talk to people about being “closet geeks,” RPGs come up more often than comics. I’d say the Midtown Comics bag is the right-ear-earring of comic geek culture, but of course, there was no implication here that the carrier of said bag wanted to get noticed. Incidentally, the show also has a segment titled “The Week in Geek,” and the regularly attending “fan” was reportedly “not happy” when the show went on hiatus for a few weeks and he was compelled to find a girlfriend in the down time.

French Geek Documentary: Chris C., a Geek Studies regular and stalwart co-founder of the UMass Comic Art Society, sends word from the News Askew blog that Kevin Smith will be discussing “such topics as the San Diego Con, geek culture, Simpsons ‘Vans’, and lots more” in a French documentary titled Suck My Geek. You can download the Kevin Smith portion here. The blog also reports that “The program was broadcast by the french Canal+ network … only in France,” and (aside from Kevin’s commentary) entirely in French, which I don’t speak. Still, I’m going to poke around on their website and some torrent sites, and if anybody has an easy idea how to get ahold of this (especially if in translation), please do let me know.

The Fight Against Voldemedia: You may have already heard (perhaps from Hipster, Please! or Pitchfork) about how Harry Potter fans and the Wizard rock community have been involved in efforts to fight media consolidation. I thought that this article in the Huffington Post, by the founder of the Harry Potter Alliance, was particularly worth checking out. Andrew Slack spells out pretty explicitly how and why this type of activist effort should be relevant to fans. I suspect that the vast majority of Harry Potter fans (which is an awful lot of people) could care less about such issues, but this does seem a potentially effective and sincere way of coating activist efforts with the themes from entertainment we find deeply affecting—much more so, anyway, than having Spider-man instruct kids to vote (when they’re old enough, I guess).

Music for Magicians: David Pescovitz at Boing Boing has a couple recent posts up about “occulture” music:

[Occulture is] a term for the space explored in recent years by a loose network of British electronic musicians. Groups like Mount Vernon Arts Lab and Raagnagrok are weaving together their interests in the occult, strange phenomena, fantastic fiction, and horror and translating the moody mindset into enchanting and/or challenging audio.

I’m not sure if this is geek music per se—seems a little more Alan Moore-ish than Neil Gaiman-ish in its roots—but it seemed potentially of interest.

The Diffusion and Evaluation of Geek Chic: Geekadelphia refers us to some neat Space Invaders rings. Curious as to how one might come across such a product, I followed the “via” link to Technabob, which in turn refers us to Geeksugar, a blog which I’ve seen before but I don’t think I’ve linked. I was particularly interested to see that Geeksugar—which belongs to the Sugar Inc. network of female-oriented consumer blogs—runs a series of posts tagged “Totally Geek or Totally Chic?” Visitors can vote in an informal poll on whether an item is “Totally Geeky,” “Geek Chic,” or “It’s so ______” (with the blank filled in the comments). I haven’t checked many of the products’ poll results (as you can’t just view results without voting yourself), but from the few I’ve glanced at, I wonder if fashion-oriented items get the most votes for “Geek Chic,” whereas more utilitarian items—the contemporary equivalents of pocket protectors—get dismissed as “totally geeky.” (Side note: I should’ve been following this blog before Christmas. It is a treasure trove of presents for my girlfriend.)

Sexiest Geeks Alive: Z. also refers me to Violet Blue’s top 10 sexiest geeks of 2007. Frontalot nabs the #2 spot, the highest ranked male on the list, with the #1 spot going to Veronica Belmont (who not only walks the walk and talks the talk, but sounds like she should be killing Dracula). I might’ve also given a nod to Schaffer the Dark Lord after seeing the video for “The Rappist” (courtesy Nerd World). Check the “update” at the end of Violet Blue’s post for other sites that have something to say about the list.

Science Tattoos: And as long as we’re talking about the chic and the sexy in the geek world today, check out this Flickr set assembled by a guy who wondered whether scientists get tattoos. The set includes molecule diagrams, complex equations, alchemical symbols, and more, with some comments by submitters.

Google Analytics keeps a list of what your top-viewed pages are. These results generally don’t surprise me because they tend to correspond with incoming links from notable bloggers I already knew about. Today, though, I noticed something on the list that seemed unlikely to have garnered about 5% of my total pageviews from such a source: posts tagged as “Apparel.”

After poking around some more, I found out that about half of these visitors had found the site through Google Images, and about a quarter through Google.com, with the rest through regional Google Image sites from around the world (Images.google.ca, Images.google.com.br, Images.google.com.tr, and a bunch of others, plus one person from AOL somewhere in there). Curious, I then checked out what people had been looking for when they found my site. This is what they searched for:

1. band geek apparel

2. buy gabe pac man t-shirt [someone searching for Penny Arcade fan-made goods]
3. geekstudies + dragonlance [someone apparently looking for something very specific on my site]
4. geek apparel [a few people looking to shop, perhaps; half of them left immediately]
5. band geek shirts [and starting here, every subsequent search term was by someone who left immediately]
6. band geek t-shirt
7. comic demon
8. dragonlance shirt
9. gamer apparel
10. geeky apparel clothes
11. girl geeks apparel
12. girls, geek, apparel
13. ladies geek apparel
14. pac-man apparel
15. retro gamer apparel
16. retro video game shirts nerd geek dork
17. role-playing apparel
18. subculture band geek

I’m still not sure what to conclude from this. My initial inclination was to think, “Aha! Interesting that so many people come here looking for gamer apparel rather than, say, programmer apparel!” Then I realized that I haven’t really written any posts about programmer apparel yet, and I probably only wrote one post about band geek apparel which tops the list. I knew to expect a self-selected sample when I glanced at the list, but it’s interesting to realize that I’m anonymously but purposefully selecting them, too, based on what I put out there for Google to find.

I still want to find it interesting that of all the geek-oriented things people could be searching for that bring them to this site, apparel is such a major one. I currently have 9 posts tagged “Apparel”; by comparison, I have 29 posts tagged “Comics” (and even more tagged “Games” that I don’t feel like counting right now). Of course, I don’t have images on the posts about games, so those wouldn’t come up on Google Image Search. And, probably more importantly, there are relatively few major sites about “geek apparel” compared to major sites about “gamer geeks,” so it’s possible that people find their way here when searching about the former because they don’t have to wade as deeply as when they search about the latter.

Looking at my overall statistics on what keywords send people here, the results seem mostly a mixture of variations on geek apparel/clothing/style, variations on the coordinates and other search terms clearly related to the xkcd meetup, and a handful of others (including some searches for Bioshock-related things—I’m shocked that I come up in the first page of results for the search “bioshock plot explanation”—and at least one hit for someone looking for “nerdcore porn”).

Again, this isn’t exactly an accurate measurement of what geek-related things people are searching for net-wide, but for what it’s worth, this site currently shows up on the third page of results when you google “geek research,” but the fourth page when you google “geek apparel.” I think it might have surprised people 10-15 years ago to hear that the former term might be more searched for than the latter.

The point of all this navel-gazing, I suppose, is an ongoing effort to figure out how site statistics might be useful in “ethnographic blogging.” It feels like an interesting puzzle so far.

The comments on the Kotaku post offer a glimpse into what gamers think about nerd apparel moving beyond web stores and Hot Topic and targeting youth demographics not typically thought of as geeky: Fashion-conscious, urban, Black youth. The reactions range from a number of derisive comments about “gangstas” to a few genuine (if usually reserved) expressions of approval. Some examples, out of order and context:

BY OKARI AT 10/17/07 07:43 PM
Me and my homies r gonna look so kewl wearing those clothes. Any1 who don’t like that is a fool.
Ugh, do we really need more kids wearing baggy clothes thinking that it’s cool?

BY ETERNALPLAYER2345 AT 10/17/07 07:44 PM
wow i sure hope my mario shirt doesnt get me shot now!

BY IGNATIUS AT 10/17/07 07:52 PM
[...] The sad thing is, [...] as long as I’m not associated with the “STREET THUG WIGGA 4 LIFE” crap that seems to be prevalent nowadays, I’d gladly buy the Bowser and Mario Bros. sweatshirts.

BY SORIYA AT 10/17/07 08:01 PM
@FrigidAir44: Gangstas are NOT cool. Gangstas think nerd gear is cool. Which makes nerds cool. So basically nerds are awesome.

BY SPARX88 AT 10/17/07 09:51 PM
Ok being white and pretty much hating anything of the sort (i.e. rap, pants half-way down the ass, and pretty much anything else “gangsta”) I’m kinda feeling the NES pad jacket.

BY JONN AT 10/17/07 11:14 PM
[...] We are talking about people who are, almost by definition, idiots. They idolize Tony Montana, and honestly think those shirts are clever.

Perhaps I’m misjudging, but from here, the negative comments suggest some serious cultural intolerance and potentially a major double standard. I can’t reliably predict anything about the musical tastes of anyone commenting here, but it’s worth noting the popularity of nerdcore hip-hop acts at gaming cons like PAX. Why is it okay for gamers – who are typically “white and nerdy,” in Weird Al’s words – to appropriate urban Black culture, but it’s ridiculous when the transfer goes in the other direction (if we can even accept to begin with that pop imagery created by a Japanese company really belonged to the white and nerdy set to begin with)?

When commenter balls187 (who happens to be Black) actually offers a completely unapologetic, positive comment – “That red bomb-omb shirt is win” – it goes mostly ignored. I strongly suspect, though, that the people offering negative comments here don’t see their denigration as related to race at all, but about related to subculture. Commenter TheIrishNinja pipes up to agree with balls187, noting, “i hate it when anything hip-hop comes up on this site, i forget how many abject haters there are of an entire genre due to its radio exposure.” And Ignatius’s above comment about the “wigga” image suggests that his main concern with the clothing is that it would make him look like a member of a White subculture he wants no part of.

Do we buy that this is not about an ignorant, retrograde, or even racist understanding of Black youth culture, but simply a vehement disagreement in taste and style? That seems too convenient from where I sit, especially considering how easy it is to read this as members one self-styled resistive subculture completely discounting another based largely on appearance. By the same token, I do suspect that the group here has been no less critical of any number of products stereotypically coded as “White” that show up on the site. And, admittedly, I have heard (apocryphal?) stories about the origin of the baggy clothing style as being from prison culture, so perhaps one could argue that this is more a Bill-Cosby-style criticism of genuinely tragic and destructive values. Still, I can’t help but bristle at the way some comments affect poor diction and equate a popular style with veneration of criminals, if not outright criminal behavior. Shouldn’t that be the kind of stereotype gamers are sick of themselves? (I wish I could find a link to the old ThinkGeek shirt: “Guns don’t kill people. Kids who play video games kill people.”) Am I simply reading too much into this as I prepare to give a lecture tomorrow on the intersection between the nerd stereotype and racial identities?

Eventually, Torrel himself shows up and thanks everyone for the input. He also directly responds to one of the most frequent early criticisms from commenters about the embedded music on his site, which he acknowledges was a terrible idea. (If you want to engage with computer geeks in their domain, you must play by their rules or face their wrath.) Some commenters throw actual pointed suggestions then, which he also responds to graciously. I suspect things quieted down a bit when commenters realized the designer was listening in. Perhaps that is polite on the commenters’ part, but I would have liked to have seen where it was going to go from there.

Threadless isn’t a geek apparel site per se, but it’s certainly got some geeks on staff and in the audience; see Nerds Unite, Fractions Speak Louder Than Nerds, Nerd Berd, the recently sold out Nerds 2² Ever, plus some assorted gaming shirts, among other miscellaneous geekery. Threadless tees also appear to be the chosen casual attire of many convention-goers at PAX, Comic Con, and South by Southwest, whether overtly nerd-themed or not. Moreover, Threadless has spawned a host of imitators, including Splitreason.com, featuring “gear for geeks and gamers.” Sounds like your typical geeky tee site along the lines of ThinkGeek and J!NX, but this one’s based user submissions and voting. (J!NX also welcomes users to submit designs, but it’s not their primary business model.)

I often wonder about the ethics of this model of user-submitted design and goods. Of course, I’m not the only one to wonder about the ethics of Web 2.0—see what Larry Lessig has to say on the matter, suggesting that there’s a distinction between sites that promote “true sharing” and “fake sharing.” Sites that rely on user-generated content for material goods, however, may need to be considered somewhat separately from those that produce content that’s more easily shareable.

Plus, despite Larry’s distinction between two basic models, it probably stands to reason that two sites could share the same model and each address the same ethical issue differently. Threadless, for example, now offers winning designers real money rather than the store credit it used to offer, which is a definite step up. (The store credit may have made the whole endeavor seem more community-oriented if it weren’t for the fact that Threadless was making money off people who had nothing to do with design submission and review.) Splitreason offers a flat rate of $250 per shirt and claims complete ownership of the shirt, which any experienced designer will tell you is basically a scam.

I’m still working through my thoughts on this issue for a paper I intend to write shortly; it’s on how the Web 2.0 mentality complicates the graphic design community’s standard approach to design contests and spec work (i.e., that these things are deeply evil). For now, though, enjoy the geeky shirt links, and feel free to chime in on the whole model of apparel design as a contest.

I’m fascinated to see now that Penny Arcade has made an “All hail BALL” t-shirt, announced the week before PAX 2008. This strikes me as a fairly brilliant merchandising/marketing technique. The only ones who will really be interested are those who have fond memories of the ball at last year’s PAX, which drastically limits the market for such a product. That’s okay, though: PA has its own venue where their most fervent fans are sure to appear, and some of those people seemed intent on getting the ball somehow included in the annals of PA history. The reference will be completely opaque to outsiders, so the shirt basically functions like a secret handshake with other fans. And, as I realized at Comic Con this year, some people buy fannish and geeky apparel just to wear at other cons—as a button on one person’s backpack said, “Being a fan means never having to ask, ‘Where would I wear that?’” When I go to PAX next weekend, I’ll be surprised if I don’t see dozens of people wearing this shirt.

This move really helps characterize Penny Arcade as an outfit that takes its cues from its own fans, while still doing projects in their own style. Kudos, too, for having the restraint to let the subject lie dormant awhile and suddenly announce the shirt the week before the next con.

I see some signs that make me wonder whether this change is underway. The New York Times Magazine has a slideshow up of people with their online avatars, though I suppose it’s as easy to read it as “see, these are people too” as it is to read it as “weirdos are fascinating.” Also, a couple weeks ago, I noticed that the Newbury Comics CD/comics/kitsch store in Harvard Square was selling Dungeons & Dragons t-shirts. And I’m not just talking logo shirts here, though they had those—they had a shirt with the art from the cover of the Dragonlance rulebook, which features a half-elven man with a sword and some demon thingie behind him. I’m not sure, however, if these are being sold/worn mostly as a retro/ironic thing or if the pervasiveness of games like World of Warcraft is finally making D&D seem more socially acceptable.

(And yes, I know enough about Dragonlance to tell you where the art came from and that one of the guys pictured in it is half-elven, but apparently not enough to tell you what the demon thingie is actually supposed to be called. I’m doing my best here, though.)