I find the campaign interesting because it’s very much like MIT’s “Nerd Pride” slogan, but even more official and widespread. The various ways that American has tried to lay claim to ‘wonk’ strongly resemble the ways that people have tried to define reclaim ‘geek’ and ‘nerd,’ down to claiming that there are many “types” of geeks, and explaining meaning through backronyms like “general electrical engineering knowledge” or “knurd” (for “drunk” backwards). Given that American University is based out of Washington D.C. and attracting many students who are quite interested in being described as “policy wonks” someday, the new campaign is a kind of way to signal that it’s producing a particular local flavor of geek.

The Eagle, AU’s student newspaper, features comments from folks who don’t quite appreciate the connotations of this new label. Inside Higher Ed notes, “While some noted the positive associations with policy experts, many others posted comments about the nerdish associations with the word”—which is true, but not quite the whole story.

One “AU parent and marketing maven” suggests in the Comments to that article that the word has nerdy connotations which might prove problematic. When you tally up the responses between anyone who notes the connection to ‘nerd’ (‘geek’ is never mentioned), however, you don’t see much concern with nerdy connotations at all. “[Wonk] essentially means ‘nerd,’ which is fine,” one student quoted in the article said, expressing more of a complaint with the way the branding campaign was conducted than with the actual results. In other words, the complaints I’m seeing aren’t about students feeling stigmatized or insulted, but about concern that the campaign won’t actually work. (And I think you’re going to see that at any school that spends years and millions of dollars on any branding campaign, no matter what the result.)

I don’t know how effective the campaign will be in getting people to stop asking “Which one?” when students say that they’re going to American University. We now live in a safer environment to brand oneself with a nerdy word, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t work ahead of AU. If this campaign can stretch the connotations of ‘wonk’ to imply that it’s a nerd who tries to affect policy or change, no matter what their expertise, and if AU cements a reputation as “the wonk school,” I could see that being a selling point for many students. I think has MIT promoted the concept of “Nerd Pride” more than “Nerd Pride” could ever elevate MIT, but nobody asks for clarification when you say you’re at MIT—and they left other nerdy words up for grabs.

Defining the American Nerd: Salon has an interview with Ben Nugent, author of American Nerd: The Story of My People. (Thanks to Paul for the link.) Our respective approaches to considering the place of the geek/nerd in American culture differ somewhat, but I have ben fascinated to read more about the points where our conclusions align. I wonder, too, how readers here would respond to his definition of what all nerds—from computer programmers to Society for Creative Anachronism folks—have in common: “a love of rules, a love of hierarchies that were meritocratic and open to everybody, and in some cases the affectation of rationalism.”

On a personal note, I also found it funny when Ben remarks that “I’m probably the one person on planet Earth who might have to affect nerdiness as part of their professional life.” I similarly keep getting the “Are you a geek?” question and I’m never quite sure how to answer. I certainly think I am, but I have known geeks who would disagree (because I don’t build/program/live in my own computer). Plus, the people who ask me are generally the people I wouldn’t normally act geeky around—something I only realized about myself after months of studying how others understand what it means to be a geek.

Breaking into Geekdom: Austin 360 (the web presence of the Austin American Statesman) has an interview with a hometown geek done good, Scott Porter, star of the recent Speed Racer movie. (Thanks to Church for the link.) What I found most interesting was how there may be a mild hurdle for a guy who played football (and played a football player, in Friday Night Lights) to get accepted among the Hollywood geek elite:

The weird thing is now that it’s becoming popular there’s this huge backlash and everybody’s really testing each other to see if you’re a true geek or a true nerd. I passed the test — the Wachowskis kind of ribbed me for a little bit. I don’t know if it’s because of the fact that I played football in high school or the characters I play or the way I look, but a lot of people tend to not believe that I’m as into it [comics/sci-fi] as I am.

Virtual Therapy, Real Gains: I was completely fascinated by this New Yorker article about “Virtual Iraq,” a Full Spectrum Warrior VR mod customizable for treating soldiers with post-traumatic stress. (Special thanks to Chop Shop, my local haircut joint, for leaving out something in the waiting area other than fashion magazines for a change.) The article does a pretty good job of explaining how this is used very carefully as a tool for therapy, and what psychological processes it engages. I was most interested, though, to read the very important cultural strength behind this, as it offers a method of therapy that lacks the stigma of seeing a “shrink.” As one soldier explains:

Infantry is supposed to be the toughest of the tough. Even though there was no punishment for going to therapy, it was looked down upon and seen as weak. But V.R. sounded pretty cool. They hook you up to a machine and you play around like a video game.

That same soldier admitted later in the article (anonymously) that he cried after every session.

One could argue that there’s a more widespread gain to be made by removing the weak or non-masculine stigma of therapy, rather than catering to those who can’t get over that stigma. That doesn’t do much good for people who are suffering right now, though, and I wonder if treatments like this might be a way of getting the hardest-to-convince populations thinking about therapy in new ways. Of course, I’ve made pretty much the same argument about how making formally unusual comics and video games can shift stigmas related to those media among non-geek audiences, so take from this what you will.

Not Interested in Unlocking the Clubhouse After All: The Boston Globe has an article commenting on recent research suggesting that the major reason for the gender gap in the sciences and technology professions may just be that this is what women prefer, and our society allows greater freedom to follow personal career preferences.

I post this link with the usual caveat that it is not scientific research, but a newspaper article about said research, and may qualify the claims therein less than peer reviewed material would. That said, I’m very curious to learn more about this, as the chicken-or-egg possibilities seem very important to consider. The implication here seems to be that science and tech simply don’t appeal to the innate and more broadly enculturated preferences of American women, but I wonder how well the stereotypes surrounding these fields specifically can be parsed out when studying what people want and believe.

I also think we should question the assumption that working in science and tech means working with “inorganic materials” as opposed to the “organic.” As any programmer can tell you, even the most tech-oriented jobs require working with people at some stage in the game. I wonder if we should be questioning not just why people prefer what they do, but why we conceptualize different fields the way we do. Might we see interests in computer science programs shifting if they offered increased emphasis to communication skills and teamwork exercises in their curricula?

Perceiving Smarts and Popularity: Boing Boing directs us to research at Ohio State University suggesting that kids think peers with glasses are smarter and more honest, but not necessarily any less attractive. One researcher said that “the findings suggest that media portrayals associating spectacles with intelligence may be reinforcing a stereotype that even young children accept.”

Meanwhile, Newsweek reports on research at the University of Virginia that teens can be happy just believing they’re popular, even if they’re not seen as particularly popular by their peers. The kids who are reasonably well liked but not super popular seem to benefit from this, but it doesn’t sound like teens are fooling themselves:

The one group of teenagers who did not fare well socially were those who did not perceive themselves as well liked and were not ranked as popular by their peers. These kids were viewed as more hostile toward their peers as the year went on and they were less sought out by their classmates over time. “They’re not at all on the radar screen,” says McElhaney. “They don’t see themselves as accepted and that’s where it’s most problematic, when you don’t have either that popularity or sense that you’re well liked.”

Perhaps the most practical solution for such teens, implied by another researcher quoted in the article’s final paragraph, is to at least find a small group where one can be accepted.

Makers, Punks, and Geeks: V. Vale at RE/Search has written an essay on the parallels between punk culture and the “maker” culture fostered by Make Magazine and its Maker Faire. As Boing Boing summarizes, shared ideals include DIY, Mutual Aid, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Black Humor.

This is a familiar argument to me, but I’m still trying to piece together for myself a cleaner understanding of the genealogy of this branch of geek culture. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner addresses how hippy/DIY ideals led to the development of the net as we know it. Publishers Weekly said of the book, “On first glance, back-to-the-land hippies and dot-com entrepreneurs might not seem much alike”—but perhaps punk culture is sort of the “missing link” there. (This reminds me that I’m looking forward to reading Christina Dunbar-Hester’s dissertation, which similarly addresses the role of DIY culture and political activism in geek ideals.)

Also through Boing Boing, I came upon this New York Times article on Maker Faire. “This is a real geek fest,” a physics professor quoted in the article remarks, and the article makes note of a couple of the sillier points of the inventions (like cars shaped like muffins).

Noticeably unlike other geek fest articles covered by major newspapers, however—which often leave it to the reader to nod in amusement over weirdos in costume—this article consistently leads the reader back to conclude that this is all A Good Thing. Muffin cars may be weird, but they are “green,” and the overarching message of the festival emphasized here is of the positive uses of technology for humanity.

Is this tone sign of greater respect for geeky pursuits? Maybe. I’m inclined to believe, though, that this is indicative of the socially acceptable geekiness accorded specifically to technology, thanks to its widely understood economic worth. This is, as the author notes, a “high-tech, adamantly nonconformist culture, steeped in engineering and art and innovation in garages that incubate billionaires.” You won’t hear such praise in the Times‘s Comic Con wrap-up this year, even though the attendees of each event may see quite a bit of overlap.

On the Virtues of Steampunk: The New York Times and the Boston Phoenix both recently did pieces on steampunk (and an unedited version of the NYT piece went up here). The NYT piece in particular got me thinking about a couple of things that seem relevant to geek and tech cultures in general.

This article is concerned with “the intersection of romance,” emphasis on explaining the contemporary and subcultural importance of the romance. I’m curious, though, of whether this has broader relevance to how we consider the design of technology. For instance, I was very interested in this comment: “Yes, he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass.” The specific mention of the iPhone suddenly got me thinking about how steampunk may in some ways be another version of the kind of design consistency and holism championed by Apple.

Sure, Apple is all very top-down, steampunk is very DIY, but in both cases, it allows for a unified aesthetic experience between multiple objects in everyday life. The economic realities of mass production mean that a truly unified design aesthetic across multiple product types must necessarily be DIY, or at least rely on a lot of copycatting. Apple doesn’t make video game consoles, but thanks to redefining white and curvy as the color and shape of the future, Nintendo and Microsoft have helped make their electronics fit the contemporary living room aesthetic.

I’m not sure I’m going anywhere with this, but I suppose I’m wondering whether steampunk represents a challenge to other unified design aesthetics (or, to be less charitable, aesthetic monocultures). We’ve been able to “skin” our software applications for years now; will marketers find a way to bring that level of visual customization into other areas of our lives, on a much broader level?

This brings me to the other line I particularly appreciated: “Part of the reason it seems so popular is the very difficulty of pinning down what it is. … That’s a marketer’s dream.” This seems so relevant to the concept of “geek” and “nerd” more generally that I wanted to make note of it for future reference.

The Best Weapons Are Silent: How do you entice the employees of a video game publisher to keep mum on company secrets? Sega’s gamble: motivational posters with ninjas.

In the UK, such learning is strongly associated with the upper class:

British upper-class philistinism involves feeling embarrassed about knowing anything, especially any esoteric knowledge or knowledge that may have taken some effort to acquire. (At the Oxford college I attended as an undergraduate, the motto was “effortless superiority”: You should never seem too hard-working or too interested in your studies, unless you want to seem like a “swot,” a “wanker,” or a “girl.”)

But “In America,” she writes, “the cultural place of Latin is very different.” You can learn Latin at inexpensive or free schools, so there is no need to feel ashamed about your knowledge. Thus,

[M]any choose to learn Latin because they are genuinely interested in learning how the Romans imagined the world. To describe American Latin students, we need to substitute the much more attractive category of “geeks” for Amis’ “wankers.”

The then article explores why one might want to learn about ancient culture in America today, as exemplified by the popularity of film and television such as Troy, Rome, and 300: “we are interested in stories about the growth and collapse of a great and greedy empire, or about a clash between Western and Eastern civilizations.” That leads directly into the suggestion that “culture is never independent of language,” and learning about ancient Roman civilization beyond 300 necessitates that one learn Latin.

The individual pieces of this line of reasoning seem sound enough, but I’m having some trouble stitching them together. First, it’s only very recently that “geek” has meant anything positive, and it’s still used negatively before adulthood. “Effortless superiority” is still the attitude affected by the popular crowd in high school—as it’s hard work, not good grades, that mark one as a geek—though I am fascinated to read that this apparently lasts, or lasted, into the college years at Oxford. And second, while the popularity of Troy and 300 might reflect the kind of broad cultural interest implied in this article, such a broad interest may not map directly onto the interest of an unusual subgroup. That is, I have a feeling that anyone who would consider him or herself a “Latin geek” would be likely to have gotten into it through 300.

Am I not seeing the forest for the trees, though? (Or not seeing some trees due to excessive focus on other trees?) I wonder if my concept of “geek” is simply different from what was meant by this article, and now I’m very curious now whether American students have escaped mockery despite a strong interest in Latin.

This is, I am told, a social underclass among children even lower than the nerd, which may suggest that nerd coolness is sort of starting to permeate kids’ school culture, at least at this kid’s school. Not that it’s any better for kids labeled as norks (or just dorks) to be the ones that get picked on, of course, but a potentially interesting development nonetheless.

Essays: I really, really need to get back to these, so before I forget let me direct your (and my) attention to three essays. First, Paul Graham’s practically canonical “Why Nerds Are Unpopular.” I read it some years back and I figure it’s worth going over it again with a fine-tooth comb to compare it to the research that’s been done on the subject. Also from awhile back, a college newspaper about MIT’s geek culture. Really, I should probably be spending more time just hanging out at MIT for this dissertation; it’d be interesting to compare how the geek culture there has changed since Sherry Turkle wrote about it in Second Self. And finally, Hipster Please (neat blog about nerdcore and the nerd community noted in a recent comment by Church) features “A Pontification on Nerds and Community.”

Online Geeky Groups: As part of my efforts to find my way into smaller, more “local” geeky communities, I started hitting up the social networking sites to see what sorts of groups they had. MySpace has a Geek Culture group (among others), Meetup has a whole geek subdomain (but alas, no events in Philly or Boston), and Facebook has over 500 geek-related groups (before even searching for “nerd”), including a group for geeky girls at Penn. Still haven’t figured out what to do with any of this knowledge, but it seems good to know.

Another Magazine: Nerds Gone Wild seems like what Geek Monthly might have been like if were produced by Australians who like to swear more in print and give away PDFs of their magazine online. Includes yet another potential ancestry for geekdom: magicians!

The Politics of Comics: Japan’s new PM may be a manga fan. This is apparently thrilling news to Japanese fans and investors, as there really is such a thing as pro-manga policymaking: “While serving as Japan’s foreign minster earlier this year, Aso was instrumental in creating the ‘Nobel prize’ for foreign manga artists. He’s keen on promoting manga overseas, arguing that the comics are a critical vehicle for enhancing Japanese diplomacy” (etc.).

Gamers and the Spiral of Silence: Sometimes, Kotaku posts about things like “the weird world of FFVII roleplayers” or academics discussing virtual migration on World of Warcraft. And when they do that, you can pretty much assume that some people are going to post comments in response to express how the people cited in the post are pathetic. Granted, the former post there does have some pretty extreme stuff going on in terms of how invested these roleplayers are with their games, and the latter only has a couple negative comments. Still, they fit the general pattern I’ve noticed, and I’m wondering if there’s a spiral of silence going on here with the lurkers. From what I understand, it’s not the most well-supported theory, but it’s done okay, and these sorts of things might work differently in different communication media. (Just thinking aloud.)

I’m Not Even Sure What This Is: And finally, Evergeek Media: “It’s Amazon meets AP – with geeks!” It sounds like they are a sort of news/data aggregation service for companies that want to understand what’s going on in geek-oriented media industries. Looks like the site hasn’t been updated for awhile. I don’t even remember where I originally stumbled upon this, but I just found it again the other day in some old bookmarks. I wonder how much of a market there really is in providing insider knowledge to companies that want to reach geeks, especially considering that most such companies I know of have plenty of eager geeks on staff already.

Research: For academic research and conferences related to geek culture and various traditionally geeky media. (I’ll also tag posts about my own research with this because I still can’t bring myself to make a category titled “Me me me,” though I admit I’m especially interested in getting feedback on my papers.)

School Culture: For items pertaining to school culture as lived by students, such as clubs and social hierarchies.

Education: For issues pertaining to teaching and education at all levels.

Honestly, this is mostly for my own convenience as I go back through old posts and collect thoughts for papers and such, but I figured I might as well let everyone know.

Update: Going through my bloated “Miscellaneous” category to categorize them more specifically, I noticed a definite thread of posts tallying up people’s ways of defining the boundaries of geekdom—geek vs. nerd, art geek vs. science geek, and so on. And so I figured I might as well go ahead and also add a category for Defining Geekdom. Sorry if this brings up a bunch of old posts on people’s RSS readers (the way I believe it does with mine).

This rejection may be both laudable and problematic, as the NYT article explains:

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white. Bucholtz sees something to admire here. In declining to appropriate African-American youth culture, thereby “refusing to exercise the racial privilege upon which white youth cultures are founded,” she writes, nerds may even be viewed as “traitors to whiteness.” You might say they know that a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having. On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students,” even if the nerds were involved in political activities like protesting against the dismantling of affirmative action in California schools. If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture, it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.

This is an interesting argument, but I’m going to have to agree with Journalista’s Dirk Deppey in most of his response:

Of course, nerdiness is also an absence of redneck culture, Jewish culture, Hispanic culture, Native-American culture, old-money culture and any of hundreds of other kinds of culture. Likewise, — though I’m sure this is something of a stretch for cultural-studies types — one shouldn’t discount the possibility that nerd culture is pro-something, rather than anti-black culture, or that it may in fact have nothing whatsoever to do with race. And come on, statements like “a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having” are, if anything, antithetical to practical nerdishness: Just ask the Japanese. (Isn’t Quentin Tarantino’s worship of 1970s blacksploitation films part of what makes him a nerd?) Still, don’t let any of this stop you from seeing life exclusively through a simple black/white dichotomy, Ms. Bucholtz!

Dirk calls out Mary for being narrow in her scope, though in her defense, a cultural phenomenon this big needs to be reined in somehow. She’s writing about nerd identity with a prevailing focus on race; Lori Kendall writes about nerd identity with a focus on gender and computing; I’m writing about nerd identity with a broader focus on media use; and we all refer to one another’s areas of focus. Nobody that I’m aware of has attempted to focus on age, though there’s a huge gap in the academic literature between those writing about geek/nerd identity among young students and those writing about the same terms as applied to adults. (I’m going to touch upon this somewhat in my dissertation by asking people how they got into their media interests and whether they were nerds as kids, but I won’t be doing comparative research among children.) Arguably, the whole point of academic research is in the accumulation and triangulation of knowledge, so it’s not like any one of us is going to get it completely right in a single book.

I do agree that race figures somehow into nerd identity—how can you argue otherwise, after viewing the trailer for a documentary about white geeks semi-ironically appropriating hip-hop culture? I also think that it’s good that Mary Bucholtz is exploring the race angle further, as most peer reviewed literature on nerds/geeks has focused on gender to the exclusion of race. Nevertheless, I’d argue that race is not the defining aspect of nerd culture among most adult members, and it may not even be as central among kids as the NYT article implies. It’s true that “African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school,” but most recent literature on this topic that I’m aware of suggests that this is the case for kids of all racial and ethnic groups.

This is why it’s very hard for me to answer people who ask me what “geek culture” is, or how to define what a “nerd” is. I think that “whiteness” and “masculinity” are two of the more important concepts that shape how we think about and perform nerd identity/geek culture, but each is only part of large picture. The part of that picture that interests me the most (at present) is seeing which aspects make it to the products and events that are explicitly or implicitly marketed to self-identified geeks and nerds: clothing at ThinkGeek and J!NX, events like Comic Con (“nerd prom”) and the Penny Arcade Expo (with musical acts about “the geek experience”), and music like nerdcore hip-hop and lab nerd rock.

These things implicate media use above all else as the one common denominator, though it’s important to read between the lines regarding who doesn’t make the cut as a legitimate geek. There’s stuff in here for women, but it’s the minority; maybe even less explicitly for nonwhite groups; and surprisingly little for those whose geekiness doesn’t fit neatly into a media market. Someone asked me at Comic Con last weekend where “biology nerds” fit into my study, and to be honest, they don’t make much of an appearance. I took a photo of a guy in a shirt that said “Plant Geek” this past weekend because it’s so atypical (and also because I happen to be dating a plant geek who I think will be excited to see it). The shirt was homemade by his school’s local horticulture club, not sold through any of the major nerd sites. There’s just not the same kind of market for that sort of geekiness.

Between the two forthcoming books mentioned in the above article, the dissertation I’m working on (which I hope to turn into a book eventually), and any other upcoming works on geek/nerd identity, it sounds like this topic is going to see some attention from a variety of perspectives in the near future. Over time, I’m hoping to see an even broader range of focus than what we see now: discussions of how geek identity develops with age, consideration of personality and psychology (taboo though these may be among some cultural researchers), intercultural/international conceptions of geek/nerd identities, and more. I’m not proposing an entire subfield of “geek studies”—but if you write a book or article on this, I do expect that it will have an audience, and I’ll be among those readers.

Make next year easier… upload last year’s homework to Facebook Docs! [...]

It may be summer, but before you delete all of your homework, you should upload it to FACEBOOK DOCS!

FACEBOOK DOCS is an application made by a company called SCRIBD.
SCRIBD : TEXT :: YOUTUBE : VIDEOS

Wouldn’t it be nice if next time you got stuck on a problem, you could just open up Facebook Docs and find the paper of a student from last year… not to cheat, but just to compare…

Everything you write is /your/ property. Thus, there’s no reason to not share off your mad writing skills and maybe help some poor soul down the road…

Its like getting a book with comments already in the margin!

PS… Cheating is wrong. but helping others is Christian.

Now, a few things.

The educator in me cringes a bit because it’s almost certain that this will be used to plagiarize. That’s why I added it to my own Facebook account, actually, figuring I might need to search it in the future when I read a paper that seems just a bit off. I did catch a plagiarist this way once, using Google—I suspected that undergraduates are unlikely to use womb metaphors when deconstructing film, and the first search hit confirmed this for me. Dealing with a plagiarist was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my graduate school experience, and the idea of online tools further enabling this is bound to tick a lot of us off. Even if this service is meant to be used for tutoring rather than plagiarism, the “make homework easier” mentality may be missing the point of homework, and the punctuation errors really aren’t helping.

On the other hand, these folks have done their homework (ha ha). They have a pretty reasonable argument that homework answers are students’ intellectual property, and arguably, exam-taking alone and without external references is not exactly representative of problem-solving outside a school context. The problem, of course, is that some teachers can’t or won’t make up all new testing materials each year—but why should that be the students’ problem?

Perhaps voicing this perspective seems unsympathetic to my teaching brethren and sistren, a function of my own need as a researcher of media and culture to update teaching materials frequently and rely more on papers than exams. I’m sorry, brothers and sisters, but I must say that I was swayed somewhat by today’s Featured Doc, “They Didn’t Study,” offering examples of amusing doodles and inane answers on exams. I haven’t really thought much before about how homework actually functions as a medium of communication, but this got me thinking about it.

I did this stupid stuff in high school, even in college a bit. (My calc test asked me to draw “Region R” and “Section S,” but I added “Mister T” as a free bonus.) Sure, this may have been picked as the Featured Doc to strengthen the argument that this service isn’t just about cheating, but come on: you know we “culture people” are suckers for evidence of “resistance.” If I try hard enough, I bet can envision a scenario in which doodling Batman or a Ninja Turtle in one of my own classes could result in bonus points.

For what it’s worth, when you google the company that makes this application, Scribd, the second link is a Scribd doc, “pictures of geek culture.” At first I thought this was just an odd coincidence, unrelated to my other comments about Facebook Docs, but now I wonder if it’s potentially relevant after all. Should we be reassured that the geeks—perhaps those least likely to cheat—are those most firmly associated with this service at present? Or, if this takes off, should we see Facebook Docs as a sign that the non-geeks are becoming media literate enough to conceptualize homework as intellectual property, to contribute to and learn from user-generated content online? I still expect to drop by for a search or two while grading some day, but I can’t write this off as nothing more than legitimated plagiarism just yet.

Postscript: A friend from Penn just walked in the room and I showed her this post and the Featured Docs. She said that she used to make similar doodles on her own tests, and then she suddenly exclaimed that she knows the person who drew this, who showed her the drawing in person. Also, I’m not sure why, but the Facebook Docs uploaded from Penn so far include an issue of the Annenberg newsletter. And, finally, apologies to the anonymous artists whose work appears here uncredited.

I’d love to find something like these at Penn; a game development group seems particularly plausible, considering the growing number of interested parties majoring in Digital Media Design and working on masters degrees in Computer Graphics and Game Technologies. On the other hand, maybe it’s tougher to get club-style groups together in places that already include game design as part of the curriculum. Sadly, given my own research schedule, I’m unlikely to start another club up anytime soon.

Keeping with the spirit of the day and this site, though, I figured now would be as good a time as any to link to the The MIT Hack Gallery—and to express how impressed I am that the university actually gave a subdomain to a page chronicling practical jokes. Many of the hacks listed in the chronological index lack visuals, sadly, so allow me to link to a site that features some images of a recent favorite of mine.