At Sciencewoman, for example, Alice Pawly describes the article as “problematic”:

I’m glad women feel like they can dress how they want, look “girly” and all. … I just challenge that now women are experiencing a simple choice for how to display themselves, and that they just happen to choose to do so in hegemonically feminine ways.

And over at Salon, Catherine Price expresses her own mixed feelings:

My confusion … stems from the fact that the Nerd Girls video makes it seem like sexual appeal is a necessary component to being part of their group. …

[P]erhaps the Nerd Girls aren’t as all about their sexuality as the video makes it seem. I certainly hope that’s the case — ideally, we’d convey to young women that they shouldn’t be afraid to be into science even if they aren’t holding down part-time modeling gigs, and that there’s more than one definition of what it means to be “hot.”

The commenters on those posts seem divided on how much of a problem it is that the nerd girls promote “hegemonic femininity.” And, as Catherine notes, it’s hard to say how much of this is actually relevant to the group.

Gizmodo, meanwhile, doesn’t offer much editorializing. Its (mostly male) commenters, on the other hand, occasionally offer some friendly or critical notes, but mostly either hostile or blatantly sexist interpretations, from what I saw:

Ferg1 at 11:06 PM on 06/15/08
no thank you

smcallah at 11:10 PM on 06/15/08
I don’t like when people try to act like a nerd. Because god damn it, I was born a nerd, and I went through school in the 80′s as a nerd, not a great time to do so.

So I get uppity when someone who appears to have never gone through middle and high school being considered a nerd suddenly wants to say she’s a nerd.

Hello_Newman at 12:06 AM
It’s just a normal picture of young women casually dressed and not a photo shoot. Cut them some slack, I think we’re too used to booth babes dressed to the nines, this is what nerds look like. I’m sure if it was a story about women who go out to night clubs they’d look a lot hotter, but it’s not.

cubensis at 01:43 AM
I’d hit #2, #6 and #7.

I put the link there in case the post goes back online, but at last check, the post was deleted. I like being able to refer back to comments for research, though, so it’s a good thing I was able to find it in my Safari cache and print a PDF of the basic text and images, sans CSS formatting. (Thanks, Retrospective!)

I can see why some people are wary of the Nerd Girls’ approach; the reaction among many Gizmodo commenters is a neat demonstration of how some nerdy men will respond to sexualized nerds (especially with the veil of anonymity). And, of course, there’s the danger that the ladies who don’t have self-esteem about their looks will fear that majoring in engineering will compound their social woes.

That said, from the perspective of social psychology research, promoting female nerds as possessing feminine sexuality may actually be an effective (if not ethically unproblematic) means of shifting nerd stereotypes. According to some research (which I hope I can be forgiven for not digging up right now), stereotypes are linked in our minds. Someone who believes that young black men are criminals, for example, would also be likely to believe that such men are natural athletes, have good rhythm, etc. If you present such a person with an example completely atypical of their mental construction of the group—e.g., a young black man who is shy, unathletic, and good with computers—that person will conclude that your example is an exception to the rule. If you only tweak the stereotype slightly, however, such as by presenting said person with a young black man who is into basketball, freestyle rapping, and studying medicine, you have a better chance of getting a prejudiced person to reconsider the belief that young black men are criminals.

One actual example of this strategy, if I remember correctly from my Social Psych class a few years back, involved an ad campaign for women’s soccer which promoted the women as both athletic and sexy. This is basically what the Nerd Girls are (purported to be) going for. This takes on an added sense of urgency, perhaps, considering that the “unsexy” stereotype may actually be part of what steers girls and women away from studying engineering in the first place. That’s one of David Anderegg’s biggest concerns in Nerds: Who they are and why we need more of them. Adolescents and post-adolescents are especially concerned about seeming sexually desirable, and this plays a role in the career choices they’re considering around the same time.

I hope I covered my back enough by acknowledging how problematic this strategy is, if that’s really how the Nerd Girls are promoting themselves. I suppose it raises the question, then, of which stereotype demands greater resistance from a group of female engineers: the idea that women should be attractive according to traditional norms of femininity, or the idea that nerds can’t be women? I’d like to think that any one person can resist both of these in her own life if she so chooses, but that is different from making a unified, public statement to gradually prod a stereotype into a slightly more acceptable direction.

Perhaps, though, going for “nerds are sexy” is overshooting a bit. The nerd stereotype is still bad enough in the eyes of many that asserting that “nerds are attractive” really doesn’t take much more than pointing out: “Look, we bathe regularly (and we’re getting much better at noticing that your eyes glaze over when we start talking about Battlestar Galactica).”

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.

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.

Understanding Webcomics: Anne Thalheimer, a webcomics blogger, muses over what a “webcomic” really is, given that plenty of comics artists whose stuff exists online don’t consider themselves webcomics artists. (Link via Journalista.) As we’ve discussed here recently, there aren’t as many formal differences between web and print comics as some predicted, which makes this, as far as I can tell, a purely academic question. Seeing as how Wittgenstein couldn’t find a single, unifying definition for ‘game,’ I suspect that the webcomics community may not have much more luck in achieving its analogous goal. Still, these kinds of debates have a lot of practical use within the community of artists and enthusiasts, as discussing formal issues inspires innovation and potentially also outreach to broader audiences. (I wrote a paper about how this happened especially during the 1990s with regard to print comics and Scott McCloud’s definition of comics which I may finally get around to sending to a conference this week.)

The Other Nerdcore: Kotaku brings the Nerdcore Calendar to my attention. I assumed that this was nerdcore as in “hip-hop,” but no, it’s more like nerdcore as in “softcore,” and softcore as in “porn.” Last year’s calendar had a retro gaming theme, and this year’s has a superhero comics theme. Both feature trivia on selected dates, sort of saying, “what happened on this day in geekdom.” You can check out the calendar’s page at TotallyNerdcore.com, titled with “Welcome geeks, nerds, and dorks of all kinds!”—but be warned that it’s not safe for work.

Television Genre Hodgepodge: G4 is technically a cable channel about gaming, but it will be airing syndicated episodes of Lost. The rights will be shared with the SciFi Channel, a genre which Lost (probably?) belongs to. G4′s version, “Lost 2.0,” will have an online version and little “factoids,” which apparently attracted a younger audience when they did the same thing to Star Trek and Cops.

Tearing Down Science: Robert Lee Hotz reports for the Wall Street Journal on medical scholar John Ioannidis’s claim that most published research findings are wrong. According to the Dr. Ioannidis, “A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true.” I really need to follow up on this to read the original article, as it seems pretty relevant to me for two reasons: one, from here it looks like his claims are general enough that some may look to apply them to social science research, including media effects research; and two, among many nerds, faith in science resembles something like a religious fundamentalist’s faith in scripture (a claim that is meant without offense but which members of both groups may get huffy about).

Blogging for Academics: My fellow Annenberger Deb points me to a post on blogging for academics. It all seems pretty obvious from my perspective, but sometimes I forget that not everyone quite understands how internet searches work, and not everyone quite understands how academic job hunting works. Long story short: Only use your full name for stuff that you don’t mind associated with your professional identity, and note well that many or most “First Person” columns at the Chronicle of Higher Education are pseudonymous for a reason. Oh, and as blogging software goes, I personally prefer WordPress to Blogger because I find it useful to categorize posts for ease of browsing and searching later, but Blogger is indeed simpler.

Hippies and UFOs: Andy Roberts describes hippie culture’s fascination with UFO imagery. (Link via Boing Boing.) I’m not sure how I want to elaborate on this, but it seemed worth mentioning here for two reasons: one, geek culture has been directly compared to hippie culture, so the shared sci-fi preoccupation is interesting; and two, because I was just chatting with someone the other day about how UFO abductions seem to have become passé since X-Files jumped the shark.

On the hipness of nerds: The blogger behind .Evolving Music., a self-described “nerd hag,” reports that nerd is the new black.” Commenter Johnson laments, “I hope this doesn’t start to spawn a bunch of nerd posers. I can’t imagine anything more horrifying than a frat boy saying ‘Yo bro, the new edition of D&D just came out, it’s so fucking tight bro.’” Meanwhile, Idea City interprets my description of the XKCD event as an example of “true geeks” asserting their true geekiness in opposition to appropriation by the hipster set.

Randall on the Meetup: Speaking of the XKCD event (or “meetup,” as I keep forgetting everyone else is calling it), the comic’s own creator, Randall Munroe, has written a fine blog post about how the whole thing went down. Includes photos, a description of the trebuchet they used to fling things at a place I used to play frisbee, and a link to a write-up in the Boston Phoenix Magazine.

TV’s Geeks: MSN showcases TV’s Greatest Geeks. Funny side note: I used the exact same picture of the Simpson’s “comic book guy” in my presentation Wednesday. (Thanks to Cabral for the link!)

Game industry targets school kids: I wrote a post yesterday on Shouting Loudly on the Entertainment Software Association’s new anti-piracy campaign—a K-5 curriculum teaching kids that intellectual property must be respected, and fair use only exists in the classroom.

More on “The Great Nerd Culture Gap”: Church recently brought to my attention Time Magazine‘s new nerd blog by Lev Grossman, Nerd World. I was fascinated by his post on how “the mainstream” is still might not get nerdy pursuits even as our interests make get increased media coverage, but I think I’m even more fascinated by what his readers have to say in response.

The original strip ends with a person explaining that he went to the coordinates revealed to him by a woman in a dream, where he discovered that “It turns out wanting something doesn’t make it real.” This makes for a sad and touching sort of ending, but also left the door open for something much grander.

I’m in Cambridge, Massachusetts this weekend, staying with my girlfriend who works at Harvard, and visiting my family before two of my younger brothers move to LA later thsi week. As it turns out, the event Jordan mentioned to me happened two blocks from my girlfriend’s place. I walked over with a camera at 10:30 to see who might have shown up.

Only a few people had arrived by that time, but they knew to expect others. As I walked into the park, I saw some college-age guys milling about, making eye contact with me to see if I was there for the event. They greeted me as I approached; one was from Long Island, and another was from Russia. He flew here just for the event, and had to get help from others on the XKCD forums in obtaining a visa. Ten or twelve others were around the neighborhood, they explained, but were wandering until the appointed time. Another fellow arrived, explaining that he was from (relatively) nearby Framingham, and “I wasn’t sure if it was universal time.” I had to take care of some other errands before the main event, so I bid them farewell for the time being.

At 2:30, I realized I was going to be late if I didn’t leave the house soon. I ran down the street, camera in my pocket, hearing the murmur of the crowd as I approached. People were standing outside the fence of the park, looking at the mass within. I started taking photos.

The space was full, especially the jungle gym, which I mistook for a solid structure until people started climbing out later and I realized I could see through it. Hundreds of happy geeks were scattered across the park. The center of the playground was especially densely packed with mostly college-age men and women shoulder-to-shoulder in t-shirts referencing XKCD, Penny Arcade, MIT, and countless obscure jokes about science, math, and video games. I hurried to the center of the throng, taking pictures as I went, as people started a ten-second countdown to 2:38. After the cheers that followed, some started chanting “Ran-dall, Ran-dall,” calling for the creator of the comic to appear. I noticed a giant, unfinished version of the comic strip that started it all, affixed to the fence against the basketball court.

Randall Munroe appeared next to the strip just as people were calling “Speech! Speech!” All heads turned and the crowd quieted as he shouted, “Thanks for showing up.” Laughs, and he explained that the original strip ended wrong; apparently, wanting something enough does make it happen. Cheers, and he explained the next step: This means the comic needs a new ending, so he brought some markers. “It’s like Wikipedia,” he shouted, and in no particular order, people made their way to the strip to finish it in their own ways.

I suspect that most of those in attendance didn’t actually draw anything on the strip. Most were just happy to have a spontaneous “geekfest,” as a friend of mine called it. I didn’t attend with this friend; we just happened to spot each other across the crowd. We first met on a local BBS in the early 90s. He randomly bumped into even more people he knew from MIT. It was like this all over the park: people running into friends, chatting with strangers, finding or creating things to do.

A small group was competitively trying to see how far they could extend tape measures before they bent (as suggested in this strip). A few were in costume or carrying props; I spotted one furry, a guy in a cape, a few people dressed as stick figures (e.g., tape over a white outfit), several people with foam or papier-mache weapons, and two people holding up “citation needed” signs (as in the Wikipedia reference from this strip). The folks with fake weapons had playful battles for onlookers. Some guys played guitars by a tent. A blankets were laid out with groups picnicking. Someone was distributing (selling?) shirts commemorating the event, emblazoned with the coordinates. And one fellow wore a fill-in-the-blanks shirt from ThinkGeek reading:

im in ur
42.39561 -71.13057 2007 09 23 14 38 00
meeting
ur dorkz

There’s at least one good summary (posted by Ben/”Dragonhawk”) at the “I was there” thread in the XKCD forums already. I can’t say how many people were there, but at the peak I suspect it was several hundred.

I had to leave early for my brothers’ farewell party, but things were still going strong at 3:20. I felt lucky to have the chance to drop by this fun, fascinating, friendly gathering. If you were there, please feel free to post links to your writeup or photos in the Comments.

Updates: I realized after posting this that I really didn’t describe at all what this event must have meant for the local community. This is because that’s kind of hard to tell. There was a separate mini-playground fenced off from the larger part of the park, and I believe I saw some parents with kids in there. There’s some talk of this in the forum, however:

rhichi:
You know…more than the normals, I felt bad for the little kids and their parents expecting a nice afternoon at the park. I’ll admit it I nearly bulldozed a kid trying to get to the pole that activates the fountains. It was just so awesome!

chaosspawn:
I talked with one of the parents there, turns out he was an xkcd fan. He didn’t recognize the name Randal Munroe, but looked it up when he went back home and realized that it was from the comic. So he came and hung out while his kid was napping.

Okita:
Some guy asked me to take a picture with his son who had been playing in the fountain and was all wet.

dogfish:
That would be me. (I would probably not describe myself as a normal, however.)
(Okita, let me know if you’d like a picture of the the picture — it came out really well.)

Admiral_Obvious:
Truth be told, I was surprised that there were ANY “normals” in the crowd at all! At least we weren’t a rowdy bunch — I was half worried that a mobscene would have scared off any parents bringing their children to a “favorite neighborhood park,” expecting a quiet Sunday.

That last comment, incidentally, was more of a reply to people discussing a pic of an attractive woman who just kind of showed up and hadn’t heard of XKCD before.

I dropped by the park this afternoon to see what kind of mess might have been left over. The answer: none whatsoever. The only traces that anyone had been there at all were some chalk writings (including “flickr: xkcddreams,” “hack the planet,” and “nerd nation was here”) and a few notes on the community bulletin board (including a page from a guy advertising for a “dream girl” and ads for local SF cons).

Also, I should note that I found (and joined) an XKCD meetup pool of photos on Flickr, and have added the xkcddreams tag to my photos. Here’s one large and particularly good set of photos I happened to stumble upon. Also see some neat adjustments made to park signage.

Is it sad that I have both heard of and used that formula before?

I’d say no, but since I’m trying to remember where my graphing calculator is, I’m hardly impartial.

This also led my friend Jordan to calculations on the probability of finding a girlfriend. The validity of this analysis is apparently in dispute. Let us remember that the odds change depending on context: If you’re determined to date a gamer, for example, you may have a better chance of finding a mate at the local arcade than in, say, Chuck E. Cheese’s, where the people playing games are likely to be minors, and the adults are more likely to be married parents. (Exception: You may also find the occasional group of twentysomething guys who recall that Chuck E. Cheese’s serves beer for the parents and decide to show up for the novelty of getting drunk with an animatronic animal band. I learned of this practice from someone at South by Southwest Interactive.)

Also, head on over to the New Scientist Blog to help identify the “Top 10 Science Pop Songs” (link via Boing Boing). Suggestions on the table already include songs by the Beastie Boys, Kraftwerk, comic book artist/rocker James Kochalka Superstar, and a handful of nerdcore hip-hop artists.

As long as I’m announcing events with geek-oriented names, please also feel free to check out Dorkbot, featuring many worldwide chapters of “people doing strange things with electricity.” I caught a neat Dorkbot party in Austin during South by Southwest Interactive (featuring Tree Wave on the stage, a Tesla coil playing the Ghostbusters theme song, free issues of Make Magazine, and free beer, among other attractions), and I hope my visit to Portugal this summer coincides with a meeting by the Lisbon chapter.