The site has received about half a dozen spam comments in a few hours, so I’m suspending anonymous commenting functionality for a bit. I’m hoping that this is the equivalent of playing dead when pursued by a bear.

I’ll be back with a real post sometime, too. Lots of good links lately—just very busy.

Update: The storm seems to have passed, and anonymous commenting is going back on. I’m thinking I’ll set up one of them “what does this image say?” verification tools to screen out evil robots, when I have a few more free moments. (Thanks, Denise!)

Yesterday marks one year since I started up this blog. Thanks for actually showing up, commenting, linking to me, sending me other links, and generally reassuring me that you don’t have to wait for Comic Con to hang with the geek community.

I just created a photo site for the photos I’ve been (and will continue to be) taking at the geeky events I attend. It is at www.flickr.com/photos/geekstudies.

I’m in Massachusetts now, so I won’t be able to post updates from past travels until sometime after I return to my desktop computer in Philadelphia. Very shortly, though, I will be posting 70 photos from an unexpected event I stumbled into yesterday, thanks to Jordan.

I’m in the process of revising the categories on the site a bit. Before, I was lumping a bunch of things under the “Academia” category that really didn’t belong there. Now I’m dividing that category up into three different categories:

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).

If you sent me an email to my geekstudies.org address recently and you’re still wondering why I haven’t replied, it’s because I set up a convoluted email forwarding scheme that turned out not to work after all. Hopefully I got everyone who fell through the cracks, but if I missed you, feel free to try me again.

I went ahead and added a very short “Frequently Asked Questions” section to the end of the About page. For now, it’s just to direct people to the post answering the question I still get every time I’m in a sufficiently large social situation: What’s the difference between a nerd and a geek? I have added a few new examples to that post since I first wrote it.

Also, just to give fair warning: I’m working hard to finish my proposal this week and get some articles sent out to journals before the proposal defense on August 20th, so site updates might continue to be short and sparse for a little while. Please feel free, though, to continue leaving comments and sending tips for relevant articles, and thanks to everyone who has done so lately.

I tried changing the links around a bit to add just a wee bit of color to the site, though I remain stubbornly minimalist with the overall design. Also, I hear that my posts were getting cut off at the “read more” tag in people’s RSS readers, which I think I fixed. If you read by RSS and have been thinking that I am a man of few words, this may come as a rude awakening for you.

Well, here it is: I designed the logo yesterday afternoon in Adobe Illustrator, and have spent all my time since then scraping at the White As Milk Wordpress theme until the colors, sizes, and layout were closer to what I had in mind. I was a computer science major once upon a time, but it’s been a very long while since I had to muck with any code, so please let me know if I mangled the theme so badly that something actually stopped functioning.

The title above says “More or Less Complete” because some odd CSS inconsistency is making the text on Archive pages start lower down, and I have to manually add the title. It’s six in the morning, though, so perhaps this is something that can be revisited tomorrow. I welcome you to send suggestions if you have any. (Update: Now that I have two posts I realize that there was extra space left at the top for links to adjacent posts. I still wonder how the Archive page is supposed to line up with the others, though.)