So you know that whatever you’re going to get the geek in your life for Christmas is going to be expensive, but beyond that, you’re completely lost. It’s cool. We got you. Check out this infographic, courtesy the team at Ebay Gifts and take notes. The graphic covers geeks of all styles and ages and lists some pretty fantastic gifts, all of which I would be more than happy to receive. Hint hint. Not only are there gift ideas, but also short little lists of important features. It’s definitely a great cheat sheet for all the gifters in your life who are constantly buying you socks, and socks you don’t like at that.

Check out the full infographic after the jump.

Today marks the illustrious birth of Mogulite.com, the newest site in the Abrams Media blog network (which includes Geekosystem!). If Geekosystem doesn't satisfy your hankering to follow the lives, businesses, and exploits of titans of technology like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs with features like our classic list of top web geeks, Mogulite could be the site for you: The site aims to turn a little much-warranted scrutiny on the captains of industry who exercise outsized influences on our lives, but are often themselves cloaked in mystery.

We’re committed to the idea that what the ultra-wealthy and powerful do matters, as much as many would like to deny it. We’re ready to celebrate those helping to change things for the better – while, on the other hand, highlighting hypocrisy and exposing those secretly serving as puppeteers, to make our lives more treacherous. We’d like to keep apace with the gobstoppingly wealthy — preferably over a round of aged scotch. If we can’t make it into the boardroom, we can at least join you top tax bracket folks at the Harvard Club and share a drink, right? No? Okay, fine. We’ll be at our laptops. The point is, we’ll be neither sycophantic nor cruel – we will, however, be merciless.

Las year, artist Len Peralta was working on a project in which he designed 52 trading cards featuring geek culture icons. These cards, dubbed Geek a Week, featured many mainstream and lesser-known geek icons, dressed up in other geek-related fashions, doubling the fangasm. I once thought Felicia Day and Portal only happened in my wistful dreams, yet Peralta made it somewhat closer to reality, dressing her up as Chell, Portal’s protagonist who is doomed to android hell. And look, because of the portal effect, there’s infinite Felicia Day, which is a pretty good amount of that. There’s also Weird Al, Penn & Teller, Jonathan Coulton, and Veronica Belmont dressed up as a blue Kratos (for some reason), and many other icons you probably follow on Twitter.

ThinkGeek has the exclusive rights at printing and selling the cards, so make sure to head over there and check them out. The sets are currently selling in packs of 8, which some may realize doesn’t evenly divide into 52, and no, it doesn’t seem the ThinkGeek product listing makes mention of what that last pack will contain. For now, there’s only one way to find out!

(ThinkGeek via Kotaku)

Geeks are enjoying a massive cultural renaissance right now, something we should all be rejoicing in. It’s not every decade you get to enjoy all your favorite scifi/fantasy novels made into movies, see geeks at the center of popular television shows, find a game/comic book/anime convention near you almost every weekend of the year, or overhear conversations about stuff you love on the subway, in a restaurant, just about everywhere. It’s a freaking smorgasbord!

But right now, we’re in the midst of a serious crisis of geek identity. Geeks are more visible in popular culture than ever before. What used to be the secret shame of being a geek is now all mixed up with ideals of success, popularity, and even sexual attractiveness.

The world is upside down. MY world is upside down.

>>>Full essay at The Mary Sue.

“I’m not a nerd. I used to be one, back 30 years ago when nerd meant something.” – Patton Oswalt

A question for my fellow geeks: Could you have ever imagined today’s pop culture environment? Especially while some of us were subjected to taunts, name-calling, or physical bullying over the weird stuff we liked? Because we were into horror movies, or science fiction, or video games … we were the different ones who had to be called out for being different. We couldn’t fly under the radar enough. But as much as “normal” kids made our lives miserable, we liked feeling like insiders. We were otakus, with our specific but passionate fascinations.

But now, there is a place for all of us, all because of the Internet. The geek stuff we held so dear that some thought we had to be ashamed of is part of the mainstream now because – to our horror – it’s become trendy. If something has a Facebook fan page, how underground can it be? It’s as if it doesn’t even belong to us anymore.

In the late ’60s, Bell Labs employee Lawrence Harley “Larry” Luckham decided to take a walk through his mainframe-laden data center and photograph his co-workers. His casual snaps provide a fascinating time-capsule look at a subculture of men and women who may not be as glorified today as Mad Men‘s swashbuckling ad execs (and admittedly they don’t dress quite as snazzily), but who laid the foundations for the technological advances and culture that define our time. (Above: The office’s operations manager.)  It’s also a great chance to see what a Honeywell minicomputer looks like if you haven’t already seen it.

Who says geeks don’t have style? Nerd Boyfriend is a sort of online lookbook comprised of photographs of geek celebrities past and present paired with suggested garments for copping their looks. According to the site’s editors, this vintage Einstein look can be approximated with a J. Crew crewneck sweater, wide-legged Luke Simon pants, and Grenson brown leather, white-soled boots.

(Though as the site’s comments illustrate, fashion geeks exist as well: Commenters point out that Einstein’s sweater sleeves are vertically-stitched raglan sleeves, whereas the J. Crew sweater has diagonally-stitched raglan sleeves.)

The site defines “geek” rather liberally; maybe geek/hipster would be more appropriate? (See: Willie Nelson; Lucian Freud; Robert De Niro.)

But there are still plenty of nerd-certified classic stylings. A few: Monty Python; guitar-wielding Leonard Nimoy; a young Ian McKellen.

(Nerd Boyfriend via Boing Boing)

Flowtown has lovingly documented the evolution of the geek, from chicken-decapitating circus performer to ’50s tech lover to D&D, comics, Star Wars, and beyond.

Semiconductor company AMD recently published a guide to getting a geek guy in five lessons. It is either a fiendish, deliberately outrageous troll post to get blog links (success!) or merely a patronizing dispatch from a bizarre mirror universe governed by high-schoolish social rules and wince-inducing gender norms. Let’s run through the steps:

I have a very good friend. We’re both writers, both geeks, and both talkers, so much so that we’ve developed a number of inside jokes that serve us as conversational shorthand. I would like to share one of them with the greater geek community. It refers to a certain sort of social situation, and we call it:

Flashing Your Geek