(via Ebay Gifts, thanks Brittany!)

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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.

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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.

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.

Oswalt says in Wired:

Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan’s. Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun …

The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet.

Oswalt goes even further to say that anyone and everyone can consider themselves an otaku about something: Lost, The Wire, even reality shows. Reality shows! The lowest form of entertainment, formed by the least amount of thought or effort, and people get as fervent about them as they did over the mythology of Middle Earth. He’s right to bemoan this development. It means that being a fan — even an ardent fan — means less than it used to. Using his example of Rocky Horror, a demented, insane musical about transsexual monster-creators, was limited to midnight shows seen by only the most committed of people. As I was going to search for one abomination that I’d thought existed — a Rocky Horror reality show (to find a cast for an MTV-produced remake 0- seriously, how many things are wrong with that?) — nearly all the results that came up were related to Glee, one of today’s most mainstream phenomenons. Rocky Horror no longer belongs to the night – it’s in primetime now. With Two and a Half Men.

But here’s the other side of the coin: Would we trade mainstream acceptance of geek/nerd culture for the exclusivity we once had? Not as more confident (and jaded) adults, but as developing kids, teens, and young adults? Would there even be a geek culture if we were never geeks who were subjected to daily “character-building exercises” like being pushed into lockers, called “Poindexter,” and treated like outcasts? The answer is no. If life went so swimmingly for everyone, there would be no new stories by people fantasizing about a different, awesome world or getting up on stage in front of a group of strangers, telling them about this obtuse moron who doesn’t understand a world beyond his own nose. As mainstream as things will become, we are still the only ones who get it.

Geeks will never have to worry about the mainstream taking us over. We would never trade being interesting and unique for being boring like everyone else. And now all those boring people want our stuff, which wasn’t cool enough for them before, and that’s really annoying. But you know what? They will probably never totally understand why it’s so cool and always was. If Oswalt is pissed about the availability of everything, I suppose that makes sense. The challenge and satisfaction of the hunt are diminished when you can probably just find something on eBay. But that “gym douche” in the Boba Fett shirt might have no idea that he could be wearing a Jodo Kast shirt, amirite?

Point being, we’ll always be the true otakus. The Internet can’t take that away from us. Shaking our heads at the less enlightened will just have to continue.

(photo via lonelyReviewer)

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.

Computer operators:

A programmer unwinding:

More at Luckham’s site.

(Larry Luckham via Flavorwire)

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. (All male though, eh.)

Click for full-sized chart.

(Flowtown via TDW)

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.

We decided that we needed a term for this shortly after we started college, when the trials of a liberal arts college orientation week were still fresh in our minds.  We’d both watched, or participated in, a scenario like this:

• Geek meets new person.
• Geek does not want to be judged solely on their unorthodox interests.
• Geek instinctively reins in their behavior, so that the other person will get a sense of their whole personality and not simply decide “Oh. What a geek.”
• Something catches the geek by surprise, and, in a similarly instinctual reflex, they flash their geek.  There are just certain subjects that we can’t remain silent on.  Further reading.
• There’s no going back now.  It’s out there.  The other person now knows that they are dealing with an enormous geek.

I know this level of social awareness doesn’t apply to everyone, but I’m willing to bet that most geeks can relate to being in a situation where they have to be a little more mainstream than they are at home (a job interview, for example) but where they still occasionally slip up.  And I am aware that the instinct to hide the aspects of your personality that set you apart from the group can be a socially immature one.  More on that later.

Anyway, my particular orientation geek flash was nearly incandescent.  It happened on my first day of college Band Camp (Ok, wow, see that?  A flash), where you’d think I would have been at home.  For any other college band geeks out there, we were a 15-20 person student-run band, proudly “not DCI.”  About 20% drums, 20% clarinets, and like one trumpet.  We would take time in the middle of every practice to play some kind of game, and we called it Mandatory Fun.  (Surprisingly fun, and surprisingly mandatory!)

Our drum major was explaining that day’s game, which we called Batman and Superman. The point of the game was to get everybody in the circle to talk and laugh about things, rather than competing against each other.  “Everybody gets to name a pair of things, and then we go around the circle and each name one of them.  For whatever reason you want.  Like, I could say… Batman or Superman, and you would say ‘Superman,’ because… he’s taller?  I don’t know if he’s taller.”

And I said, all too quickly and authoritatively,  “He’s taller.”

And then I covered my face with my hands, as we all laughed, and later that day, the drum major invited me to join my first Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

Anyway, that original friend?  The one from the beginning of this post?  She saw two flashes during her orientation.  The first was a friend of hers.  For clarity, lets call my friend Z.

Z and friend are talking.  Z says, “my family named our car Dante.”  Friend says, “Ooh!  My car has a name, too!”  Then friend gets really quiet.  Finally she mumbles: “I call it Gondor.”

Z takes her hand, says soothingly, “Is it white?”

Friend nods, sadly, “And it has a loud horn.”

In her second story, it is Z herself who flashes her geek.  She tells me she was walking through her dorm, and while she passed a lounge heard someone exclaim loudly “And how did Han Solo meet Chewbacca, anyway?!”

She poked her head back in the room and said “Actually…”

And couldn’t help but launch off on a treatise about galactic human slavery, the heraldry of Imperial pilot uniforms, and giant slug mafiosi.

The Utility of Flashing Your Geek

Well, its been the better part of a decade since I was in my first semester of college.

…

Sorry.  Needed a moment.  Between starting college and ending it, I played D&D for the first time, and started playing World of Warcraft.  I watched Pulp Fiction, and Samurai 7, read The Authority and The Odyssey.  I wrote my first screen play and my first comic books.  I learned to take greater pride in my interests, and I don’t hide them in the average social situation (barring things like job interviews, as mentioned above).

In fact, I take enormous pleasure in deliberately flashing my geek when I know it will be appreciated.  Sometimes, it’s in small gestures, like the “I Believe In Harvey Dent” button on my otherwise professional laptop bag or the copy of The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, Vol. I that I’m quietly reading on the train.  For research purposes.

Sometimes, I’m less subtle.  A fellow percussionist and I were discussing John Phillips Sousa and his unflagging devotion to the military march.  He suggested that the composer was really a robot.  I suggested that he was really a cylon.  He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a choke, paused to collect himself, and then muttered: “Goddamn frakking cylons.”

So: flash your own geek whenever appropriate.  Show everyone that we’re closer to the mainstream then the mainstream might think.  And if you have a particularly good flashing your geek story, whether it was intentional or unintentional, let us know in the comments!

A sample branch: sci-fi fans > video gamers > roleplaying gamers > LARPers > 13-year-old gamers of any sort.

(click the image to see its full, more readable size.)

For those who’d prefer a more technical take: Luke Welling has a programmer hierarchy flowchart with those smug assembly and LISP types at the top.

(iFanBoy via ChartPorn)