Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

Karen “PhileoSophia” sent me an email a while back* with a bunch of knitting-related suggestions for the Geek Test. What do you think about her proposal that there is a relationship between knitting and geekiness? Is knitting a hobby that attracts geeks, or vice versa? Perhaps you would be so kind as to draw a Ven diagram and/or a graph a scatter plot and include it in your comment below.

In any case, here is the email I received. At the very least you should check out the links at the bottom! I’ve linked to a couple before on my blog, but they’re all great enough to link again. And all are added to my “someday I’ll have skillz to knit that” pile. Especially the knitted dissected frog and rat, which I could imagine displaying in a shadow box on my living room wall.

Greetings Yvette,

I love your site!  I am a proud, female Major Geek as well as an avid knitter/crocheter.  I have noticed that there is an odd relationship between knitting and geekiness.  For the past few months, I have been trying to find the geekiest knitted items on the web.  I have found Futurama’s Bender toilet paper holder, binary scarves, probability sweaters, d4 shaped dicebags, R2-D2 hats, the Digestive system, a truly amazing knitted Brain, other *ahem* body parts and systems, and, (my personal favourites) knitted dissections of a frog and a rat.  Perhaps you should look into the geekiness of knitting and consider adding that to the test.  A couple of examples would be:  “Have you ever… Used dice to determine the cable pattern for a sweater you’re knitting?  Transferred a program in binary to binary knitting (where Knit=0 and Purl=1)?  Knit any body system?  (Bonus points for the Circulatory system)  Created amigurumi of any Star Wars character?  Star Trek character? etc, etc.”

Yes, I am trying to inflate my score…    For your amusement, I have included some fun links of geeky knits for you to peruse! Enjoy!

PhileoSophia
(A Knitting Geek)

Binary Scarf
Code Red Virus Scarf
Chaos Sweater
Star Wars Amigurumi
Knitted Dissections
Knitted Brain
Knitted Digestive System

*I’m behind in answering emails, in case you sent one and have not yet received a reply. I read them all and try to answer them all!

I do a little knitting from time to time, but I’m not very good. Mostly scarves and/or abandoned projects. (We shall not mention the cowl I made with my own non-pattern for a friend’s baby a few years ago.) I can knit and purl and even There’s just something about interpreting a pattern with 3-letter abbreviations (dpn, ssl, omg, wtf) that makes my eyes spin. I can’t even understand the concept of a “yarnover.” A yarn over what?!? That’s an incomplete sentence, not a noun!

Anyway. I have these fantasies of knitting some fabulous items for fashion, warmth, and expression of geekiness. Of course they only take an hour or so in my fantasies and turn out perfectly and I’m even sipping on margaritas while happily clicking my needles together and there’s nary a knot or dropped stitch.

Also, Matt Damon is doing shirtless sit-ups in my living room while Mike Rowe shovels something and sings to me.

….Um. What were we talking about? OH YEAH. Knitting.

At this point, I’m a little bit of an obsessive pattern saver. I know what I want to knit—I just need to develop the skills and patience and dedicate time to it and stuff. Once I do, though, here’s what I want to tackle first: knitting Star Wars inspired hats! These are my 3 favorite fangirl patterns:

R2D2 knit beanie by CarissaKnits. A very awesome (free!) pattern that is somehow made by the telescoping lens thingy on the front.

A Leia knit wig by ansleybleu. This one’s not free—the downloadable pattern PDF costs $7.95 from her Etsy store. It was apparently originally a commission specifically for Carrie Fisher (through one of her friends). It’s basically honeybun earmuffs with a beanie instead of one of those annoying headbands. Oh, and Princess Leia Buns of Hotness!

Finally, the Yoda knit hat, felted for extra coolness, by Sunshyne. The free pattern is for a baby-size head. But by the time I develop mad knitting skillz with the first two projects, I bet I will have the skillz to resize this pattern for an adult noggin. Now that I think about it, though… it would be very cool to wear the knit Leia buns and carry around a baby* in a knit Yoda hat. That sort of cosplay requires a little more, though… maybe a third character… anyone know of a free Han-Solo-in-Carbonite knitting pattern?

*So I guess in addition to mad knitting skillz, I would also need a baby. Or, if you’re following the Star Wars mythology that is expanded in books and such, I would need two babies since [SPOILER] Han and Leia have twins (a boy and a girl, natch). There can’t be two Yodas, though. I cannot think of a good solution to this problem. Oh. Em. Gee. I just did! One of the babies would wear the R2D2 beanie!!! Now that’s a full circle Star Wars geek craft geek-out. If I had a lightsaber, it would be extended.

The secular celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, as I see it, has three real purposes: 1) for kids to eat green cupcakes until they’re sick, 2) for adults to drink green beer until they’re sick, and 3) for everyone to pretend they’re Irish for the day as an excuse to be loud and wear gaudy clothing.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone! Enjoy this women’s church suit and hat by Donna Vinci that suitably merges the religious and secular purpose of this holiday for the sake of fashion. I’d need to consume at least three leprechaun-shaped hats full of green beer in order to wear that out in public, even on St. Patty’s day. Click on the photo to see more detail, including the really crappy Photoshopping.

Too many years later, here is an updated Geek Test! It’s version 3.14 in honor of Pi Day.

I uploaded it late last night and have updated a few minor things on the site. It’s driving me a little crazy because there’s so much I still want to do regarding the site, not to mention how the test is scored… but getting a more relevant-in-2010 test online was a big step for me. Dear self: just take baby steps from here and you can do it. Like the addition of social networking/sharing buttons at the bottom of the page. Done, but tweaking is still required.

For now, the geek tests in other languages are still in version 3.1 but will hopefully be updated soon.

Now go get your quiz on. It’s a little bit longer than before, but not by much. I hope you enjoy it! Please let me know if there are any glaring omissions in your opinion.

Happy Pi Day! May your day be filled with delicious pies and other round edibles as you do math for fun and recite π to as many decimal places as you can. Stay tuned for a slightly refreshed geek test sometime today….

I wanted to take a moment to address Beth’s comment/question from last week regarding how to deal with her daughter getting picked on at school (presumably for being a geek). Am I really a geek? Yes, ma’am, I believe I am. How did I deal with that at school?

Well, that’s not a question with a straightforward answer. First of all, getting picked on—and being called a geek, nerd, dork, or many of the other horrific things kids call one another—is part of a larger problem of bullying and social ostracization that runs rampant through schools and beyond. Geeks aren’t the only ones who are picked on by any means. Kids who are “different” in any way tend to suffer, and there is usually not an easy way to deal with the pain caused by anything from a day of not fitting in to being an outcast for years. But that’s not to say that they won’t eventually find a friend or a crowd that gets them. Which is what the growing geek subculture is all about.

Personally, my biggest school social challenges were in seventh and eighth grade at my small and somewhat-rural middle school. I was a good student who tended to be a teacher’s pet, which meant that I unintentionally rubbed a lot of kids the wrong way. Maybe I was precocious and annoying, maybe I had no fashion sense, maybe I was too chubby or clumsy or weird, maybe I tried too hard to fit in, maybe all of the above. Boys rarely talked to me, but I had a decent group of girlfriends in sixth grade—who suddenly started snubbing me in seventh grade for reasons still unknown. It was traumatic, to say the least. And then in eighth grade I developed a strong friendship with a different girl only to have her also suddenly turn on me by the end of the school year and take another of my precious few friends with her.

I don’t remember anyone calling me a geek specifically, but who knows what they whispered about me behind my back before I turned to see disgusted loathing in their eyes. I may not remember the exact words they used, but I remember those looks and how they much they hurt. After all, I didn’t know what I had done to deserve such outward hatred. The worst part about the kids who were truly mean to me was that Read more…

I finally have a better understanding of what Chat Roulette* is after watching this clever video from Casey Neistat. Spoiler: there are perverts who troll this random video chat mechanism! Sch0cking! I have to admit that I’m mildly curious to check it out, but definitely less so after learning more about Chat Roulette Maps. Oh, internet.

*Which, as “chatroulette,” for some reason brings to mind the word “charlatan.” Also, it took me a while to realize it was not a French-sounding “CHA-troulette.”

Here are three good things about today:

1. My replacement Logitech Trackman mouse arrived in a timely fashion and has enabled me to return to the world of Scrolling. Without having to buy a new mouse!
2. I ate a surprisingly delicious BBQ pulled pork sandwich on ciabatta bread from the UVU cafeteria for lunch.
3. My husband and I are retarded for each other.

Inspired by a Julia (a very lovely Canadian and fellow Sundance Film Festival volunteer)’s blog, 3 for 365. Thanks, Julia!

I don’t obsess (too much) over my web analytics, but I was surprised to see, oh, about nine times the usual volume of traffic to my site on Tuesday thanks to a prominent link to the Geek Test on reddit.com in the geek category.

Huh, I thought to myself while browsing through the couple hundred comments. Just imagine how much nicer this would all be if the test weren’t outdated.

There are little bumps in traffic here and there as fresh-faced geeks discover the Geek Test, but traffic has been pretty steady for a few years. Blogging regularly seems to have helped a little. Visitors at this point I think are mostly checking back now and then for an updated version of the test that I keep promising. I mean really, what’s my problem? I’ve developed a pretty nifty cycle of guilt, energized motivation, and paralyzed action about the whole update thing. It stresses me out and at this point it’s quite embarrassing. When I tell people about the Geek Test, I do so sheepishly with qualifiers and apologies in advance for its spiderwebs and creaky joints.

Well, that’s going to end on Sunday.

I’m not promising a huge revision of the test or a revamp of the site. I’m going to publish a minor update that will mostly just prune the out-of-date references and fix some glaring omissions. But you know what? It’s going to lift a weight off my shoulders and reduce my anxiety about  The Big Update.

There’s still time to weigh in on what Geek Movies you would add or remove from the list. I may open another section up to discussion before Sunday, but for the most part I’m going to tackle this minor update it with the resources I already have. And when I say minor update, it really doesn’t sound scary at all!

Smiles are best when you’re not expecting them, and sometimes you accidentally find a smile in the most unlikely of places.

I feel like I’m channeling Delerium* right now: Isn’t there a word for this sort of thing? For seeing a smile in a garbage can and some dishes on the counter, or for seeing a rabbit in a cloud, or for seeing shapes in tea dregs at the bottom of a cup?

It’s like found art, but different. A found smile?

*referring to a character from The Sandman series of graphic novels by my favorite author, Neil Gaiman. I’m not actually a huge fan of the Sandman artwork—it’s too garish and early 90’s for my tastes—but the story and writing are OMNOMNOMNOMamazing.