Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

I’m going to start posting some of the emails I receive, along with my reply, here on this blog. This is in addition to the place I’ve set aside for crazy emails. I’ll start with an interesting question I received that goes back to the days before the Geek Test was Internet Famous.

Hello Yvette,

Thanks for your great website! Many years ago on the front page there used to a picture of a cat’s head. This kitty was making a comedy face and was named Fairuza in the filename. Who is this cat and what is this picture? When and where was it taken? I’d love to get more information on this great picture! I attached the picture. Please reply soon, thanks! have fun, Mike

Hi Mike,

The first thing visitors saw on my first version of innergeek.us was the cropped head of a kitten that Ben and I named Fairuza (after Fairuza Balk for a reason that I can’t quite remember). You were one of the first people in the world to take the Geek Test if you remember Fairuza on the front page!

This photo was not photoshopped other than to crudely remove the background. I took it in the fall of 2000, a few weeks after our newly adopted cat, Isis, had kittens. (We didn’t know she was pregnant when we took her in, but watching five kittens grow from soggy mouse-sized creatures into curious kitten-shaped mammals was a fun and rewarding experience.) We took a lot of photos (especially considering that we were still using film-based cameras back then) and I must have caught Fairuza mid-yawn for this one.

Here’s a recent photo of Isis mid-yawn. Sucky lighting, blurry photo, but can you see the resemblance? She’s making a crazy face for the camera… all pirate-eyed and practically screaming “Yarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!”

Fairuza went to a good home with a woman who renamed her Tiny.

We found homes for the other four kittens. I would have liked to keep one of them, especially since Isis was a great parent, but we lived in an apartment and already had Loki. So we remained a two-cat family until last summer, when Phoebe showed up outside my employer’s office.

So though I no longer have an awesome Fairuza face on the front page of my website, there are still plenty of places where I gratuitously place my cats’ funny faces. I guess it’s fitting that that’s how everything started out.

I made them myself, can I have a cookie now?

Creating those little cards was a lot more work than I expected. Seriously, I am a writer who sometimes designs on a computer but rarely draws anything worth showing to anyone with decent eyesight. But I finally got them close to what I was envisioning, and that made the effort worthwhile. I can’t wait to hand them to people at Comic Con next week!

Here’s how I made the design:

1. Thought about what kind of business card would work well, and came up with the idea for a comic-style card.
2. Started drawing caricatures of myself. Some were really, really, horrible. I had to look up how to draw a female body because I wasn’t getting it right.
3. Finally figured out that I should draw the caricature elements separately, scan them, and then piece them together in Adobe Illustrator (CS1 that I got in my last year of college but never really learned how to use).
4. Hit the jackpot with Blambot.com, where I found some awesome free comic fonts (for Mac and PC) and pre-made dialogue balloons in .eps format. Perfect!
5. Swore a lot as I learned how to alter the Illustrator files to get the dialogue balloons in the size and shape I wanted.
6. Added the text (Blambot’s Anime Ace 2.0) and obsessed a little over the exact wording.
7. Tweaked and tweaked until Illustrator and Photoshop both worked together with me enough to get the final result you see above.

It’s not perfect, but I won’t be embarrassed to hand out that design. And there is probably a better way to do something like that… so if you have any suggestions for next time, please leave a comment. I’m not under any delusions that I would be able to illustrate my own graphic novel, but it would be nice to learn a little more about art ‘n stuff. I would like to write one someday (soon, maybe, with all this Comic Con inspiration).

Next on the agenda before Comic Con: packing and maybe finally getting around to updating my website?

Sam Murray from the UK shared this link with me: http://www.getitornot.co.uk

It’s an IT recruiting company that has a 5-question geek test on their homepage as a barrier to entry. Nice work, CW Jobs! I approve that message!  

I think I just found another point for the Geek Test: "I have made playable musical instruments out of edible and perishable materials, like broccoli."

Seriously, I’m in awe of this guy’s enthusiasm and vegetamusicability in a mad, mad way. 

If you want to read my random thoughts throughout the day, and I haven’t posted on my blog, maybe you’ll find something interesting in my new twitter feed:

http://twitter.com//innergeek

I think that this may come in handy if/when I go to San Diego Comic Con in July, since I can post a thought to twitter from my mobile phone. How exciting! Seriously, I can’t stop thinking about Comic Con and how much I really want to go.

You’ll never believe what I’m doing today.

I am working on innergeek.us and going through geekmaster emails that have long been neglected. Which mostly means deleting all the spam.

Occasionally, there are curious emails about specific questions on the geek test. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the fact that people still email me when the site and test are clearly outdated, but just how exactly am I supposed to respond to emails like this?

Hi,
one of the questions in the geek test is "I have looked forward to dissecting a frog, pig, etc.".  Perhaps you didn’t notice, but relatively a large percent of the geeks are vegetarian, or close to be ones. So I afraid that this is not so good question.

I guess I should put that one on the list of crazy emails I’ve received in the past.  It’s not really crazy… just weird. I would argue that geeks are more likely to be meat eaters than vegetarians. Feel free to leave your own thoughts in the comments. 

In other news, the whole ansty situation of what does my website mean in conjunction with what does my life mean and will I ever be a writer is really getting on my nerves, and maybe this is the finally-somewhat-like-spring-weather talking, but I’m ready to do something about it. With baby steps, I think, to prevent an insta-overwhelm.

Of course I still need to finish up my taxes and get that off my shoulders by Tuesday. Blech. Normally I love figuring out taxes (nerd alert), but this year it’s a little more complicated and it’s making me nervous that I’m going to screw it up. And that’s just asking for procrastination… 

I’ve made some basic changes to the existing Geek Test, which basically amounts to adding a couple more questions and updating the outdated bits (like adding the third movies for Lord of the Rings and the new Star Wars Trilogy).

Ben seems to think that I shouldn’t post what I would call version 3.2 because it still needs a good overhaul. But that is a more daunting task every day, considering the backlog of incredible suggestions that I have received from people in the past few years. I figure the least I could do would be to put up the slightly enhanced version.

Not many people comment on this blog, especially since the Great Accidental Comment Deletion a couple months ago (I wish I could bring those comments back!). But if you have an opinion on this matter, please leave a comment for me regarding the Geek Test version 3.2 question. Should I post it or wait until I can release Geek Test version 4.0 with fanfare?  

The article in the Roanoke Times seems innocuous enough: Tech trio seeks market for new game. But hey, open it up and read and you’ll find two things:

1. These guys from Virginia Tech have created a NEW text-based online game (remember Zork?) in the middle of a graphics-whoring gaming society.
2. Michael Ringenbach is a friend of mine from college who won the title "Geek of the Year" at the 2001 Geek Party.

Are these guys crazy? Perhaps. But I think it’s pretty gutsy (and geeky cool) to move forward (and yet somehow backwards) with a text game. Then again, maybe not… the popularity of texting among teens (God, I sound old) is soaring and most phones could handles this kind of gaming on a mobile level… and it would make sense that if people became addicted to the story, it wouldn’t matter if there were no mind-siezuring graphics like World of Warcraft.

I just got another email from Mike saying that the game is definitely not yet ready to be released, so you can’t play it for a while. The website isn’t quite ready, either. So hopefully he’ll let me know when those are ready so that I can pass them along to the readers of this blog (and maybe the website, if I ever update it….). Speaking of WoW and his in trueness to gaming and geekhood, Mike also wrote this:

On the more geeky side of things, I’m working on my third 70 for World of Warcraft, with 2 other retired 60+ on a different server. 

Best of luck to you and your geeky buds, Mike.

I thought you might be interested in geek terminology from Croatia (Hrvatska).

Nerds are called "štreberi" (shtreberi). Geeks are actually called geeks, but they’re sometimes also called shtreberi, frikovi (from English freak), šmokljani (shmokljani), and more specified names depending of the area of their geekness.

 

P.S. Your geek test is cool.

(I scored 54,95661% and titled as a super geek

but you were right – I’ll try again!)

I got an email from a guy in Italy about a mistake on the Italian Geek Test. His signature quote was this quote by Trevor Linton:

"Of course my password is the same as my pet’s name!
My cat’s name was Q47pY!3 and I change it every 90 days."

Also, I found an article entitled Brooklyn Doctor Opens IM Practice: OMG! You’ve Got Cancer

I just love that title!   Here’s a snippet from the article, which definitely describes a type of cutting-edge medical practice that would be really cool if it works out in the long run:

"Parkinson’s medical practice combines quaint house calls of yore with decidedly 21st-century technology. For a yearly fee of $500, Parkinson makes an initial visit to his patients in their apartments and offers two additional visits as needed. But he is available to them any time between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. weekdays for unlimited consultation on IM or e-mail."