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!
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.
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!
Right now, there’s one helluva geek party going on in Canada: the first-ever Geekfest Montréal. One of the organizers, Debbie Rouleau, contacted me about using the Geek Test in one of their activities to determine the “Geek du Geek”—the Geek of all French Canadian Geeks. Of course I said oui.
(Luckily we were communicating in English. I know enough French to understand the Geekfest website, but speaking or writing it c’est trés difficile.)
I’m looking forward to hearing about how it all went and who the Geek du Geek ends up being. I’ve promised to profile him or her on this very blog, so hopefully I’ll get that up this week. And hopefully they’ll have another Geekfest next year so that I can at least dream of going! It’s about time I finally visited my dad’s ancestral homeland, anyway. Where I will make a point of trying poutine.
An updated geek test. You want it, I want it, we all would sleep better at night if it were updated.
In my head, the task of updating it is a monstrous beast that requires ultimate preparation before going in for the attack. But… I never seem to be prepared enough. And that’s a problem. Especially when I get emails and guilt-inducing blog comments from really nice people who just want a more accurate geek score.
I have hundreds of emails from people that I started to organize in a sort of database to help me choose the best questions for the test. I haven’t kept it up very well, though, and frankly there are so many great suggestions that it’s really hard to imagine the test being limited to 500 points. But I honestly feel that it should not be longer than its current incarnation. (Weighting the questions is definitely something I want to do, but Step One needs to be addressed first.)
Here’s where you come in! I’m going to break the geek test down into chunks and request suggestions for one chunk only right here on my blog (since I’m already planning to be here every day in 2010). Let’s start with…
Core Geek Movies (that must be watched at least twice to count).To participate, leave a comment on this entry with this information:
- Which movies (listed below) you don’t think are geek core, with a brief explanation.
- Which movies you think deserve to be listed, with a brief explanation.
The Current Geek Movie List:
Bladerunner
Clerks
The Dark Crystal
The Fly
Highlander: the movie
The Last Starfighter
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
The Matrix
Any Monty Python movie
The Neverending Story
Princess Bride
Rocky Horror Picture Show
Spaceballs
TRON
War Games
Any Star Trek movie
All Star Trek movies
The Original Star Wars Trilogy
The New Star Wars Trilogy
Transformers: the movie
Weird Science
Any Kung Fu movie made before 1980
Thank you!
I’ve been working hard to figure out what to do with my blog and with innergeek.us in recent hours, days, weeks, months, years. Mostly it’s overwhelming, and nothing ever seems to be good enough. I’m the only one who ever has that type of problem, right?
This blog, if you’re reading it on my actual site, is currently using a WordPress theme I found online but do not intend to keep. I like the daffodils and the black flourishes and the gradient on either side of the center column, but it’s not set up to easily switch the background of the center pane to white so I know that my words are a little tough to read. It’s easily the girliest theme I’ve ever contemplated using and will eventually be replaced by a more gender-neutral (and geek-inspired) look.
I’ve toyed with rebuilding my whole site using WordPress, but that may end up making future features more difficult to incorporate. I’ve instead decided to build my CSS so that I can seamlessly integrate my WordPress blog into that design. Now the major hurdle is building a design that meets or exceeds my vision. I have dozens of pencil sketches all over my desk and a handful of abandoned designs on my computer. So I’m taking a break right now.
For the sake of accountability (to YOU! My loyal readership! Or at least my mom.) I’m going to lay out my plans for innergeek.us.
- Create an innergeek logo. (done!)
- Create a site design that seamlessly integrates WordPress blog (I think I’m really close.)
- Create graphics for site design
- Build CSS for site design
- Refresh exisiting content, except Geek Test
- Transition to new web host (there’s never a good time for this, is there?)
- Upload and test everything online in a secret sandbox
- Refresh Geek Test to a slightly less embarrassing version 3.2
- Launch new site by September 1, 2009
- Overhaul Geek Test
- Launch new Geek Test by October 16, 2009
At this point, I think 30 days is a reasonable amount of time to give myself to revamp the website, especially if I’m stocked up on coffee. I’m going to table all the super-sweet feature ideas for now because I think that’s slowing me down. After I launch the new site, I’ll have six weeks to publish Geek Test 4.0—and that’s a hard deadline for my most overwhelming task. It’s the ten-year anniversary of the very first Geek Party where the very first version of the Geek Test was unveiled. It. Must. Happen.
But for now, I’m gunning for goal #2.
