by Blogbot

We’ve been having crazy amounts of fun chatting up a storm on Reddit’s IAMA page. Steam has been rising from Missy’s keyboard as she tries to keep up with the deluge of comments and queries from the site’s users.

“I am a little overwhelmed by the response,” says Missy, “but having a great time answering all of these questions.”

Thanks to Reddit, who made a special SG-style logo especially for our IAMA event, and to everyone who’s participated so far. We’re super excited to be Reddit’s #1 IAMA, and love that everyone’s efforts have earned us a coveted Gold Star!

And our Reddit/IAMA party is still going on, so come on over and join in the fun!

by Brandon Perkins

for the record, this is some shit i just thought of y’all, science fiction that’s not admissable in no court of law. 

– mf doom

Everyone on the bus was horribly disfigured. Warts, scars, stains, blemishes, matted hair, and various other dismembering smells. Fifth-generation t-shirts that started with sports-playing grandsons ended their tattered saga on the drooping shoulders of a youngin’s great grandmother. Hand-me-downs were hand-me-ups. It all went in reverse. The passengers sat two-by-two or stood in the aisles, grasping sweaty bars for balance. Their day to day bus was taking them into the night and the Brown Between had a tendency to jerk rather suddenly.

The bus ran from Los Angeles’s most maligned residential line (Compton’s Circle) to the #720 and back again. Higher class routes existed for higher-class passengers who lived in fancier places. It was mostly the poor that rode the Brown Between. Its primary purpose was to shuttle the cleaning staff, rat catchers, dishwashers, fast food short order chefs, sheet metal deburrers, and other employees of undesirable servitude to and from their overcrowded residential complexes on an impossibly rickety set of tracks-and the Brown Between was the only line in the city that still seemed to be on tracks. When the seats were comfortable they felt infested with unimaginable insects. And when they weren’t comfortable? The fabric looked frightfully diseased and the insects actually crept up everyone’s legs.

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by Damon Martin

Dressing like a nerd has become the “in” thing to do (which is a little worrying when you consider yesterday’s “in” is today’s “out”). Personally I’ve been dressing like a nerd pretty much my whole life, because well, I’m a huge nerd – so I’ve little choice but to ride the wave (even if it beaches me in fashion oblivion in 6 months time). That said, there’s nothing wrong with being a stylish nerd (at least for now) and so with that I present “Geek Chic: The May the Force Be With You” edition.

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by Ryan Stewart

William Gibson will always be the cyberpunk prophet, the man whose Hugo-winning 1984 debut novel Neuromancer, about a future underworld dystopia where radically advanced computing possibilities exist in tandem with sex, drugs and political skullduggery, introduced the notion of “cyberspace” to the public and predicted the emergence of a world wide web, along with computers of ever-increasing intelligence and dubious motive. In the post-September 11th world, however, his attention has increasingly focused not on a new imagined future (the branch of Matrix-style cyber fiction his work spawned chugs along regardless) but on the complexities of the present. In a recent NYT op-ed about Google’s tightening grip on our lives, Gibson conceded that “science fiction never imagined Google” and characterized the search engine as a “coral reef of human minds” with an impact so potentially transformative that it should cause us to consider new ideas like “training wheel” identities for today’s minors, whose every stupid, impolitic thought is being cached to their potential future detriment.

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by AJ Focht

School is back in session and this is your chance to grab that nerdy guy (or geeky girl) that you missed out on last year. But before you rush in head first there are a few things you should know.

While Bob Suicide has been helping all you geeks get down with the right look (and smell!), I thought I would go a step further and offer tips for those of you who are perhaps contemplating dating a nerd for the first time. First of all, bear in mind the rules and rituals of geek bonding are very different from those that apply when you’re dating a member of the general population. Nerds tend to be a bit more, let’s admit it, eccentric than, well, normal people. What makes us nerds so great is that we fully commit ourselves to a project, or video game, or whatever – in the extreme. This can also be a drawback if you are not well versed in the ways of nerdom. Some of our habits, hobbies, and even speech can come off wrong if you are not privy to the way of the nerd.

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By Edward Kelly

It starts innocently enough. A woman with red hair and a nervous smile sits in a non-descript room where the lighting is perfunctory at best. Behind her the wall is textured and yellow-ish. The woman rifles through an off-camera plastic bag. She holds up a receipt showing that the product in the bag was purchased recently (if memory serves, the timestamp on the receipt read August 30, 2010, around 2:45 p.m.).

The video is eight minutes long and therefore above average for something on YouTube. I’ve described the first minute or so because, since I saw it, the woman in the video, Karen Alloy (a popular YouTube vlogger with the user name “Spricket24”), has changed the settings and the video is now logged as private. If the description above sounds downright banal, well, that’s because it is. In fact if it weren’t for the title I would’ve bailed on it after the first 15 seconds. But the title of this video is “How To Take A Pregnancy Test” and thus I am in it for the long haul.

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by Andrew E. Konietzky

This week I had a great round-table discussion with friends concerning the state of new media and the changing world around us. Being a writer and podcaster, I have long been a supporter of CC. Whoops! I may have to give a bit of a refresher course first: Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that works to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational and scientific content) in “the commons” – the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, uses, re-purposing and remixing. So I sat down to do a bit of research for my benefit and to show I am not created just out of cheesy films, zombies and strange culture. Well, actually I am, but I do have a stake in this changing world of media.

The world is now a hyper-expanding WikiNation, with information flowing back and forth faster than ever before. Plug in your cranial jack and download the info-burst on this documentary from the global networks. Rip: A Remix Manifesto, in which web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers. He is also the web producer of HomelessNation.org, a web project dedicated to bridging the digital divide and allowing everyone to participate in online culture. Brett is one of Canada’s first video bloggers and has been working with youth and media for over 10 years, and is a founding instructor of the Gulf Islands Film and Television School.

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