Get your geek on: a GEEKOMANCY giveaway!: seanan

Get your geek on: a GEEKOMANCY giveaway!

I am a total geek. I have never tried to conceal my geekiness, choosing instead to embrace it for the wonderful thing that it is. Without my geeky pastimes, I wouldn't have the same friends, the same toys...the same life. I don't define myself by my geeky passions, but I can't pretend that they haven't defined me throughout my existence. Much like a bonsai is shaped by wire and scissors, I have been shaped by the X-Men and horror movies and roleplaying games and mythology, and I like me this way.

All things considered, it's probably not a surprise that when I was offered the chance to blurb Michael Underwood's Geekomancy, I said "sure, why not." A magic system based on and powered by the geeky joys that run my universe? Yes, please. And to no one's shock or amazement, I adored it. It's fun, it's peppy, it's about people I recognize, because they're the kind of people I voluntarily surround myself with every day of my life. The sequel, Celebromancy, came out recently, and is even more fun.

But here's the thing: these books are e-only, which means they miss out on bookstore browsers and surprise eyes, and too many of the awesome geeky people I know haven't encountered them or had the opportunity to give them a try. So I asked Michael's editor if I could do an e-book giveaway for the first book, to get people hooked on the series, and he said sure (after he finished blinking at me a great deal). And so I now present...

SEANAN GIVES AWAY SOMEONE ELSE'S BOOKS FOR A CHANGE!

This giveaway is for three electronic copies of Geekomancy by Michael Underwood. The limitations:

1. You will need to get the book through a specific channel (the publisher's website), because what I have are download codes.
2. The book is not going to be "Kindle ready," and may not be transferable onto a Kindle without evil magic.

To enter, leave a comment with your geekiest moment. No geek is too great! I, and the Random Number Generator, will select three winners on Friday, June 28th. Open to US residents only (sorry), please leave your comment on the entry itself; comments on comments will not be eligible to win.

Game on!

bzarcher

June 24 2013, 19:24:30 UTC 4 years ago

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I got a date with a very lovely lady because I was able to let her know what that year's BotCon exclusive TFs were.

bercilakslady

June 24 2013, 19:24:59 UTC 4 years ago

Probably my geekiest moment was noticing a professor reading something in Old Norse with Old English pronunciation.

Or maybe having a serious discussion about fanfic during a religious celebration. (Shavuot, for those curious among you.)

faecat

June 24 2013, 19:26:47 UTC 4 years ago

I got Bruce Boxleitner to pose for a picture with me while holding an orange plastic dinosaur named Sir Richard, the Head Ambassoraptor of the Dinosaur Bureau of Travel and Tourism.

lietya

June 24 2013, 19:28:32 UTC 4 years ago

Once, for fun, I and a friend conversed entirely in "Darmok at Tanagra" type references. And I totally unconsciously did the Data head tilt while we were doing it, too.

suearmitage

June 24 2013, 19:28:39 UTC 4 years ago

My geekiest moment was meeting Peter V Brett at a book signing and him saying "so you're 'twitter sue'"!! Lost for words..

tylik

June 24 2013, 19:31:55 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 24 2013, 19:33:57 UTC

I was

a) playing Dungeons and Dragons b) on a Friday night in c) a Microsoft conference room (where our group usually met) with d) a group largerly composed of microsoft game developers (though I did high capacity network servers myself thank you) and as we were getting our stuff together someone started reading through a nerdity exam.

And in this august company... I still got the highest score.

[ETA: Seriously, I almost didn't even want to admit that.]

jenk

June 25 2013, 01:04:26 UTC 4 years ago

.....this was probably around the timeframe I was playing Magic in a Microsoft conference room with Windows developers, right?

4 years ago

hrhleia

June 24 2013, 19:32:22 UTC 4 years ago

My geekiest moment was probably posing next to a Dalek at NYComicCon with my sonic screwdriver, TARDIS t-shirt, trench coat and Converse hi-tops. Alternatively, every time I've dressed up as Agatha Heterodyne for Connecticon. :D

geekhyena

June 24 2013, 19:33:54 UTC 4 years ago

I met my boyfriend because I'd printed off that day's page of Girl Genius (the one where Agatha finds out that Gil managed to save Punch and Judy) and brought it to work because I was overcome by the feels. He came up behind me, saw what I was reading, and recited the last panel line-for-line. We then skivved off work to spend 3 hours geeking out together, and then he introduced me to his wife (also a huge geek), and we've been together as a polycule for 3 years now.

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reedrover

June 24 2013, 19:39:13 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 25 2013, 00:20:41 UTC

My geekiest moment lately was: while attending an "alternative lifestyles" convention in a large metropolitan city, during the Saturday night open bar mixer, in the middle of the meat market, I ended up playing boardgames on networked iPads in the middle of the bar with a bunch of like-minded people.

My nerdiest moment still rests back in high school, when Dad nearly ran off the road in excitement when we saw the license plate KMNO4 on a purple porsche. We all got it at the same time and chorused "potassium permanganate!"

Understand, though, that I went to a science and technology magnet school, so the bar for "geek" and "nerd" was pretty high.

soon_lee

June 24 2013, 19:41:11 UTC 4 years ago

Emailed Charles Stross on how much I loved "The Atrocity Archives", and included some typos I found: got asked if I wanted to be a test reader for him.

tarysande

June 24 2013, 19:47:38 UTC 4 years ago

My senior year of high school (lo these many years ago), my final acting project was a live-action Sailor Moon movie I wrote, starred in, directed, wrangled/made costumes for, and enticed (let's go with enticed) all my friends into participating in.

(I also had a bonus role as Luna's voice, though my black cat with moon-sticker and peanut-butter-on-nose-for-fake-talking provided the visual.)

inaurolillium

June 24 2013, 19:53:41 UTC 4 years ago

Um. Science geek, general knowledge geek, or pop culture geek?

Science geek: Physics class, high school, the time I worked out the longest possible way around to figure out a problem from the book. The rest of my group thought it couldn't possibly work, so we took it to the teacher, who looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Yes, of course, you could do it that way, and you'd get the right answer, but why would you want to?"

General knowledge geek: Sitting in a coffee shop just after college, and a group of slightly younger students, high school seniors or college freshmen at the next table arguing about our system of government. One of them turns around suddenly and says to me, "A democracy is when everybody votes on everything, and a republic is when representatives are chosen to vote for groups of people. Which one is the US system."

"Neither," says I. "We have a hybrid system called a representative democracy or a democratic republic." He tried to insist it had to be one or the other, and I gently (or not so gently) explained that that was a false dichotomy, because whatever he wanted, what we actually had was a hybrid system.

Pop culture:
Asking job applicants, as part of their interviews, "You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not with out your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?" I always swore that if anybody got the reference, they got the job. No one did.

colliemommie

June 24 2013, 21:15:01 UTC 4 years ago

Unless they pulled a laser blaster on you. No job if you shoot the interviewer.

museclio

June 24 2013, 19:58:15 UTC 4 years ago

I got Lucy (the fossil, not the cartoon) tattooed on my back. It's on the entire top right quadrent so I can now joke that I am flagging bottoming to geekyness.

June 24 2013, 20:05:45 UTC 4 years ago

Verra nize! Your story is also pretty awesome, imho. Which Zeetha outfit did you cosplay?

sabine791110

June 24 2013, 20:02:56 UTC 4 years ago

I love this book! I listened to it first on Audible, then had to get the Kindle version so I could snuggle it. Drake Winters is my new fictional boyfriend.

pirate_nami

June 24 2013, 20:10:19 UTC 4 years ago

I met my now-fiance through an online Sailor Moon RPG, We are now happily geeks together. :)

aliciaaudrey

June 24 2013, 20:17:10 UTC 4 years ago

But it is so hard to choose! I will present a selection of one sentence moments/facts.

My father used to relate (from memory) the plot of various classic works of science fiction and fantasy to me as bedtime stories.

I met my husband on a Final Fantasy fan website. About a third of our wedding party? Also met through said website. In fact I am occasionally hard pressed to think if people I DON'T know from fandoms of various kinds (because even people I didn't meet through them I tend to have met through people I DID--I think that list right there is pretty much limited to people I know from law school at this point, and most of THEM are obsessed with either Dr. Who or Star Trek.)

Every year for the holidays, I buy my husband the goofiest Deadpool T-shirt I can find.

And I play a completely self centered, stuck up elf mage in a Pathfinder game in a Google conference room on their Back to the Future Floor twice a month.

godream

June 25 2013, 02:03:34 UTC 4 years ago

High-five for RPGs in Google conference rooms -- seriously ideal. If I told my teenage self about the combination of whiteboard walls, always-at-the-ready copiers for characters sheets and post-its for areas-of-effect on boards and pencils of course, surrounded by geeks, and of course infinite soda and snacks, she ... would continue working her rear off to get there, I guess?

(My group plays 4e, because we are shameless hack-and-slashers at heart. But our floor theme is movies set locally, so it's not quite so awesome as Back to the Future.)

apocalypticbob

June 24 2013, 20:19:23 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 24 2013, 20:20:07 UTC

At Planet Comicon in Kansas City this year, Nicholas Brendan, aka Xander Harris from Buffy, noticed me sitting in the front row in my Steampunk harlot cosplay costume. He was in the middle of answering a question that was asked to the panel of him and Clare Kramer (aka Glory) and he did a double take and asked me if I was actually resting my head on my boobs. I said yes and did my signature Faceboob. He and Clare lost it, and asked me to stand up in front of the room of 500 people and show them what was so funny. I complied. Loved that I could give a moment of laughter to someone who gave us 7 years of entertainment. Also broke Wil Wheaton completely in the autograph line. It was a good weekend.

melchar

June 24 2013, 20:24:42 UTC 4 years ago

Geekiest moment - Lo now many, -many- years ago I was at the 1977 Eastercon in LA - mainly there to referee Dungeon & Dragons. The elevators were having major problems & sometimes stalled between floors.

So I'm in one of the elevators - with my D&D stuff - and there's this other guy in there with me and the elevator has stalled out for a couple minutes. He asked about my pile of gaming stuff and I gave a quick explanation of D&D. Then he told me to make sure I was at the new movie panel in the main ballroom that evening because he was in the movie. I promised to be there - and was. It was for 'Star Wars' [long before it got subtitled 'A New Hope'] & the guy was Mark Hamill.

glad2dance

June 24 2013, 20:25:17 UTC 4 years ago

My geekiest moment is when a friend and I made up a cipher like the one Dorothy L. Sayers wrote about in Have His Carcase, and went around posting ciphertext on the walls of our dorm.

Second geekiest is probably re-enacting the first dance scene in Pride and Prejudice between Lizzy and Darcy at a costume Ball, including the dance (from the BBC miniseries version) and the dialogue.

June 25 2013, 01:05:19 UTC 4 years ago

Sayers reference!

catsittingstill

June 24 2013, 20:25:49 UTC 4 years ago

I guess that my geekiest moment was collecting data on protein crystals at the Advanced Photon Source (which is the synchrotron near Chicago.) Once you had the crystal mounted and frozen to vitreous ice and all ready to go you had a button you had to push. You then had 1 minute to get out of the little room with the diffractometer before the door closed and one minute after that before the shutter opened and the xray beam was on. You *really* wanted to make it out of the room before your minute was up because while there was a panic button, it shut down the ring--the synchrotron itself. Which stopped work at every beamline (I think there were sixty or so) all the way around the ring.

Everything went smoothly--I even ran things by myself for about four hours at the end of our 24 hour shift. But it was a little nerve-wracking.

I still have the ID card they gave me to be able to get in and out of the facility and use the bathrooms and stuff. It's long-expired now but I never had the heart to get rid of it.

dragonsong

June 24 2013, 20:25:57 UTC 4 years ago

I just bought my husband polo shirts with a Dalek on one, and the Imperial crest on the other. Hey, 2nd anniversary gifts are cotton! Unfortunately, nobody at his work gets either of the shirts.

anna_sinistra

June 24 2013, 20:33:03 UTC 4 years ago

Got to pose in a Tardis on Free Comic Book Day.

paradisacorbasi

June 24 2013, 20:36:41 UTC 4 years ago

My geekiest moment:

That one time I did an image set on my LJ of "the Badger song" but illustrated by Star Trek references.

Bashir, Bashir, Bashir, bashir
Bashir, Bashir, Bashir, bashir
Bashir, Bashir, Bashir, bashir
Crusher, Crusher
FRAKES! FRAKES! IT'S JONATHAN FRAKES!

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