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!

klwilliams

June 24 2013, 20:38:45 UTC 4 years ago

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My (shared) geekiest moment: Chaz and I went to see the Difference Engine at the Computer History Museum. After a demo, we went over to look at it more closely, and Chaz said, "This is the geekiest place I can think of. Will you marry me?" (I said yes.)

ladymurmur

June 24 2013, 20:58:42 UTC 4 years ago

The first ereader that I ever touched was David Weber's kindle, when he was GoH at a local con.

When I bought my first kindle just a short while later, one of the very first books that I read thereupon was On Basilisk Station, the first of the Honor Harrington series, by David Weber.

There was a moment where I'm reading on my e-reader about Honor Harrington reading on her "book reader", on my kindle, like the one that David Weber owned... I still get shivers thinking about that. And then I giggle. :-)

(I already own, and thoroughly enjoyed, Geekomancy, so please, RNG, pass me over - just this once!)

kshandra

June 24 2013, 21:07:01 UTC 4 years ago

That would have to be the time I sat down, completely at random, to a 4-person game of Magic the Gathering with Richard Garfield and Peter Adkison. (And then promptly played Flashfires without realizing Richard, my partner, was playing a predominantly white deck...oops.)

belegwen

June 24 2013, 21:09:54 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 24 2013, 21:14:38 UTC

I was LARPing with the Quest Game in New England, during the autumn's weekend long game.

I and four other people had ended up bonded to the shards of a powerful artifact. The upside was that this made us invulnerable. The downside was that if we moved more than twenty feet away from each other, we experienced incredible pain. That night as we and several other players were wandering through the woods chasing after something that was marginally plot relevant we came upon a cliff.

As everyone discussed how best to get around this obstacle, the five of us discussed whether it would be a good idea to just jump down, since we wouldn't be hurt. Most of us thought we shouldn't. Then an NPC asks, "Are you standing right there as you have this conversation? Because you," points at one of us, "are to close to the edge. Rock, paper, scissors."

He lost rock, paper, scissors, meaning he was now falling off the cliff. I turn to the NPC and ask, "Is the cliff more than twenty feet high?"

"Yes."

The rest of us stated in unison, "I jump."

Deleted comment

4 years ago

ext_2036792

June 24 2013, 21:28:08 UTC 4 years ago

My husband and I were on our honeymoon in Vegas about 11 yrs ago. They still had the Star Trek setup at the one of the hotels (Hilton?). We decided to have lunch at Quarks and, while we were waiting for our food, a Klingon walked over to our table. I love Klingons. I about passed out. I couldn't talk and blushed beet red. My husband was nice enough to take my picture with the Klingon and ignore my fan girl fit.

zandperl

June 24 2013, 22:12:46 UTC 4 years ago

Last night I was irritated that uploading photos to Flickr from my trip an astronomy conference and observatory was stealing enough bandwidth that it was slowing my stream of Sherlock from Netflix. So I Tweeted about it.

juglore

June 24 2013, 22:18:17 UTC 4 years ago

While I was working for the special collections department of Golden Library on ENMU campus I came across the rough draft for Star Wars Sequel by Leigh Bracket. I held the original draft of Empire Strikes Back in my hands. In my hands!

sleightedge

June 24 2013, 22:39:23 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 24 2013, 22:43:03 UTC

My geekiest moment has probably been talking to Gregory Wilson, my favorite magician, after attending one of his lectures. It was a small group of four or five of us, and he asked our opinion for ways to improve one of the tricks that he'd been doing in his act recently. I managed not to babble and never have I been more grateful for 7 years of mock trial public speaking practice!

alumiere

June 24 2013, 23:15:06 UTC 4 years ago

It's pretty impossible to pick geekiest, so I'll go with the most recent very geeky moment... A couple of weeks ago I marched in LA Pride with the Bentcon contingent, dressed as a gender bent Spider Jerusalem. I was sad that so few people even from Bentcon knew who he was.

bookblather

June 24 2013, 23:20:31 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 24 2013, 23:21:07 UTC

When I first saw Doctor Who, I loved it so much that I seized a blanket and a plunger and proceeded to run around playing Dalek for about three hours.

I was twenty-one at the time. And 100% sober.

eta: OH OH OH And I got to wear Tom Baker's mile-long scarf! THE ACTUAL SCARF. I WORE IT.

resolute

June 24 2013, 23:32:12 UTC 4 years ago

I graduated from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

Olivia Youngers

June 25 2013, 00:19:26 UTC 4 years ago

Not sure it's the geekiest but it is my favorite! The moment I knew my college major would be related to biology:

Sophomore year of high school. The setting: homecoming dance. The moment: I stand in a secluded area with my friend and we observe that there is an empty space around us-- like an awkward bubble amidst a sea of teenage "dancing." I turn to her excitedly exclaiming that we have a zone of inhibition. Her face: confused. My further response: you know, like in the penicillin lecture from class today. Apparently bacteriology was not a topic she wanted to discuss in formal wear. My zone got one person bigger.

silvertwi

June 25 2013, 00:21:01 UTC 4 years ago

1) Joss Whedon was my Commencement speaker. There were special showings of his works, and I got to geek out and talk about the music he writes for a few minutes--with Joss Whedon. (I was dying of curiosity as to how a person who claims no musicianship could write music...and also just wanted to tell him how much I enjoy all the musical jokes in his works.) Also? I/my graduating class got to see Much Ado About Nothing weeks before it was released even in LA and NYC, etc. With a Q&A afterwards. And I high-fived him as I walked up to get my diploma. Best. Graduation. Ever.

2) I am now a sound geek. I work with sound equipment, and am now in love with high-quality headphones. Wicked Girls, in particular, sounds *amazing* with good headphones capable of reproducing the whole range of frequencies. OMG. I am in love with the combination of Sennheiser headphones and Wicked Girls. ... Oh, and I want to do sound design/engineering for a living.

3) For a wedding this past weekend, I tried to write a parody of "Hero of Canton" about the wedding couple, but ran out of time. I plan to finish it and post to youtube, though. :P :D

jenk

June 25 2013, 00:56:39 UTC 4 years ago

An ex told me he first became attracted to me when I was explaining how the FAT file system worked his first week in Microsoft tech support.

birdpooka

June 25 2013, 01:07:36 UTC 4 years ago

The most recent is probably spending about 30 minutes babbling excitedly to my roommate because I finally understood how the density function for a multivariate normal distribution worked well enough to program my own version from mostly scratch.

Other highlights may include the time my date asked what I do and I came up with an improvised 10-minute (illustrated) introduction to acoustic phonetics (carrying graph paper in my wallet is surprisingly useful).

vincentursus

June 25 2013, 01:13:29 UTC 4 years ago

Explaining to my classmates that the wild winged jackalope was endangered because its wings kept getting caught in its antlers.

lapis_lazuli615

June 25 2013, 01:30:07 UTC 4 years ago

Does it count as a geekiest moment that I already own Geekomancy? LOL

joyce

June 25 2013, 02:00:11 UTC 4 years ago Edited: June 25 2013, 03:26:49 UTC

I don't know about the geekiest, but one of the most recent: I was teaching class this spring and made a passing comment about writing fanfic that went right over 59 heads. #60, on the other hand, came up after class and asked me what I write and who I ship. I was pretty amused.

chantry

June 25 2013, 02:12:59 UTC 4 years ago

Before watching "The Man in the Iron Mask" (1998 version), I read the "goofs" page on IMDB and found that someone had tagged the shoes Phillippe is wearing during the final fight in the Bastille as "modern shoes with laces." So I watched closely during that scene, and saw that the shoes did, in fact, have laces - but they were not modern, they were a style called "latchet shoes."

I know this because in addition to all my techno-geeky pursuits, I'm also a historical re-enactor who specializes in 16th-century pike & shot - these are the kind of shoesI wear during events. That's not the geeky part.

The geeky part was going back to IMDB and making a correction to remove that so-called "goof."

And it has, in fact, been removed.

godream

June 25 2013, 02:22:28 UTC 4 years ago

A collective geekiest moment from a lunch conversation at work (we're software engineers, but in retrospect I was a bit outclassed as the only non-physics major in the group):
"Well, if we *were* living in the Matrix, what would be the giveaways? Personally I think that if there were some shortest measurable distance, that would be a sure sign that we were living in a simulation. I mean, that's lazy programming right there, clearly taking a shortcut."
"Yeah, likewise, if there was some maximum speed that it was possible to go. You'd set it really high of course, like hundreds of millions, maybe MAX_INT, and figure nobody would actually run into it..."
"Sure, that would actually be really useful, because then you could more easily parallelize the simulation -- it would be easier to split it over a bunch of machines because you'd know that events sufficiently far apart in space couldn't affect each other within some period of time."
"Hm....."

sanacrow

June 25 2013, 02:24:06 UTC 4 years ago

My first date with my wife was to a Wierd Al concert. The second was to a comic con. We courted working gaming at cons together. I knew she was a keeper when she understood eating ramen and being a day late on the rent to buy a limited edition dolly statue. That was... a couple of decades ago. More recently, when I had to move from forearm crutches to a chair to be able to do cons, she helped me design Oracle cosplay.. (Our preferred used to be Harley and Ivy.)

wild_patience

June 25 2013, 02:27:47 UTC 4 years ago

Not really a contest entry - is this the same Michael Underwood who is partner/husband to Sue Dawe?

teal_cuttlefish

June 25 2013, 02:29:40 UTC 4 years ago

SF Geekery: I had a little pickup truck with the license plate TANJ, which is a curse word in Larry Niven's Known Space series. When I found out he was in town, I got a Sharpie and went to see him. I asked him to sign my truck. He obliged, signing the driver's visor.

The truck is now totaled (I was rear-ended), but I still have the visor. In a small world type story, when I took it to the body shop for evaluation before it was totaled, I told the owner of the shop that my favorite author had signed the visor. He called my husband before I got home to tell me that Larry Niven was his cousin!

Technological and Social Geekery: Years before the Internet was a Thing, I got involved in local BBSes, eventually running my own, "Mom's BBS." I met both my Hubby and my PsuedoSpouse through that board, and was one of the only female sysops in Denver. (Which did entail some unwelcome pursuit from other sysops, unfortunately...) Hubby and I have been married 21 years now, and I've been with PseudoSpouse for 17 years. A fairly long-lived polyfamily.

June 25 2013, 03:12:59 UTC 4 years ago

I was at OryCon in about 1996, standing in line to eat lunch at the hotel coffeeshop, waiting with my partner. We chatted with the couple in front of us while we were waiting, and when the waitress started to lead them to a four-top, they invited us to join them. While we were eating, I managed to sneak a surreptitious glance at the gentleman's badge.

I was eating lunch with Larry Niven.

rickvs

June 25 2013, 02:33:57 UTC 4 years ago

I'm sort of riding on my friend's coattails, but my geekiest moment was probably being one of the groomsmen at the wedding of two athiests, where the musical selections included the theme from "The Greatest American Hero", plus "Under Your Spell", from the musical episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".

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