You will be notified by email when the rolls of Gaming Paper have been sent. :) Enjoy!
Ms. Norton's entry was chosen by the 'pick a folded slip of paper out of a hat' method. (After all entries from various sites were munged into a single document, printed, separated and folded identically. We're so scientific and high tech!)
Thank you to all who participated! Keep an eye on this space for future giveaways of cool, geeky swag.
Just a quick reminder that our Super Fantastic Gaming Paper Giveaway closes tonight at midnight EDT. Get your entries in before then. We will announce the winners on Friday.
Remember, your entry must include some way to contact you, so be sure to include your email address when you comment here.
Contest is open only to residents of the Continental US, GC bloggers are not eligible (sorry, Chicas). Void where prohibited.
That's right! GeekaChicas is giving away two rolls of Gaming Paper (as reviewed by KitchenJedi here):
One roll 1 inch squares, and
One roll with 1 inch hex.
Both are durable, reusable, and easily disposable!
To enter, leave a comment below answering the question, "What game would you use the paper to play?"
Additional ways to enter:
1. Friend GC on Facebook and leave a comment with your answer.
2. Post about the giveaway to your FB wall along with your answer.
3. Follow us on Twitter and tweet about the giveaway (once daily), or
4. Blog about the giveaway (and send us a link to
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)
5. Send a picture of yourself/your friends dressed as your favorite RPG character to
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(pictures may be displayed on GeekaChicas when winners are announced).
Come on, Sisters! Let's get our Geek On!
(Sorry, this giveaway is open only to those with a U.S. shipping address. GeekaChicas writers and their families may not participate. )
Let's take a minute to shower some geek love on our most prolific and acclaimed Chica, Pearce.
See, her birthday is this week, and even though she's way busy with her absinthe company, Southern Alchemy, we wanted to mark the day. Though it seems her sweet fella, Circus Boy, beat us to the punch with this lovely, geeky confection:
They say baking is like chemistry, so I guess we know it's true.
So, let us lift our glasses to a woman with enough energy to write for three websites, run two companies, tutor school children on the side and still look fabulous doing it. (Seriously, she's like a cross between some super-intelligent, alien ferret and a supermodel.)
Obviously, it's the viral videos. It all started about four years ago, when the made their first YouTube music video in the back yard. The song is called A Million Ways:
Of course, they didn't really go viral until the utterly famous treadmill dance for Here it Goes Again:
What made that the one that got everyone talking and sharing the video? Well, it was something we hadn't seen before, obviously done on the cheap, but still very impressive. It was a real conversation piece. I got this video sent to me from maiden aunts I didn't even know had computers. It got the word out, in a big way. This was not what made them beloved of Geeks, though.
See, Geeks appreciate flash and all that, but what we love more than anything is seeing someone do something amazing with something ordinary. We love the 3D virtual goggles made from Wii controllers, we love Diet Coke/Mentos rockets and we love seeing regular guys do unusual things well, and with great confidence. Perhaps it is also that their bland expressions and concentration remind of us of how we would look doing such things. I mean, we can't all be Adam Lambert or Lady Gaga. It's proof that folks who look like engineers can still be cool.
In the wake of their amazing internet success, they have made many videos. None have really gone way viral like Here it Goes Again, but mostly we were paying attention. Then came This Too Shall Pass. Their first go was a hoot:
There is much to love in this. The catchy song, the high levels of visual interest and complexity. The scope and spectacle. But this isn't the one that went viral (that being a relative term).
Still, for some reason they made another video for the same song. A video of such Geektastic destructive complexity that the internet has once again exploded. I have seen this video in no less than twelve places in the last 24 hours, not including the half a dozen posts by personal friends and emails from maiden aunts.
I could go into why this is The One, but I think it's pretty obvious. Even though you've probably seen this by now, here it is. (And yes, I know I'm a sheep. Baaaa!)
Here we are at the heart of the true Geek spirit, the Internet. What tends to distinguish geeks from the rest of the general population is our desire to learn things and know stuff when no one is forcing us to do so. But how that spirit finds expression in the vastness of the Internet is another matter entirely.
It is often, as they say in 'net vernacular, kind of wack. Odd. I'm always excited to find new bits of engaging entertainment on the 'net that are also subversively informative. No one is forcing anyone to learn about the things they really need to know to make their way in the world, but it's out there, if you can find it, and a lot of the stuff produced by geeksmanages to be both smart and fun.
So, in that spirit, here is the awesome, relatively new video from EconStories on Youtube (via BoingBoing):
Let me show you something that is really, really awesome. "Adspecs" have been in the planning stages for a couple of years, but the word is now getting out about them, and they're such a cool idea that it makes me proud to be human. Here's a quick video that explains what they are:
Did you see that? Adspecs are glasses with oil-filled lenses that can be adjusted to a variety of prescriptions, on the fly. For a lot of people with ordinary bad eyesight and little or no money, these could be a game-changer. Farsighted, nearsighted -- heck, they can even be bifocal if you don't mind a little dialing between looking near and far.
Now, I know that there are organizations of eye care professionals who go into countries where the population is under-served and help people get glasses through donations, but I'm sure there time could be better spent focusing on the cases that really require their expertise -- vision problems that can't be easily corrected by a simple prescription. Plus, these things are a LOT cheaper to get in the hands of people who need them.
I first heard about them on Gizmodo (OMG, LOVE Gizmodo - so much concentrated cool gadgetry), and found it a revolutionary, cool idea. As someone whose life has been much the better for access to first-world eye care, I speak from experience when I say that being able to see clearly can make the difference between a productive life and life-long dependence.
"They require very little training to dispense, can be dispensed by an organisation's volunteers in the field, they only need to be delivered once and can make a difference for years afterwards, and are inherently safer (and less valuable on the black market) than items such as prescription medications."
The current design costs about $20.00 a pair which is a tremendous bargain, but still well above what their goal cost-per-unit. This is a work in progress, but one I can certainly get behind.
I know most of us here at GC love to read. I can't even imagine what my life would have been like without books. So the idea that a $20.00 donation might give someone the chance to read -- or get a job, or heck, just a chance to see the world around a little clearer -- really excites me.
This is a big day for me, personally. My family wasn't huge about football (never having lived in a city with a team for very long -- Army brats) but we always watched the Super Bowl. Now I'm in my new city and they're in the Super bowl for the first time ever. New Orleans has always loved the Saints, no matter what, and even had they lost, they would have been welcomed back at heroes.
Let me give you and idea about what this has done for NOLA, a generally euphoric town at this time of year, regardless. No establishment without a television and alcohol service stayed open past 4pm today. The grocery stores had replaced the store music with CDs of Saints music (and there are scads of them - this IS a city known for it's music, yanno) for the last month.
New Orleans is still struggling to recover from Katrina, in more ways than one. We needed this. We really did. Don't b'lieve me? Take a look at this:
New Orleans is entirely unlike any other place on the planet, and I'm utterly in love with my new home. My usual post- SuperBowl fun is to take a look at the ads and pick a favorite -- something that we will likely do very soon. But right now I'm just going to leave you with this:
Those of you who havebeen around here for a bit maybe acquainted with our resident purveyor of snarky movie recaps, Fluffy Bunny. You may not know that Fluffy (otherwise known as Lisa), besides having a great wit and writing for us here, makes her living as a self-employed artist. She is based in Orlando, and also has an internet shop, F-Bod Studios, where she offers both her art and her gift of snark for us to enjoy.
I've always been impressed by her, making a life for herself with her art and wit -- and all on her own terms. Like many self-employed folk in recent years, Lisa had to make the choice between food and shelter and health insurance. (I know how this feels, too -- my Beloved and I have been self-employed for years, and now pay more per month to ensure our family of four than we do for housing, and we've reduced our coverage every year. It's only by the grace of God (and the fear of losing our children's future to catastrophic illness and financial ruin) that we remain among the lucky insured.)
It's not a new thing -- lots of people in America have had to make that choice. More and more every year. Consider this fifteen-year-old clip from The Simpsons:
Recently Lisa was rushed to the hospital with heart palpitations. Soon she discovered that her heart is fine, that her condition is easily treatable and not currently life-threatening -- but it could easily become so without surgery.
Basically, she has uterine fibroids that cause such severe bleeding every month that she is dangerously anemic. So anemic that her organs don't get enough oxygen, and her heart becomes stressed trying to push what hemoglobin she has around to everywhere that needs it. She's on iron supplements, but whatever she manages to build up is lost every 28 days. The only treatment that can help at this point is a hysterectomy.
No big deal, right? It's a fairly routine surgery, and one her gynecologist will gladly do for $2700.00 up front, which Lisa simply doesn't have. She's exhausted the options available to her through hospital programs (and they are more than willing to let her pay off her recent $8,000.00 bill over time). But she falls in that sweet spot financially -- the one between being well-off enough to afford medical care or health insurance on her own and being poor enough to qualify for medicaid or other state-funded programs.
So Lisa, our own Fluffy Bunny, is stuck waiting for a relatively simple health problem to become a life-threatening one -- which it definitely will long before she can save up the $2700 for the surgery. AND once it has to be done in an emergency situation, the cost will likely be much higher, not only for her. I used to work for the government, and I've seen it happen a lot, something treatable, left untreated, ends up ruining people financially and causing the health care system to absorb the rest of the cost.
This is a good thing for exactly no one. Especially not for my friend, and you can help her.
This article is scattered with images of her art, her wit, and her livelihood. And now I'm going to beg you to help raise money for Fluffy's operation. Spread the word! If we can get enough people to donate a dollar or five, maybe we can save her the expense of another ER visit or however many it takes until they decide she's close enough to death to warrant an emergency operation. Things being what they are, I know few of us are in a position to give large amounts. But if you donate a little and help us spread the word, we can help.
Together, we can help. I'm even putting a up this handy button, to make things easy. It's for a PayPal account dedicated to Fluffy's Bye-Bye Woman-Part That is Killing Me Fund. (The Human Fund is the actual name that comes up, and everything donated goes straight to her.)
Also, if any of the designs or slogans scattered around this article catch your fancy, you can buy them on a variety of products here. She's got some freaking awesome t-shirts.
It should come as a surprise to no one that companions from the Doctor Who reboot (2005 to present) took the highest places in our poll, because the earlier Who iterations are no longer being regularly broadcast. It seems the original series has been relegated to the purview of die hard Who enthusiasts and pre-Eccleston purists. (As hard as it may be to believe, I know at least two people personally for whom there never will be a Doctor after Tom Baker. Baker was the Doctor of my childhood - mostly due to a ten-year lag that used to exist between shows airing on the BBC and the same shows entering the US airwaves - so I have a great sympathy for them. However, they've missed some great stuff, especially lately.)
I urge all of you new Who enthusiasts to check out the old show on Netflix. Yes, sometimes the sets wobble and the Daleks are thwarted by stairs, but the show transcended its trappings. If it had not, there would not have been a reboot. Pinky swear.
Now that I've had nearly a month to heal the blow to my heart that was The End of Time, and it is time to face up to the end of Ten as well as the end of our Who Companion poll. *sniffle* Thanks to all who voted!
The iPad seems, on the face of it, like it would be ideal for someone like me - someone who is less than super tech savvy. It is a sexy piece of technology. It's beautiful, functional and it has hipster cachet.
Here at GC, we're never happier than when our readers engage us in conversation. No, really. I have always enjoyed being challenged. If no one bothers to question our assumptions, how can we grow? When I went through the "Why is the sky blue?" phase, my family actively encouraged me to ask more questions. (I'm a parent now, and I've got to tell you, I have more respect for my folks every day.) So, I find it actively enjoyable to discuss points of interest in the articles I write. (This is a different thing entirely from trollishness, which amounts to "[insert noun/pronoun] sucks" or the YouTube version, "shut up and show your boobies." Those, while amusing in their own way (Ha, HA! Inarticulate boy is inarticulate!) are not really engaging.)
So it was with great delight that I sorted through the mailbag to find the following letter from Mark Warren, a Whedon fan and writer of fanfiction, who had a few bones to pick with my recent article, Dollhouse: Did I Fall Asleep? Mr. Warren was kind enough to let me share his letter with GeekaChicas readers. It is presented here with some serious formatting issues I could not fix, though I tried. (Our site software has some issues with the text, though it looks fine when we go in to our WYSIWYG editor.)
There are more spoilers than in my original article beyond this point.
Most of you probably don't know that my day job used to be copy editing. Basically, people paid me to make sure their important documents didn't accidentally make them look like morons to people with a decent grasp of grammar and punctuation. I worked on a contract basis, and I found it rather surprising how much my skills were worth on the open market, considering that anyone who halfway paid attention in English class should know what I know. This was both encouraging (Woot! I can has Monies!) and depressing. (The the high-powered business people who could pay me $30.00 an hour to toss their jargon-filled corporate word salad into something recognizable as English obviously didn't need to know they shouldn't use an apostrophe to pluralize to be, well, high-powered business people. I console myself that this basic life skill could have saved them a lot of money. Money I was happy to take from them. Chumps.)
I soon discovered that online communications had new and exciting ways for people to violently misunderstand each other. Ways that could, perhaps, be helped by good punctuation, but never completely eradicated. In online written communication, we only get words. Things like inflection, tone and facial expression are lost entirely. Which is to say, it becomes much harder to express the concept of sarcasm elegantly.
Inventive netizens found ways around this in this in annotations used to make their meanings clearer, such as [/sarcasm] or [j/k], and let us not forget the wide array of emoticons and smileys with which we are now quite familiar. (Such as )
Still, netizens of note would occasionally remark on the lack of a clear way to denote sarcasm in writing. (Most recently by Neil Gaiman, who was told by his readers that such a mark existed in Ethiopian - an interesting side note, if not terribly useful to those of us unfamiliar with the language.)
Well, my friends, our prayers have been answered! The US firm Sarcasm, Inc. stepped up to fill the void by inventing the SarcMark, a downloadable punctuation mark you can install on your computer or texting device for the low, low price of $1.99. It currently supports most Microsoft platforms and many popular devices, and they are working on expanding to Mac as well. Right now it is available in graphic as well as in font formats, but the font version (which can be re-sized or appear in different colors) can only be seen by another device that has the SarcMark installed.
"That's a great idea," you say, "but will it catch on?" It's too soon to tell, but early sales are promising. The inventors are also reporting that they have been approached by several software companies and social networking sites who have an interest in incorporating the mark into their applications.
They even have a commercial on YouTube:
Only time will tell whether this will catch on, but I hope it does. I've always been proud of the inventiveness and can-do spirit of the Internet, and this underscores the way 'net culture inspires people to do things for themselves. Feel the lack of a sarcasm mark? Invent one!
That's what the Internet is all about!*
*Well, okay. What the internet is all about in a social evolution sort of way. In terms of commerce, it's still largely about the porn. But that's a topic for another day.
For those of you who have followed this space for any amount of time, it will come as no surprise that many of us here at GC are Joss Whedon fans. I'm no exception. I am, quite possibly, genetically predisposed to love anything Joss Whedon writes.
Last spring I was looking forward to Dollhouse, even though the premise (a group of programmable people sent out on assignments with different personalities and memories each week - most of the assignments naturally being sexual/romantic in nature) sounded strangely misogynistic and dark. Joss Whedon gets a lot of leeway with me, because he's Joss. I set my DVR with hope in my heart.
It was not love at first sight, let me tell you. That series opener was so narratively jumbled that I had a hard time watching the whole episode. I had a hard time watching it to the end, and I can lose an hour on YouTube watching videos of cats eating broccoli.
So why was this first episode of the new show helmed by my favorite television writer less compelling than, say, gonads and strife? I'll tell you.
I dunno about you, but is seems to me that getting to play dress-up and pretend to be a Doctor Who villain on the TARDIS set -- with John Barrowman and David Tennant, no less... I get tingly just thinking about it.
Therefore, I have tremendous vicarious pleasure in seeing Tim Ingham do just that. Lucky bastard.
I think my personal heaven would be something like that. *sigh*
I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it is unique. I suppose it is better for the bears than sitting in a bear pit all day, waiting for tourists to throw you apples.
Happy Holidays, everyone! Here are some fun little things to give you a smile.
First, from the Rebel Viral Team, we have Jack Bauer interrogating Santa Claus:
Now, torture is no laughing matter, but outrage hasn't worked all that well to combat it, so I figure satire is the next best thing.
Next, here's a video that does its best to bring the funny as a Geek's Guide to Surviving Christmas. However, it gets triple Grinch-marks from me for assuming that "girls" don't want DVDs or video games, which is lame. Ovaries and Geek cred are NOT mutually exclusive, bozo! But I put it up anyway, because it says "Happy Christmas" in binary at the end, and that's just cool.
This time of year, it becomes very difficult to express the sentiments of the season without references to our personal religious practices. On that note, I'd like to share the following video, from my heart. It features God singing a lovely Christmas medley with Bing Crosby.
Did I mention that David Bowie is my god? No? Oops. But seriously, the next one is truly lovely, whatever your opinion of The Monkees.
Last, but not least, a special one from our own Fluffy Bunny:
I don't even know how to introduce this video. It's so packed with awesome, I don't even care that it's going to break the front page untill the next article goes up.
I would like to give credit to Fluffy Bunny for bringing it to my attention, and apologize for not having it up sooner (I had internet connectivity issues). Without further ado, I give you the rockingest Harry Potter-related Parody I've ever seen:
You know, sometimes at this time of year, I get to feeling that something is missing. Gifts, parties, increased charitable donations, kitschy stuff on TV, lights (open flame and electric), shrubberies of various sizes, people reading from scriptures that are meaningful to them and their faith communities.
Food. Lots and lots of food.
But I ask you, where are the blood-thirsty pirates? I found 'em! So, for those of you with pirate-shaped holes in your heart this holiday season, I give you Captain Dan & the Scurvy Crew's A Pirate Christmas:
)
Those of you who havebeen around here for a bit maybe acquainted with our resident purveyor of snarky movie recaps, Fluffy Bunny. You may not know that Fluffy (otherwise known as Lisa), besides having a great wit and writing for us here, makes her living as a self-employed artist. She is based in Orlando, and also has an internet shop, 
self-employed for years, and now pay more per month to ensure our family of four than we do for housing, and we've reduced our coverage every year. It's only by the grace of God (and the fear of losing our children's future to catastrophic illness and financial ruin) that we remain among the lucky insured.) 
