The Nerd Club(bing)

I love to dance. And by dance, I mean go clubbing. And by clubbing I mean, go to a club. By myself. And dance like a crazy person for about an hour. All the while hoping that everyone will just leave me alone.¹ It might seem odd, but I believe this behavior stems from me being a Geeky Mormon Woman. Even though it’s not exactly Geeky, and not all Mormon.²

So why do I love something that isn’t exactly native to my demographic? And why would my non-applicable demographic be the source of my non-demographic behavior? Well, see, Mormons have this thing where they throw dances for the Youth³ as a way of getting the boys to interact with the girls in some sort of semi-appropriate manner.⁴ In High School, I was unfortunately too nerdy for the Mormons, and too Mormon for most of the nerds, so interactions with boys weren’t exactly plentiful. And these dances were no exception. Since I wasn’t getting asked to dance a lot, I would get bored. And when I get bored I look for something to do. And I was at a dance, so I figured I’d dance.⁵

Dancing rarely looks cool when in freeze frame...

Fortunately for my dancing desires, there were a variety of songs played at these dances. They didn’t just play lame slow songs(the presence of which would sometimes force me to awkwardly ask boys to dance), they also played fast songs. Like YMCA and the Macarena⁶ as well as plenty of other 90s classics that I don’t know the names of.⁷ I really liked it when they played these songs, since you could dance by yourself, and thus avoid that whole awkward thing of dealing with boys. I’m never one to be content with mediocrity⁸, so I started experimenting with how to dance and how I could get my body to move in cool and different ways. And eventually, I got pretty good, and I got pretty confident. To the point that one of my good friends, who was actually a trained dancer, would often comment on how good I was.

So, If I was not a Mormon, there would not have been so many dances for me to go to,⁹ and if I wasn’t a geek, I wouldn’t be so awkward, and prone to experimentation. Thus the origin of my non-standard behavior.

This trend of going to dances and making up my own moves continued through college. But after college, I didn’t exactly feel like crashing college dances. I was all old and graduated with a real job making video games,¹⁰ so I didn’t feel like hanging out on campus anymore. But I still wanted to go dancing. So I decided to try out a *real* club. Cause that’s where adults go dancing, right? And I was an adult, right?¹¹

But these clubs are full of people that are not Mormon, and even though I’m now in Silicon Valley, I don’t think most of them are Geeks either. And honestly, that’s just a real big turn off to me. I went clubbing with a Mormon girlfriend of mine recently, and she made a comment about seeing who could get more numbers,¹² and my response was "what’s the point??" I mean, there were no Mormon boys at the club that I didn’t already know,¹³ and honestly, there aren’t a whole lot of guys that really look like my kind of Geek at these kind of clubs.¹⁴ So even if I just went on one random date with these guys that try and pick up on me at the club, I don’t think I’d really enjoy it. I probably shouldn’t admit it, but I’m kinda a nerd elitist...¹⁵

Even my examples of Nerd "superiority" are Nerdy.
So Meta.

So when I dance, I try to just be as into it and crazy as possible. Cause people don’t bother that crazy person. They let them do whatever it is that crazy people do. And usually, people leave me alone. And when they don’t, it’s usually either to tell me that they think I’m good, or to try and get me to give them some level of physical contact that I’m really not interested in. I like the former, because complete strangers don’t usually stop you in the middle of what you’re doing to tell you a lie. I could really do with out the latter, though.¹⁶

But good dancer or not, all I really want to do at a club is have some fun. And by fun I mean dance. And by dance I mean actually move and do some neat moves. And that’s how this Geeky Mormon Woman hangs at a club.

1 Odd, I know. Normal people go to clubs with others, or in the hopes of meeting others. But I think we’ve established that I am far from normal...
2 The Woman element I guess is applicable... Chicks go to clubs, right? I’m always too busy dancing to notice.
3 What all members from 12 to 18 are called, though you pretty much get treated as a Youth until you are married, no matter how old you are.
4 Cause you sure know they aren’t actually going to ask the girls on dates, even once they turn 16. They might figure out how to do this once they make it to college.
5 Odd, I know. Most people choose to talk or hide in the hallways when they are bored. I’m a rebel like that. And my rebel I mean awkward nerd.
6 The Macarena is cool. Ok, it was cool. Ok, it was stupid, but at least it got people dancing. But bow ties are still cool.
7 I’m not all that great with names and artists. I was singing along to the radio in a store recently, and a girl asked me who the artist was, and I had *no* idea who the artist was, or even what the song was called...
8 Are you really surprised?
9 Like almost one a month during the school year
10 Yes Grandma, that is a real job
11 Sometimes I still have to remind myself of this...
12 Just as a joke.
13 They came with us...
14 Maybe I’m being a bit pre-judgy, but I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting engineers. I think it’s their pasty skin, dark circles under their eyes and the carpel tunnel that gives them away.
15 I’m working on it!
16 Like completely do with out it. How are some men so handsy! And the handsy ones are ruining it for the ones that would be just content with dancing a little...

Geeky Christmas Tree!

As any true geek, I let my geekyness bleed into as many place in my life as I can. This includes my Christmas decorations. Or rather just my Christmas tree, because as a young-ish single woman, I don’t have a lot of motivation to decorate for Christmas. I mean, most years, I’m not even here. And my cats like to eat and knock over all my stuff, especially items new to their environment, so decorations are just asking for trouble.

But even with the feline danger, I just can’t resist a getting a tree. I just get a small tree, so the cats can’t climb it. They limit their destruction to knocking off the low hanging ornaments and drinking the water out of the stand.¹

And as I said, I deck my tree with as many nerdy things as I can find. As long as I can find a way to attach them to my tree. I say things, because we don’t usually buy actual ornaments in my family. We buy other things, like keychains and the like, and then jerry-rig them into ornaments.² But even so, I don't have a whole ton of ornaments. I should fix that.³

Complete with LED lights!

So here’s my tree, in all it’s glory! But you can’t see the awesomenss of each individual ornament, so we’re gonna do a run down of all the Geekiest ornmants on my tree. In no particular order.⁴

I don’t care what the Official Nintendo Docs say. It’s a Wiimote.

First up, is a Wiimote keychain that my very first team lead brought back from E3,⁵ or GDC,⁶ or something. I won it by rolling a D20 and getting the highest roll. So not only is it a geeky thing, from a geeky place, I got it in a pretty geeky manner as well. It’s like Triply Geeky!

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t put keychains on your tree.

Next up is a soot sprite from the Miyazaki films. I’m going to say it’s from Spirited Away. Mostly cause that’s my favorite film of his. I got it in Akihabara on my trip to Japan. So that’s pretty nerdy. You’d think that traveling to Japan would seem like a bigger deal, but it turns out that you’re not really an Anime fan unless you’ve been to Japan. I’m not really joking. Just to go any anime convention. You’ll never find a larger collection of poor high school and college students who have managed to travel abroad a first world country. I have no idea how most of them afforded it. I only went after I had had a real job for over two years.

Major points if you know what this is, even if you don’t know why I’d put it on a tree.

Now, I don’t always buy my ornaments. Sometimes I make them. This wasn’t really intended to be an ornament, but when we were punching holes in our finished products, I realised that it would make a perfect ornament, so I punched my hole in the middle on top, instead of on a corner. So now that I told you all that, do you know what it is? That’s ok, it’s pretty random, really. It’s my test piece from my Carbon Fiber class that I took at Tech Shop.⁷

The largest, and realest ornament.

Now, not everything has a location or creation story. Sometimes I just buy geeky things. Like this DS9 ornament. Now, I can’t remember when,where or why I bought it, other than it was before 2001, and I love Star Trek. Maybe it was on sale, maybe a family member got it for me for Christmas. Maybe I got it for a family member for Christmas, cause it was something that I liked.⁸ Either way, it recently ended back up in my possession.⁹

The coolest part of the DS9 ornament, is that it came with three ships. Unfortunately, none of them are to scale. Either with each other, or the spacestation, but you can put them on the hooks at the top of the pylons, to simulate docking. I just put them on their own hooks, and placed them on my tree as separate pieces. I don’t have a ton of ornaments, so I need to space them out.

DS9 got so much cooler when they got this ship.

I should probably put Voyager on the back side of the tree or something,
but then no one would see it to get the joke.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the Enterprise E...

I do love my Star Trek ornament fleet, but I’ve got plenty of other awesome things to show you.

Anything can be an ornament. You just have to put it on a tree.
This was a mint tin. And it’s not the only one that ended up on my tree.

The Hero of Hyrul! Man, I love Zelda. And by love Zelda, I mean the Zelda games. Because I actually love Link. Cause I’m a girl. And not a lesbian. A friend of mine gave this to me as a part of the wrapping of my Christmas present one year. I immediately decided I needed to turn it into an ornament.

This is supposed to be a pin.

This is from when my parents and I went to the last shuttle launch of the Discovery space shuttle. It was a pretty amazing experience. Obviously, I’d seen the shuttles take off dozens of times on TV and in movies, etc, but when you see it yourself, it all becomes real. We see so many fantastical things on film these days, that I think it’s a bit hard to realise the magnitude of what you’re watching unless you see them in real life. I don’t think space travel was really real in my head until I saw that Shuttle take off. And now they’re all retired... At least I got to have a piece of that history when it was available to have.

And this is a car antenna ball.

Speaking of NASA, I picked this up when I interned at JPL my first summer in College. It sounds a lot cooler than it was. I lived at an observatory, and I wrote a SQL database to interface with a program written in IRAF.¹⁰ I think the coolest part of that internship was being able to tell people for the rest of my life that I interned at NASA.

I bet you can’t guess what this is, or what it’s original purpose was.

So, speaking of space travel, do you know what this is? It’s the StarTours Vehicle! Now, I don’t know if Star Tours is still cool, because they changed it in the last year, and I haven’t been back to Disneyland since it’s changed, but it was my favorite ride when we went to Disneyworld in 2000. So when I went to Disneyland with my family last year, I had to pick up something that was star-tours based. Even though we only went on the ride once. If I’d realized that they were closing it, I’d have probably gone more. I’m terrified that they’ve put too much of the new movies in the updated version... And the new movies are terrible... Oh, and that’s a toy car type thing. It’s got wheels and crud.

This is supposed to be an ornament. But I totally made it myself.

And finally, my masterpiece. I made this for an ornament contest at my first game studio job. I worked on it for like three days straight, and I was so proud. And then I was basically the only entry. So I practically won by default. Not that I really won anything. But I still think this is pretty epic. The N64 controller even has the Z button, you just can’t see it, cause it’s glued onto the wreath of controller wire.

So that’s my Geeky Christmas Tree! It's pretty Geeky, but it could be geekier. I should get some more ornaments, or souvenirs from cons or something. You can never have too geeky a tree. I just wish my cats would stop knocking stuff off. I don't like it when my ornaments make unscheduled travel plans...

Oh no! She’s entering Warp! Not so close to the tree! Think of the cats!

1 My cats like to drink water from anywhere other than their water dish, including, but not limited to, my water glass, the shower, watercolor water, and, of course, the Christmas Tree stand.
2 You’ll notice that I have only one purchased ornament set in this whole article.
3 I have nothing from Portal, Doctor Who, or any fan convention that I've attended. If those things are as important as I claim they are, they definitely should be represented on my tree!
4 Seriously, how I’m supposed to rank-compare Star Wars to Star Trek, much less either of those to NASA?
5 Electonics Entertainment Expo
6 Game Develops Conference
7 The most amazing place on Earth. Google it if you don’t believe me.
8 We do this too often in my family. My Mom always gets my Dad things for Christmas that she wants for herself.
9 Because I wanted to write this post, and I asked my parents to bring it with when they came to visit me recently.
10 If you have even heard of this language, without googling it, I’m sorry.

Wedding Numbers

So as a single Mormon¹ woman, I’m obsessed with my future wedding.

However, I don’t obsess about the same things that normal women might obsess over. Mostly because I’m a geek.

Yes, I do try and think of what cute ways I could include Portal in my wedding invitations, and I dream of how many hits the you-tube video of my incredibly geeky proposal will have, but there’s something involving numbers that I care about even more.

My wedding date.

I started thinking about this in the spring of 2009. My friend was getting married on 6/6/9, which I thought was pretty cool. So even though I was single, and didn’t really have any prospects,² I started thinking about cool dates to get married.

And that’s when I realized that 9/9/9 was like the most awesomest date to get married. Cause back in the ancient times of computer programming,³ programs would often use 999 as an escape character. So you’re escaping single-hood! How clever is that!

But I tend to be practical, and even though I really wanted to, I probably wasn’t going to get married on 9/9/9, so I started to think of other cool dates to get married. Initially, I rejected 10/10/10, because it is too close to my birthday. ⁴ But then it was pointed out to me that in binary 101010=42. If that’s not the most awesomely nerdy wedding date ever, I just don’t know what is. And if I have to explain to you why 42 is cool, well, so long and thanks for all the fish, the world is coming to an end.⁵

My friend wasn’t the only person I personally know that got married on an interesting day. My cousin got married on 10/20/2010. Again, it’s too close to my birthday, and comeon, 10/10/10!! But, even though it’s hard to argue with the awesomeness of 10/10/10, it was probably all booked up cause even if you don't get the nerdyness, there's been a strong trend towards getting married on n/n/n dates, so I applaud her ingenuity. Plus, extra points for using the first two digits of the year. That’s not easy to do.

Now we have to back up a bit here. Cause the awesome date I’d come up with for 2010 was earlier in the year. 3/21/10. Do you get why it's cool? Now this is going to really separate the nerds from the geeks. I’ll give you a hint, you need to reverse the order of the numbers. Give up? It’s the Fibonacci sequence! Yeah, I know, it’s pretty geeky and weird to like the Fibonacci sequence. But I’ve loved it ever since the days of MathNet.⁶ It’s pretty awesome all around, and useful, so you should probably like it, too.⁷

If you remember this, I think we need to get married, just on principle.

But as 2009 drew to a close, it became apparent that I was going to miss this mathematical day. Not to worry, I still had 3/2/11 to fall back on. And it was a more traditional representation of my beloved sequence.⁸

But now it 10/2011. And we’ve got no more binary dates. Well, 11/11/11, but that’s awful close to Thanksgiving, and 111111=63. That’s not very exciting. And I really doubt that I could find a boyfriend and get him to marry me in less than three weeks. That’s pretty fast, even for Mormons.

You could suggest 12/12/12, but that’s really close to Christmas. Besides, there’s no such thing as 2.

So I was about to despair. What could I look forward to now that all the interesting wedding dates have passed??

But then I remembered, the Fibonacci sequence goes on! And the next bit ends in 13! So 5/8/13 could be a very good date! It’s a bit more obscure, but it could definitely work.

And I completely forgot about Pi Day! The most sacred of all geek holidays. Second only to Talk-like-a-pirate day!⁹ And what’s even better, is we’ve got a special, extended edition Pi day coming up! 3/14/15! I’ve got plenty of time between then and now to find me a husband who’s willing to plan our wedding around an inane set of numbers.

And if it takes a really long time, we’ve also got 1/1/23, and an extra awesome mole day of 6/02/23.¹⁰ But I don’t want to tell you how old I’ll be in 2023...Lets just say, I’ll be well out of singles ward range.¹¹

1 Strike that, this is not limited to my culture.
2 Note: Wanting him back really badly doesn’t count as a prospect.
3 i.e. twenty years ago.
4 And who wants your anniversary to be close to your birthday? Then your lame husband is just going to want to get you one gift for both of them. And we all know the strength of your marriage can be measured by the awesomeness of the gifts your husband gives you for important occasions, and if he tries to double up, then you have to divide the awesomeness by 2, making his job even harder, so really, you're doing him a favor by spreading the gifting times out.
5 Ok, I do hope that there are some non-nerds aka, my family, who might be reading this, and they *might* not know about the answer to life, the universe and everything. But then again, even Siri knows that answer. Go ask her.
6 Duh Dun Duh Dun. Duh Dun Duh Dun Dun.
7 It also didn’t hurt that a guy that I had a crush on in High School thought that my Fibonacci sequence program was pretty innovative for using two variables for calculation instead of three. I thought that twenty line program with the peak of my genius for a lot longer that I should have. The funny things men do to you...
8 And by traditional I mean the way I learned it. Apparently kids these days like to start with 0. It’s hard to keep up with the trends sometimes.
9 I kid. I actually think this holiday is rather silly, and I can’t believe it’s been officially recognized. And by officially recognized, I mean large MMOs give you special drops on that day. Actually, I think that makes Pirate day officially more official than Pi Day. I think I’m going to cry.
10 Instead of 6:02 on 10/23. I think there’d be more Mole day celebrations if we ate moles.
11 Singles wards are special Mormon congregations for single members aged 18-30. Yes, Mormons want their young adults to get married so badly they corral them into their own world and don’t let them out until they are married, or full blown menaces to society.

CTRing

For years, I forgot about my CTR ¹ ring.

Actually stands for “I am a Mormon”

See, I’ve been looking for a way to identify myself as Mormon in my geeky settings. Yet somehow a CTR ring never occurred to me. Probably because their ability to influence me to make correct decisions wore off about twenty years ago. And then it was just a small piece of jewelry that just wasn’t as cool as anything else I owned.

I forgot that the real power of a CTR ring is branding.

Since I exist in two subcultures that don't have a lot of overlap, I have to dig to find one in the other. And that’s where branding comes in. For the past few years, I’ve been trying to brand myself as a Geek when I am in Mormon environments. This seemed the best course of action since the most important attribute for my significant other is his faith and standing in the Church. However, despite my clever geeky shirts, necklaces made of resistors, and triforce earrings, I have yet to have a boy come up to me at Institute or another church activity and say “I see that you are a Geek. I am also a Geek, would you like a free meal?”²

As a joke, I even tried to combine my Mormonness and my Geekyness in the form of a charm that is attached to my purse. Behold!

The only thing between you and a world full of deadly neurotoxin.

It’s the Morality Core from Portal! It declares my Geeky love for Portal, and my dedication to not flood the world with deadly neurotoxin! It's my geeky CTR ring! Unfortunately this joke is so obscure I didn't even get it until I explained it to myself. No one else has picked up on it without explanation. And we all know that the mark of a good joke is a lengthy explanation after the punch line. The explanation should be at least two to three times longer than the joke itself. Seriously, the longer the better. Then you know it’s really funny.

Honestly, I don’t know why I try so hard to brand myself as a Geek at church. Anyone that talks to me for more than thirty seconds will figure that out. I guess I’m just hoping that tagging myself will get geeks to talk to me without me having to ferret them out. Unfortunately, I forgot that Geeky men are terrified of all women, even ones who are apparently geeky.

So I’ve started to think that maybe I need to switch my strategy and wear something Mormon in a Geeky environment. But I somehow forgot about my CTR right. Probably because I don’t usually wear rings in my geeky environments. I’m a programmer, so a t-shirt and jeans is my uniform. And I’ve never seen a Mormon-themed t-shirt that I would actually not feel stupid wearing.³

Also, I’ve rarely noticed anyone wearing CTR rings outside of church. And using a CTR ring would probably work better if I was a man. Women tend to look at little things like rings. Men, not so much. Which is why sometimes engaged and married women get hit on. Men just don’t always think to look for *the* ring. However, when married men get hit on, it’s usually because they refuse to wear their wedding rings for some reason or another.⁴ Which sometimes gets me into trouble when I go to Geeky gatherings. I tend to go to these functions, not only too see what people are working on, but also to attempt to pick up men. This has never worked out for me, as of yet, because all the good ones are married.

So now that I’ve remembered my CTR ring, I’ll probably start wearing it to Geeky settings. It can’t hurt, and if anyone ever asks me what it means, I can just tell them it stands for “Companion, Tardis, Regeneration”, and that I’m a Time Lord.

1 CTR stand for “Choose the Right”
2 Come on boys, is that so hard?
3 A giant “CTR” or “I can’t. I’m Mormon” doesn’t make me feel very clever.
4 Seriously, this is the very first thing I look for when I meet a new nerd man. Men, if you don’t wear your wedding ring, it is your fault that I am hitting on you.

Hello World.

I am a Geeky Mormon Woman.

These three words are not usually used in the same sentence, much less to describe the same person. Though I’m sure I’m not the only one in existence. There have to be at least a dozen of us.

Even in that dozen, we tend to be Geeky in different ways. Most of the Mormon Women Engineers I know spend their nights and weekends in pursuit of different activities. Some do not actually have nights and weekends because their jobs and so stressful.¹ Some choose to train for and run marathons. Others put together Mario themed parties for their babies. I spend my nights sewing costumes based on the media I consume. My chosen activities sometimes make me feel unique, even among Geeky Mormon Women.

Mormons: The Video Game
Harness the untapped market!

Being unique is awesome, it makes you singular. Like Chell.² Or Abish.³ It can also leave you single. This can be a difficult state when one of your cultures has a lot of focus on family, and the other culture doesn’t understand how you can possibly get through your day without coffee.

However, I see harmony where others assume discord.

I intend to explore that harmony between the different things that I am. A Geek. A Mormon. A Woman. I hope to cover a lot of space where these overlap, and prove that there is a presence, where many assume there is a void.

This should be a fun ride.

1 Not a fun place to be, but a lot of us have been there.
2 For those of you who are not gamers, Chell is the heroine of Portal 2. She is the only surviving human in the Aperture Science facility and takes down a robot bent on her destruction. It’s a good game, you should play it.
3 For those who are not Mormons, Abish is a Lamanite woman in the 1st century BC. She is the sole Christian among the Lamanites until Ammon arrived, and she aided in the conversion of an entire nation. It’s a good story, you should read it.