The hunnerdtenthst episode of our podcast, Paul and Storm Talk About Some Stuff for Five to Ten Minutes (On Average), is now online.
This week’s episode: Storm’s new laptop and his innate klutziness; why Las Vegas makes us feel all oogie; food, dining and the Rule of Threes; plates and robots made of cheese; a question of sidekick/mascot categories; a formal request for wooden steampunk monkey robots; Abe Lincoln vs. George Clooney in an eating contest; and geek tourism.
AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION ALERT: which category of mascot/sidekick would you want: Monkey, Dragon, or Elf? Also, if you had to choose, would you choose to never eat again or never sleep again, and why? Finally, where are good destinations for “geek tourism?”
[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/www.nuggetman.com/podcasts/PS_5-10_110.mp3]
20 Comments
Hmmm, could I have a monkey dragon? I mean, dragon monkey. Yeah, that’s better. Fear the terrible (yet cute and clever) wrath of my DRAGON MONKEY. 🙂
I would never sleep. Hands down. Sleep is over rated, right? Actually, I don’t think I would miss sleep nearly as much as food.
Portland, although I may be biased. I have four words Voodoo Donuts + Ground Kontrol. Oh! And Powell’s. And! Stumptown Comics Fest. Oh, and the underground and OMSI (with submarine!) and the Spruce Goose and Saturday Market and Pirates and Pretend To Be a Time Traveler Day and Trek in the Park and and… I’m sure there’s a lot more I’m forgetting.
Also, right now I’m really happy that I know robotics and how to build nifty things. I was thinking about making a creepy doll robot, but screw that, this sounds much more fun and awesome. Mission accepted. 🙂
Guys, I was worried that you weren’t showing up to Ottawa. When I heard the end of the podcast, I literally did a little dance in my seat. Thank you!
I’m a cosplayer, and I’m going with the elf. I like the idea of a creature that isn’t reliable, but has a certain sense of power. My thoughts on it are the unreliable genie: It’s a certain rush of excitement, though you don’t know which way it will go.
Elf. He could teach me the ways of the forest, and maybe even how to do triple flips.
I’d never eat. Eating is just a way to keep the stomach from making weird noises–sleep is what I can’t get enough of. Plus, dreaming is too cool of an activity to quit.
Dragon monkey elf. Monkey monkey elf. Dragon dragon monkey monkey elf elf elf elf….
I think you’re selling the Dragon short here. If you think about it, a strong, loyal companion is a perfect compliment to geeks who may not be teeming with muscle. It’s perfect for when you have a concrete plan in your head but just need a bit of brute force that you may normally lack.
And I would do without sleep. Sleeping kills more time and, while enjoyable, doesn’t get much accomplished. I can multitask while eating. Imagine all the things you can do while the rest of the world is asleep. The extra boost in productivity would let you take over the world!
…especially if you had a dragon. 🙂
Eli here from the Hijinks Ensue Podcast with Joel, sorry if my question was not phrased well as I was sending my tweet from Vegas as it was our honeymoon. Funny that you guys talked about Vegas on this episode and we were talking about being geeks in a town like Vegas. At many times we noticed we were the only folks using iPhones while in lines or talking around. That is what had me thinking of the question of what is a good geek city to visit.
Since geek can be put in many ways, you can geek out about things like seeing NASA but you can also geek out about comic books stores, I think hearing that Seattle and San Fan were interesting choices. I have been to Chicago and really enjoyed the comic books shops and art there plus you can check out the cool places from the Batman movies. Dallas sadly does not have much of that and doesn’t cater to the geek as much but we do have a good share of cons that come through town.
I hope to hear other places people might suggest as I would love to visit the country on future anniversary trips to see geek things
I’d pick a dragon and use it to intimidate my foes and steal loot. I’m not dumb, I just think muscle is paired well with intelligence (and also, I thought dragons in many tales, are old, wise and cranky).
Geek vacation land: Silicon Valley specifically, or the San Francisco Bay Area in general, and not just because I live here. Beyond knowing that all these tech companies are all over, we have the San Francisco Exploratorium, the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, housed in a former Silicon Graphics building. (Google is also housed in former Silicon Graphics buildings, which makes me sad as a former SGI guy.) And of course there’s all that wine in Napa, Sonoma and pretty much wherever you go, assuming you’re a geek who likes a drink now and then.
Monkey, Dragon, or Elf — Disney movies costarring Eddie Murphy aside, I gotta go with dragon. C’mon, man, dragons are just awesome. And I am not stupid; I’m just in need of a strong companion who doesn’t need constant supervision and can hold a better conversation than a monkey-type. (I’m thinking along the lines of Falcor or the dragon from Merlin voiced by John Hurt.) This may or may not correlate to the fact that I’m a cat person rather than a dog person.
Eat or Sleep — No question, I would give up sleep. As long as I would be magically rested at some point every 24 hours, that would be so cool. I could get so much done. (By which I mean, “watch so many videos”.) I’m too much of a cook and foodie to ever give up eating. I would stab someone if they said I couldn’t have sushi or chocolate or a juicy steak with mashed potatoes ever again. >:(
…Aaaand now I’m hungry.
D’oh. HTML fail. :-p
1) Dragon. ’cause I already have such a mascot/sidekick.
2) Would never sleep again. For a while, I could be more productive. Then once the hallucinations started, it would be so very interesting for the rest of my life. 😉
3) Geek tourism: NORAD, the unclassified tour.
1. Monkey (haven’t you always wanted a monkey?)
2. I’m going without food.. sleep is just too awesome!
3. Another vote for the Seattle geek tour. Don’t forget the awesome Experience Music/Sci-fi Museum. Plus there’s Bumbershoot Festival labor day weekend with all kinds of geek awesomeness!
1) Personally a bit of a wolf fan myself so it would be the “loyal protector pet” like Battlecat that I think was in the Dragon class on the podcast.
Also, I’m a ren faire dork, so at least in that specific type of cosplay there are shoulder dragons (little cable puppets that I was thinking would be a great way to make your Steampunk Monkey Robots). But while they physically look like dragons (or gryphons or gargoyles or whatever depending on which ones you get), many of them give off more of a “creature of whimsy and magic” to them which like you were thinking of on the podcast and having them probably siding “elf class” of having a little magical creature with them.
2) Man, that’s Sophie’s choice. Because while it would be nice at times to not feel the need to sleep, I also found that sleeping is a great way to just pass large blocks of boring time. Like what the heck are you gonna do at 3am when everybody else is asleep and nothing is happening? But if I’m required to chose one or the other, I’d probably sacrifice the ability to sleep because eating is also a great social experience and offers so many different types of experiences.
3) I don’t have a hot “geek tourism” spot, but here in Tucson, they do have the Titan Missile Museum where they have guided tours into the silo with a now disarmed ICBM inside and there are some amazingly interesting stuff there if you like rocketry. They also let Ham radio operators hook up to receive & broadcast from their giant radio antenna out front. Oh, and I guess the fact that the silo & missle were used in the scenes of the Phoenix in the silo in Star Trek: First Contact is worth mentioning too.
A related thing to visit in Tucson (to the point that they offer a discount if you see both) is the Pima Air & Space Museum. They got a bunch of aircraft both in hangers and outdoors to check out.
Elf. Given the choice between loyalty, strength, and intelligence… def. intelligence.
Also sleep.
LOL @ Brett Glass
1) probably somewhere between monkey and elf, power is overrated;)
2)Can’t chose, either way, it would cut down 1/3rd of my daily schedule;)
3) Idunno, isn’t PAX the sheer definition of it? Maybe Tokyo, visiting Nintendo?
Monkey is dextrous and mischievous. Dragon is strong and steadfast. Elf is fantastic and unreliable (I can’t help but think of the genie Baboo). Which one is the sidekick that knows things? I want Abby from NCIS, or the computer with an endless depth of information, or the clever scientist from pulp novels (having just read Pellucidar, I’m thinking of Perry).
I would definitely choose to go without sleep. I have tried several times to train myself to go with less sleep, just to have more time in the day. I always fail, sometimes spectacularly.
I’ve got to second Kim’s note of the Sci-Fi Museum in Seattle. While I didn’t find it “awesome”, it was extremely neat. Also, Seattle is home to Wizards of the Coast (makers of Magic and D&D), and I understand the public areas of their campus are pretty dang cool.
I has advanced teh sidekick pet idea:
http://www.paulandstorm.com/longer-thoughts/a-field-guide-to-sidekick-petfamiliars/
on Geek Tourism: I think geeks are interested in more than just engineering and science stuff. On the cruise I explained to the norms “a geek is a person who likes to learn beyond the point of practicality.” With THAT deinition I propose three great cities:
(A) Washington DC: has lots of free museums and other cultural events.
(B) Seattle: is usually first or second in the United States for literacy rates. Hang out in a coffee shop and discuss thoreau with the barista.
(C) London has been a place of learning for centuries. There are a lot of innovative exhibits at the museums, but there are also some neat artifacts (some “acquired” during colonial times)
It’s a nerd, it’s insane, yes, it’s Listens-to-podcasts-in-random-order-and-comments-late-Girl!
Tehehe… I live in whatever the hell town the Large Hadron Collider is in (indeed, I work at whatever the hell organisation runs that thing), I visited Kennedy Space Center (but not Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, which is on the other side of the causeway, and hasn’t launched humans into space for decades) on the way to JoCo Cruise Crazy, and I went to San Francisco to visit Apple and go to their Worldwide Developers’ Conference in 2004. Next stop… Seattle?
My British grandmother once served me pickled walnuts, and they were a disgusting waste of otherwise perfectly good nuts.
I think George Clooney wuold be able to eat more, because he was raised in a time of plenty when everybody eats too much.
Also, LOL@Brett Glass seconded, no sleep, and monkey, duh.
I’ve cosplayed a few times, and yes, when I read the red text before listening to the show, I picked Elf pretty quick.
Certainly spot on.
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