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February 21, 2012 Posted by : Ellen Henderson

Study Finds Couples Who MMORPG Together Are Happy Together

Category : Bedroom, Family Room, Games, Sex and Relationships

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Photo from stock.xchng

In a subject suitable for Valentine’s Day, Slate.com blog Future Tense reported on Feb. 14 about a new study on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and their effects on marriages. The study was conducted by Brigham Young University, and while the BYU press release about the study leads with bad news (“Online role-playing games hurt marital satisfaction”), there’s good news in the findings for GeekMoms and their spouses who like gaming.

According to the study, which was based on a study of 349 couples, “for couples in which both spouses play, 76 percent said that gaming has a positive effect on their marital relationship.”

Read the Future Tense summary here, or go directly to the BYU press release here, and tell us what you think — do MMORPGs help your marriage?

Ellen Henderson is a novelist and web strategist. She lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband and son.

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February 14, 2012 Posted by : Nicole Wakelin

As You Wish This Valentine’s Day

Category : Holiday, Sex and Relationships

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The Princess Bride

Today is Valentine’s Day. It’s one of those holidays that people love to hate. People hate it because they’re single and it makes them sad, or they’re with someone and feel pressured to find the perfect gift. They hate it because they don’t know if they should buy roses, or chocolate, or something else and what if the present sends the wrong message? And if you’re married, well, then how do you commemorate the day and prove that you’re just as passionately in love as you were the day you swapped vows? Lots of people hate Valentine’s Day, but not me. I love it.

In high school I hated it because I never had a boyfriend. Perils of being a geek. I also went to an all girls school that was a bit of a drive from the all boys school. We mingled at dances and football games and the like, but during the school day we never crossed paths. But, on Valentine’s Day, one club or another always sponsored some sort of flower or chocolate fundraiser that would be delivered to the other school at lunch. I remember single roses being brought into the cafeteria, tied with little curly ribbons and notes for their recipients. I didn’t get one and it was rotten, but, like I said, perils of being a geek.

I met my husband my junior year in high school. It was pretty cool to have a boyfriend after what seemed like forever. I suppose in teen years it was forever. He was just as much of a geek as me and I have the pictures to prove it. I asked him out (remember, all girls school, you want a date then you do the asking) and had a wonderful time with my awkward-dancing geek. We discovered we both loved museums and the next day we went out again to the Boston Museum of Science. Finally, being a geek was paying off.

He made mix tapes for me of sappy love songs and I still have them, although now that I think of it, I don’t have a cassette player to listen to them anymore. He gave me my first roses and they were the best roses in the whole world. He introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons and ren faires and all sorts of wonderfully geeky stuff. Then one night he suggested we watch a movie called The Princess Bride.

I’d never heard of it. The title sounded like a sappy chick flick which wasn’t generally my thing, or his, but he insisted that if I hadn’t seen it I was missing out and that I had to watch it immediately. Despite my misgivings I agreed and we popped a bowl of popcorn and sat on the couch in my living room to watch. It turned out to be one of my all time favorite movies.

I had no idea just how popular it was, or would become over the years. I’m betting almost all of you can quote a few lines from this without even trying and that more than a few can practically recite the entire movie. It’s a wonderfully quirky and incredibly geeky film. From a mysterious, sword-wielding hero to an evil mastermind to a princess in peril, it’s a bit like a video game come to life. The princess is in another castle, but the hero will find her and save her in the end.

It’s been a long time since I first saw The Princess Bride, but it still holds a warm place in my heart and, yes, my husband does often say that one line and it still makes me melt. Tonight, we’ll be making heart-shaped pizzas with heart-shaped pepperoni and then, once the kids are in bed, we’re watching the most romantic geek movie ever. I hope you all have a wonderful Valentine’s Day, and spend it with someone who often whispers those three little words…as you wish.

Nicole is mom to two wonderful little Geek Girls. You can find her writing about her geek obsessions over at TotalFanGirl.com and hear her on The GeekMoms Podcast as well as Sith Heads: Star Wars the Old Republic Podcast and The D6 Generation Podcast.

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February 14, 2012 Posted by : Ruth Suehle

For Valentine’s Day: Five great, geeky couples

Category : Sex and Relationships

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Mileva Marić and Albert Einstein, public domain image via Wikimedia Commons

Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić
When Albert Einstein’s private letters were released in 1987, a lot more came to light about his wife, Mileva Marić, who also studied at Zurich Polytechnic (as only the fifth woman in its section for a diploma to teach math and physics). Some speculate that she even helped write some of his most well-known work–including the theory of relativity. At a minimum, she was clearly an important part of his scientific life and a resource he could discuss ideas with. In 1905, she is said to have told a friend regarding the Annus Mirabilis Papers, “we finished some important work that will make my husband world famous.”

Louis and Mary Leakey
Louis and Mary met when he was seeking an illustrator for his book. After becoming a couple (while he was still with his first wife!), they worked together as archaeologists, largely in Africa’s Olduvai Gorge. Together they found stone age instruments as much as two million years old and many important bones, including a one-million-year-old Homo erectus skull in 1965. After her husband’s death, Mary continued the work and went on to discover nearly four-million-year-old fossils, as well as fifteen new species and one new genus.

Isaac and Janet Asimov
Isaac Asimov is a geek icon, thanks to sci-fi works like the Foundation novels and I, Robot. He even coined the word “robotics.” His second marriage was to Janet Jeppson, who was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and scifi writer herself. She created (with a small assist from her hubby) a series of YA books about Norby the Mixed-Up Robot.

Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker
Does that name sound oddly familiar? Remember back in 1994 when a comet went slamming into Jupiter? That was Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which the couple co-discovered with David Levy. In fact, she holds the record for having discovered the most comets, as well as more than 800 asteroids. She and Eugene received the James Craig Watson Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1998.

Susan Sontag and Annie Liebovitz
These lovely ladies are cultural geeks each in their own right who have also collaborated, such as on the photo book Women. Independently, Sontag was a political activist noted for both her nonfiction essays as well as her plays and novels. Liebovitz is famous for her stunning portrait photography, such as the 1981 Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, shot the day of his death; Demi Moore’s pregnant Vanity Fair cover, and more recently Miley Cyrus’s controversial semi-nude Vanity Fair shot.

Who are your favorite geeky couples?

Ruth’s interests all involve making things, which means her husband and two kids have learned to watch out for stray pins and bead trays and to ask before eating anything made of fondant. By day, she's an editor over at opensource.com. Follow her on Twitter.

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February 14, 2012 Posted by : Jessamyn

How to Write a Successful Online Dating Profile as a Single Geek Parent

Category : Sex and Relationships, Uncategorized

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I don’t know anyone who loves dating. None of my friends cherish those awkward moments when first getting to know someone, finding a polite, but firm way to say, “sorry, not interested,” or recovering from the misunderstood good-night face lean in which one participant attempted a kiss that landed somewhere awkward and unintended. Now add to the mix being a single parent. Final ingredient? Geeky single parent. Yikes!

To the quantitatively minded, online dating makes sense. Increase your pool of potential matches, anonymously share information in a way that allows you to filter out poor matches and rank potential good matches,then live happily ever after. Ah, if only dating could be reduced to such an efficient process! It can’t. But there are definitely ways to write a better online dating profile.

1. Focus your attention on drawing in only the best matches. You’re a single geek parent. You don’t have unlimited resources. It’s tempting to try to catch the eye of many potential matches so that you have more options, but this ultimately just wastes your time. And theirs.

2. Be up front, and tactful, about your parenting status. The fact that you are a parent isn’t just about you, it’s about your potential date as well. Provide enough information so that the voluntarily and emphatically childless are not tempted by your siren song. It’s easy enough to work this into your text by saying something like, “I enjoy building Lego sets with my kids, who live with me (choose one: all of the time, most of the time, some of the time).”

3. Wave your geek banner high. In the end, don’t we all want to be cherished and accepted as who we really are? You don’t get to that point by hiding your geekiness and hoping that your date will accept this “flaw” because you’ve been otherwise charmingly normal. I’m not saying that your profile needs to reveal that you hope your mate will be just as turned on by a Starfleet uniform in the bedroom as you are… but I am saying that you may want to state your position in the eternal Kirk v. Picard debate. (P.S. Picard. Duh.)

4. Post at least one less attractive photo of yourself. Not your main photo. Not your only photo. But among many, there should be a photo of you looking less than cover-shoot ready. It’s not merely a question of honestly portraying yourself, it’s about weeding out the love-hungry that are only interested in your physical appearance.

This is my less attractive photo, showing off my extra pounds and occasional peculiar hairstyle choices. For those observant enough to recognize Machu Picchu, this photo also allows me to show that I enjoy travel without being trite. Image: Jessamyn

5. Avoid cliches. OkCupid asks you to list the six things you could never do without. Here’s what not to write: food, water, air, your friends, sex, movies/books/music.  Using any of these items in your lists merely demonstrates your imagination void. Here are a few more cliches that litter online dating sites like toilet paper around the outhouse: “I’m not into playing games, I’m just a fun person looking for someone fun to hang out with, I like to cook, I love my family and friends, I enjoy travel.” EVERYONE SAYS THESE THINGS.

6. Ignore all the advice that is designed to net you a high response rate. I’ll be the first to admit that OkTrends, the blog of OkCupid, is alarmingly seductive. I mean, there are numbers! Graphs! Infographs! Interactive infographs! But this approach is all wrong. You don’t want lots and lots of hits, you want the right hits. As much as Jon Fnkel’s ill-fated date with Alyssa Bereznak lit up the interwebs, wouldn’t it have been better to prevent that mismatch to begin with?

7. Listen to other kinds of conventional wisdom. Your online profile should have proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You can even defend your use of the Oxford comma, if you wish. This is not the place to rant about your last relationship, or spout gross generalizations about all women and all men. Nor is it appropriate to be “still married, but we’re divorcing I promise, and we still live in the same house, but I’m not going to tell you that until after our second date.”

Got all that? Great. Now consider a few geeky dating tips, and don’t delay your in-person meeting. As much as you both may have written brilliant online profiles, there’s no replacement for that first face-to-face.

What kind of online dating profile would capture your interest?

Jessamyn Jessamyn happily geeks out as mom to one son and two yappy dogs named Sherlock and Watson.  In her spare time she is also a criminologist.


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February 10, 2012 Posted by : Sarah Pinault

Valentine’s Day: How To Say I Love You

Category : Sex and Relationships, Technology

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Image: Captured by Skype, July 2010

When my husband and I began dating, at the tail end of 2000, we faced several challenges. Not the least of which was the fact that I was moving back to England after four months in Maine, and he, well he was staying in Maine. I was 20 and he was 19, neither of us had planned on falling in love. You can tell because I wracked up a monstrosity of a credit card bill while on my semester abroad, living by the mantra “I’ll never be back here, I’ll never be back here.” But nevertheless there we were, 3,000 miles away from each other and madly in love. Now my husband was more self aware than I and had confessed his love in person two nights before I left the country. I on the other hand was holding tight to not falling in love, in fact I didn’t realize that I had until I had left and been crying for the entire bus/plane ride home. So I did what any self respecting 20 year old did in 2000, as soon as I got home I logged into AOL and IMd him. That’s right folks, my first “I love you” was via Instant Messenger, and that’s where my technological love affair begins.

For the next two years and nine months we lived and loved at a great distance. I went to him for Thanksgiving, he came to me for the summer. He came to me for spring break, I went to him for the summer. And in between was a flurry of communication. It was the heydey of Im-ing and so we chatted on AOL every chance we got. We became loyal patrons of our respective phone card dealers. We also added a touch of old fashioned romance to our courtship, we exchanged letters, sending poetry and photgraphs by virue of the postal system. For Valentine’s day that first year he bought us journals. We each kept a journal, and when we got together we would exchange them and read about our time apart. The things that slip your mind on a daily basis.

In 2003 we got married and I became separated from my family to start my own. Luckily by the time my son was born in 2009 we had seen the dawn of a new technological age. Facebook, Twitter, Skype, so many ways to make those miles meaningless. Now my two year old son has a wonderful relationship with my parents, he may even see more of them than the grandparents who live twenty miles away. Skype has given my parents and my son the gift of each other, just as AOL Instant Messenger gave the same gift to my husband and I. Now he can say “I wuv you Grandad, I wuv you Nanny” and blow them kisses from thousands of miles away. It doesn’t take the place of the hugs, but it helps.

Sarah Pinault is married to her husband but not her job, has a baby that insists on being a toddler, and keeps one foot in the British time zone despite having lived in Maine for 8 years now. She blogs about the meaning of life over at mainemummy.blogspot.com and has been a self-professed geek for well over 20 years.

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February 10, 2012 Posted by : Kay

With Lego Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

Category : Education, Elementary, Sex and Relationships, Teens, The Web, Toddlers, Toys, Tweens

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I’m no ‘girly-girl,’ and I never was. Even when I was young enough to be indoctrinated into the cult of gender segregation, I blew off the idea that girls and boys were too different to play well together and I have never regretted scoffing at that nonsense.

Sure, I had Barbies, but I played with them like any other action figures. My paper dolls were all astronauts, and the shoebox they lived in was as myriad and TARDIS-like on the inside as the imagination inside any child’s head. I was faster and tougher than any boy on the playground, and if that sometimes made me unpopular with peers of all genders, well… Who needs friends when you’ve got Legos?

However, since the newest line of girly-girl Legos was released, the question I’ve been asking is, “With Lego Friends like these, who needs enemies?” Don’t get me wrong, as an artist, I approve any time Lego expands their palette. Even when new colors come straight out of a Martha Stewart catalog. Too, as a lifetime Lego fan, I feel that life is just better with more bricks in it. But those ‘Ladyfigs’ have got to go.

What were they thinking?! Lego could have saved a lot of time, money, and headache. All they really needed to successfully target the female market was to advertise their product to boys and girls at the same time. The way that Legos were originally marketed. And if minifigs must be gendered (who needs gender when everyone has corners?), Lego could help us help their bottom line by designing minifigs that defy gender stereotypes. I’m as sick of super-macho mini-men as I am of those obnoxious floor-length, non-articulating block-skirts Lego gives their little women instead of legs.

I’m not the first to say any of this – I’m not even the first Geek Mom to bring it up – and my rant may not be the most eloquent. For that, I direct you to Feminist Frequency, where Anita Sarkeesian provides a clear and complete picture of the gendering of Lego and offers some solutions to Lego’s… bricky issues.

YouTube Preview Image YouTube Preview Image

Kay Holt has a habit of getting science on everything.

 

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February 09, 2012 Posted by : Laura Grace Weldon

Despite This, You’re Still My Valentine

Category : Holiday, Sex and Relationships

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anti-Valentine, love rants, married despite this,

CC CarbonNYC's Flickr photostream

 

 

You know when you’re talking with friends, it’s okay to kvetch without having to preface with a polite caveat like “well you know I love him/her but…”

Here at GeekMom we wallowed ever so briefly in some of that recently. Want to listen in?

 

OHMIGOHD! Why is it that the ONLY TIME my husband EVER goes on a run is when I ask him to take care of dinner for the evening??? PS: This comes out to between 2 and 3 “runs” a month…

It is 7:30, the kids haven’t eaten yet, I am supposed to be working from home, and I am sitting in my bedroom about ready to SPIT NAILS!

I’m sorry to vent but if I don’t write this down somewhere I’m going to hurl something against a wall.  unsigned 

 

 Mine does that too, minus the running. He simply micro-obsesses over something minor while letting the actual task languish.

I realized there was no hope of relying on him for vital domestic tasks the day I hosted a Mother’s Day brunch for his relatives.  I had tiny unwell children and a nursing baby, meaning it took me several days to prepare the food and gifts. He insisted he’d clean the kitchen and do the dishes. As the time approached I set the table, put the food in the oven, straightened the house, picked flowers from the garden and arranged them, took a shower, bathed the kids, got everyone nicely dressed and came into the kitchen to find the exact same chaos of pans I’d left. He had started to clean the stove but got distracted and had taken all the dials off to clean behind them with a toothbrush.

My policy of not swearing in front of the kids was sorely tested that day. It’s really hard to smile through a dinner for company while suppressing murderous rage.   Laura

 

 My DH has this habit of cleaning up after kiddie messes in the following order: himself, the surroundings (floor/table/bed), the child.

Really?

My instinct is to do it in the opposite order.  I discovered he got this habit from his Dad, who once at a family reunion was playing happily with our toddler youngest son until he spilled milk down the front of his shirt.  FIL brought my literally dripping son across the house over to me, hands him to me (still dripping), says, “He needs to be cleaned up” and walked away to clean himself up.  I cleaned up not only the child, but also the drips all through the house.   unsigned 

 

 

Despite that fact that you never seen any papers or other debris strewn about the floor inside the house but notice any harm to the yard outside the house, you’re still my Valentine.  unsigned

 

Despite the fact you see your son fall on the concrete and scrape the skin off the top of his nose, you still think giving him the ‘you’re a big boy’ pep talk trumps scooping him up and just giving him a hug so he can sob until it feels better? You’re still my Valentine. unsigned

 

For Valentine’s day 2003 – when we still lived in other parts of the world – my husband, then fiance, sent me a wonderfully thought out but completely thoughtless Valentine’s gift.

Knowing how much I suffered with menstrual cramps he sent me several boxes of heating pads along with the chocolate hearts.  Sarah

 

As an antidote to all the gooey hearts and flowers stuff, you may want to join in. Care to share a “despite this, you’re still my Valentine” tale?

 

Laura Grace Weldon is the author of Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything.  She lives on a small farm with her family and blogs optimistically.

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February 09, 2012 Posted by : ChaosMandy

Valentine’s Ode to Wrestling: Part Of Our Love Story

Category : Mom Time, Sex and Relationships

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

My Valentine! (Image: Mandy Horetski)

I’ve been a big fan of professional wrestling since I started watching the WWE over a decade ago. I had friends in college who got me sucked in. You may think that professional wrestling isn’t very geeky, but wrestling fans are very passionate. I always say that it is like a soap opera with violence, but there is also action figures and cosplaying in wrestling .

Wrestling as been a big part of my relationship with my husband, Todd, since the beginning. One of our first dates was at a WWE house show. We went with another couple and had a great time cheering on our favorite wrestlers. We went out for dinner afterwards and this was when Todd asked me to move in with him.

I was a little freaked out by the idea of moving in with him. This was partly because the one other time I had lived with a boyfriend, it had been a disaster. But for some reason I knew it would be different with Todd, so I agreed even though we hadn’t been dating very long. It was one of the best decisions I made.

Now we have been married for five years and wrestling is still a big part of our lives. Earlier this month, we got a chance to see a TNA Impact house show, and it brought the memories back of that first wrestling date. Ironically, even though the house shows were separated by over ten years there was one wrestler who was at both shows.

Jeff Hardy (Image: Mandy Horetski)

Jeff Hardy is one of our favorite wrestlers. He’s a great showman and was both the house shows we got to see on and near Valentine’s Day. We got to go to the backstage area at this latest show and was able to get his autograph. It made our special date even more memorable as it brought back our memories of that very first wrestling date.

Since that first show, Todd and I have gotten married, had a daughter and gone to WrestleMania. Wrestling is part of our love story and it probably always will be.

"Chaos" Mandy Horetski is an avid Browncoat, blogger, and stay-at-home mom who lives in the mountains of NC with her geeky husband and 3 year old princess. You can find her on Twitter as @ChaosMandy as well as on Google +.

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February 07, 2012 Posted by : Jessamyn

Captain Picard on Domestic Violence Services Funding:Make it So

Category : Sex and Relationships, Support, TV, Movies, and Music, Uncategorized

Tags: , ,

Image: Jessamyn

Patrick Stewart, who has written about his experiences growing up in a household with an abusive father, is now urging better funding for domestic violence services in the United Kingdom. As if there weren’t enough reasons to love Captain Picard already!

In a piece for The Guardian, Stewart shares his response when he was asked to support Refuge, a UK charity that provides support for domestic violence victims and survivors.

“I accepted for my mother. As a child, there was little I could do to help her. But now I can give support and encouragement to women who live in the same sort of fear that she did.”

Stewart goes on to explain the current funding crisis for services for victims of domestic violence in the United Kingdom, a dire situation indeed.

Before you start to think that it’s just a problem across the pond, funding for services that support victims of crime in the United States is just as critical.  Agencies have lost basic funding across the country, and, as a criminologist, I see the effects of this in the work I do every single day.  I can’t say for certain, but my suspicion is that the Federation would want us to do better.  A secondary directive, if you will, to help victims of crime with the resources they need to survive, heal, and rebuild their lives.

Please consider donating to a domestic violence or sexual assault charity in your community. I promise you, the funds are badly needed. Need one last reason? Check out this pic of Stewart dressed as a feminist.

Engage.

Jessamyn Jessamyn happily geeks out as mom to one son and two yappy dogs named Sherlock and Watson.  In her spare time she is also a criminologist.


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February 03, 2012 Posted by : Sophie Brown

Matt Smith Proposes at London’s Doctor Who Experience

Category : Sex and Relationships, TV, Movies, and Music

Tags: , , , , , ,

Matt Smith Proposes at the Doctor Who Experience © BBC Worldwide

Matt Smith Proposes at the Doctor Who Experience © BBC Worldwide

Last night, Matt Smith proposed to his long term girlfriend and Doctor Who fan Stacie-Anne Dilkes at the Doctor Who Experience in London; but before you get yourself in a fluster, no, it’s not that Matt Smith.

The 22 year old from Essex shares the same name as the actor currently portraying the Doctor and managed to get some help from BBC Worldwide to plan  the proposal. Stacie believed she was visiting London for a shopping trip when she visited the attraction. Matt, dressed in a bow tie and tweed jacket, pretended to be an exhibit in a section of the Experience where guests can see original props, costumes and monsters from the show. He stunned his girlfriend by appearing and bending down on one knee – happily, she said yes (who wouldn’t?)

Matt Smith (the actor this time) was in on the surprise and sent the couple a personal message of congratulations, commenting that:

 ”Matt Smith proposing to his girlfriend! Firstly, being a Smith means phone calls to the bank take so much longer – there are so many Smiths!! But I bet none of them have proposed at the Doctor Who Experience! Amy and Rory would be proud. Next – babies in the TARDIS…? Congratulations to you both and many years of happiness. Love, Matt.”

If you want to go and see where it all took place, as I did last summer, the Doctor Who Experience is in its final three weeks at it’s current London home, having been there for a year. It will soon move and re-open its doors in Cardiff where the show is filmed.

www.doctorwhoexperience.com/

Sophie's AvatarSophie Brown is a busy stay at home mother living in England with her husband, one year old son and two middle aged cats.  She is currently studying for a Bachelor's Degree in Natural Sciences and also writes the blog The Geek Arts. Sophie can frequently be found wasting time on Twitter.

 

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