Last year I did a top ten sexiest geeks of 2005 list for Tiny Nibbles, which was followed a week later by Wired’s ten sexiest geeks (and they sweetly included me). As seen on Fleshbot and Kotaku this week, it looks like Wired has announced their call for nominations on their year-end sexy geek list earlier this year; definitely click on over and add to their comment-nom chaos — it’s fun, fascinating and exciting to see friends nominated (and a few noms for me — thank you!!!!). I’m still going to wait until closer to year-end to announce my sexy geek list (same time as last year), and you can bet that like last year, mine will be very different than theirs, for lots of reasons. In fact, people have been sending me tips and links for it all year, and I’ve amassed quite a file.
So now I turn into Miss Ranty McRant for a minute. I usually don’t pay any mind to comment trolls, but I was cruising the comments on Wired’s post and saw this:
“I’m sorry, but Violet Blue and Xeni Jardin are just fluff in the incestuous blogosphere. Just because they’re ‘sex positive’ (Geez, who isn’t?) and girls doesn’t make them candidates for the ‘Sexiest Geek Girl’ title. I think that Morgan Webb & Kari Byron (who are actually geeks and actually DO STUFF) would be better candidates. They both do hands-on geek things instead of just writing about tele-dildos and C-list porn.”
I know not to feed the trolls, but I have to say this: Uh, SRL? Ten years of sitting around looking pretty and filing my nails — when not doing robotics, industrial metal fabrication, dreaming up and creating wild lethal props and machines, welding, driving a forklift, running production crews, electrical work, carpentry, wrenching on engines and operating bizarre lethal robots. I fluff with lathes, I motherfucking craft with flame throwers and shockwave cannons and web-tele-operated air launchers for *fun*. Yeah, I stand in front of cameras on Geek Entertainment Television (and I vlog), but I know what I’m talking about from solenoids to splogs because I *do stuff*. And there’s no rivalry with Mythbusters; Kari is a hottie, and they have invited me to participate in the show twice now. Also, I built this website myself in 2001 with nothing but a book on HTML and a ripped copy of Dreamweaver, and have grown it ever since (I have one sexy geek chick friend who now helps me with MT). I figured out how to podcast when there were only like a few dozen podcasts in existence. When Slate did a textcast this summer, I figured how how to do it, and did it just to see if I could (second podcaster to do it, and first female, yo). There’s more, but I don’t pose with PSP’s.
But Xeni? Now you’re in dangerous territory. Two things: this year she went to Tibet to do a story on hackers in the Himalayas — and you don’t do anything like this fluffily unless you want to end up in a Chinese prison. Right now she’s in Guatemala — you figure it out. *That* is hardcore.
Okay, now the trolls can go ahead and call Xeni and I fluff. Just don’t come crying to the sexy girl geek who heads the SRL security staff when my finely-tuned Running Machine accidentally runs over your troll foot.
/rant. I guess the way to make me see red is to say I don’t do anything! Image: I’m getting ready to pack for Roboexotica — I leave for the robot festival in Vienna this friday; I am an invited, featured guest, which makes me all excited and nervous. I will help run a drinkbot with Miss Suicide Bots and be on Austrian TV talking about robots and sex. Note about the Running Machine: it’s actually *our* machine, as in SRL. It’s one of the three main machines I’ve maintained and operated for shows for the last ten years — “senior” SRL operators like me tend to refer to machines we’ve worked on and fixed a lot in the first-person possessive — that is until the cops show up, at which point they all belong to Mark…:)
