Starting your holiday shopping early this year? Looking for the perfect gift for someone? Look no further than the GeekGirlCONLINE ‘21 Virtual Expo Hall!
The Virtual Expo Hall will open next weekend, November 13, and remain open until the end of the year. The Virtual Expo Hall is full of unique, geeky gifts as far as the virtual eye can see. You can find art, fashion, comics, decor, books, games, housewares, and toys, in addition to gifts from LGBTQ+-owned and POC-owned businesses. If you can’t find what you’re looking for browsing through the different categories, there is also an “All” category where you can see all exhibitors and browse gifts that didn’t fit into a specific category. There is truly something for everyone among the offerings of our 120+ exhibitors.
GeekGirlCONLINE ‘21 WILL BE HERE IN LESS THAN A MONTH! If you haven’t already, mark your calendars for November 13 and 14!
All of our programming this year is free to stream on Twitch. Click through here for FAQs about this year’s event.
In case you haven’t seen already, we’ve recently announced our full programming schedule. We’ve got a packed schedule—from the DNA of strawberries to BIPOC artists in animation, there’s truly something for everyone this year. Read on for full details about each event.
The first time I read A Wrinkle in Time, it was part of a 4th grade reading assignment, where each student had to choose a book that all the other students would then take turns reading. I’ll be honest. A Wrinkle in Time, chosen by the only kid in class who could spell Czechoslovakia (which was both still a country at that time and quite the feat of spelling), fell somewhere between the books Soup on Wheels and Freckle Juice, both of which resonated with my 9-year-old bookish self a bit more than A Wrinkle in Time.
With its more complex character development and themes of love and individuality that seemed beyond my years or at least beyond Soup on Wheels, that initial reading didn’t leave me feeling all that inspired. That said, I fortunately returned to the book just a few short years later and have since read it at least half a dozen times. With each new reading, more of the book’s magic and wisdom is revealed to me, largely through its oh-so-relatable 13-year-old protagonist and my personal geek girl hero, the plucky Meg Murry.
On the weekend of November 13 and 14, we’re bringing you this year’s celebration of all things geeky in the form of GeekGirlCONLINE ‘21. This is a free, digital event streamed on GeekGirlCon’s Twitch channel. Follow and turn on notifications now!
Programming content for this year’s event is being curated by our glorious Programming Team. Some of the sessions will be pre-recorded, but most will be live. We’ll be announcing the schedule in early August, so stay tuned.
Below we’ve answered some FAQs about GeekGirlCONLINE ‘21. If you have more questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to geekgirlconline@geekgirlcon.com.
Happy World UFO Day! Today is an opportunity for people to gather together and watch the skies for unidentified flying objects or ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ as they are now more commonly called. So what is the history of UFOs and the likelihood that these phenomena are actually evidence of extraterrestrial life?
Allegedly there have been sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena since ancient times, although the number and nature of reports have significantly increased since the second world war. The so-called ‘Modern UFO era’ was established with a sighting near Mount Rainier in 1947 that popularised the name ‘flying saucers’ and began an obsession with flying saucers that lasted a decade. The term ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ was adopted to better describe more common later sightings of different shapes such as cigars and triangles.
Yesterday was World Bicycle Day and therefore an excellent time to celebrate bicycles and cycling. It’s also a perfect time to introduce eRacing – a hobby that has kept me both fit and sane during these strange pandemic times!
There are lots of good reasons to celebrate bicycles. They are a fun way to travel and enjoy the outside but also have big benefits for our health and the environment. For millions across the planet, the bicycle is a vitally important form of transport – their simplicity makes them both affordable and easy to keep working. Bicycles are especially important in rural areas of developing countries enabling healthcare workers to reach their patients, students to safely reach their schools, and businesses to reach their customers or new markets.
When Colorado expanded their COVID vaccine eligibility to include all adults, I was thrilled. I spent hours that first day chasing leads for anywhere that still had appointments available, before a coworker hooked me up with a drive-up vaccination clinic he’d learned about through a FB group created specifically to connect people trying to get the vaccine with clinics and pharmacies that still had doses in stock.
Four weeks later, I was fully vaccinated and eager to start living a slightly safer, slightly freer life. My fiancé and I moved to Denver last summer in the midst of the pandemic, and I couldn’t wait to actually get to know this city I’d been living in for almost a year. And that’s when my mental health started to take a turn.
[Image description: A blue-tone drawing of a cartoon person lying on a bed with their hands together while staring at the ceiling.] Source: Giphy
I didn’t know I could be so excited for New Pokémon Snap to come out until Becca posted about replaying the original Pokémon Snap from 22 years ago. Her post immediately transported me to my childhood TV room, trying to capture all 63 featured Pokémon on film. Would the New Pokémon Snap scratch the nostalgia itch and be worth the full price? Would I still get excited about taking pictures of Pokémon I didn’t know? I found out soon after I started playing—the answer is YES!
Here are three little ways New Pokémon Snap captured my heart, and one way it did not:
For the past several years I’ve been setting myself a goal of reading 50 books per year. Somehow, I always feel certain I’ll easily accomplish it and reliably come out five to ten books short.
Last year was the first time I’ve ever officially succeeded. In the final few days of December 2020, I forced myself to rush through a forgotten stack of graphic novels I’d already decided I didn’t want to read. I guess this was the way my particular brain compromised between the incessant call to be “productive” above all else and my absolute rejection of that value in general.
It’s halfway through 2021 now—both months after last year’s “triumph” and months into this year’s challenge. (Again, 50 books. Again, I’m behind and feeling guilty about it.) It’s an odd time to be thinking about this, I guess, but the charge to write about something interesting for this blog post forced me to confront just how depleted my capacity to fully engage with media has been during the pandemic. The bleak truth is that though I might have finally met a goal I’d been striving for, I don’t really remember anything meaningful about any of the books I read last year. In some ways, that claim might be an oversimplification, but it’s also an accurate description of the emotional toll the past year and a half took on me and, consequently, my media habits. So, in other words, when it came down to it, I placed more value on the quantity of books I read than the effect that media had on my life.
When I was growing up, I often observed that there was a distinct lack of good women role models in film and TV. Women characters always seemed to fit into a limited set of stereotypes: the damsel-in-distress, the leading man’s beautiful-but-personality-free love interest, the femme fatale, and the Cruella de Vil-style villain. The first good woman character I remember as a small child was Wonder Woman from the 1970s TV series. I adored her; not only did she beat up the bad guys with ease and always came back from adversity to save the day, but she had some fantastic moves! The twirling transition from Diana Prince to Amazon Goddess, the iconic crossed bracelets stance to defend against gun attacks, and best of all her boomerang tiara! Dressed in my Wonder Woman pyjamas, I would proudly strike a pose with my arms crossed. Usually indignantly whilst being given a ticking off for leaving my toys on the floor!
