Culture

Meet Samantha Cook of Hacker Scouts And Help The Cause!

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banner2We geeks have to make sure that we impart our wisdom, experience, love of learning, and ability to recognize unwise technical choices to the younger generation. That’s not always easy between work, family, our own kids, and the decaying educational infrastructure. Meet the Hacker Scouts, an organization that gets young people involved in science, technology, and engagement in the community. It’s pretty much everything I wish I’d had when I was younger.

Best of all? They’re leveraging the latest technology to let you help out – using Kickstarter to get their own lab in Oakland California. Yes, kickstarting a science scout facility. So you know, I’m going to interview anyone involved.

Fortunately, Samantha Cook herself, the Executive Director, took the time to speak with me. So go, read – and then go support and get involved.

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Geek As Citizen: Introduction

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So in the weeks to come I’m going to be exploring a subject near and dear to my heart: what it means to be a geek and a citizen of our communities, nations, and the world.

Yes, that can be a fascinating topic, and of course I’m a compelling author (and handsome, too, just noting). But the question comes up: Why write about Geek Citizenship in the first place, or at least why am I doing it when I could be ranting about the video game industry or interviewing cool people?

As much as I love those things, this is a serious subject.

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Sympathy For The Intoxicated: Drunk On The Power of Technology

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Monday, we got to meet Nathan Shumate of the accurately named LousyBookCovers. It’s a fascinating insight into the man, the project, and the . . . less than ideal covers that occasionally appear in self-publishing.

He mentioned one thing that struck a truth with me; that some people get drunk on the power that modern technology, print on demand, distribution, etc. presents. I wanted to explore that a bit because it’s rather personal, and very telling for us MuseHackers.

There’s plenty of power modern technology gives us. In many ways modern technology is all about empowering because power sells and people want to do their own thing. People want to make videos and books and music and games; many of them can now live the dreams that years ago would have stayed dreams except for a few. We have sheer ability now.

However, as we’ve seen power may not be misused but . . . well it can result in products of questionable value. Oh we’ve all done it. We all have that fanfic we don’t want to mention, that bad book cover we’re not proud of, that AMV that was kind of awful, or the company brochure that proved there’s a reason we’re shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near desktop publishing. We wonder how we missed how . . . not that great we were.

We miss it because we get drunk on the power.

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