1) Watching my wife (a normally shy and introverted personality who hardly ever plays games) pick up a xbox controller to try out SSX Tricky. Three hours later she is yelling at the TV as she is doing flips and uber tricks on her snowboard. "Oh yeah! What's that? That is me doing awesome!"

I used to love to splice together stereo equipment. In highschool I had three seperate amps powering 4 sets of speakers around the room all pulling signal from a computer, 3 cd changers, two tape decks, two TVs and of course the radio. It was like a kingdom of sound.

I don't have a stereo room anymore but I still love to integrate all of my electronic equipment together. I have a component switch on the tv and CAT5 running all throughout the house and extenders and couplers lying in draws all over the place.

I get this great satisfaction of making "Devastator-like" combinations of media merchandise.

I hadnt heard of that before. Did you get a noticeable performance or gas performance increase. I'm just curious, it's not the size of the increase, its just cool that you could do that.

This reminds me of another example, much simpler than yours. I have a Sony surround system. TV and hometheater system is in the front of the room and I didnt want to run the rear speaker wires under the rug, it wouldnt cover enough. So I figured out that I could buy those RCA connectors and plates. I ran some generic speaker wire through the ceiling overhead and installed two RCA connector plates on the front wall and back. Then I cut the speaker wires and attached the RCA connectors so i could plug the unit and speakers into their respective nearby walls.

To me, this was an act of art, and though I have mentioned it with great pride to folks (i.e my parents), they never seem to appreciate it the way I do.

I can totally appreciate that. At work, part of my job is collecting and packaging intellectual assets for re-use. This may sound kinda dry, but there are very satisfying moments when I make a new set of templates or leverageable work products available by packaging it in a user friendly way, or distributing it to the community. Of course the community just wants the assets themselves to make their lives easier, so the art of packaging is probably only appreciated by me.

Do you have your own forge?

hrm. is this something a lot of people do around here? can you explain why? it seems the guy i am currently dating (and whom I am nutty for, so yeah, i'll tolerate it cause he's friggin great) does this and I will admit my first reaction to the self-made chainmail in the garage was "holyhell ruuuunnn" but again, really cute, so i didn't........maybe its more of a normal thing? lots of closet RL paladins out there?

on topic:
anytime i boot up an NPR podcast i feel a bit geeky and proud. ira glass, i <3 u

It's not geeky to like Ira Glass. You're getting confused because Ira Glass himself is actually pretty geeky, but I don't think you get the geekyness by proxy.

Yeah, those might inhibit your marketability to the opposite sex just a tad.

Comic books and video games can do that too.

My god.

There are several of us around here who do that. I enjoy doing it, but am not overly passionate about it. Your work colleague is probably an "all grain" brewer, and looks down on "partial extract" brewers like me. Sometimes, I don't even measure the gravity of my brews! There, I said it. Yes, there is even a geek hierarchy in home brewing.

Learning how to solder wires to circuit boards so that I could mod my Xbox (and successfully doing so) was geekly (geekily?) satisfying.

-I got tired of having to go upstairs to reboot a router that kept losing connectivity, so I set up an X10 device to reboot it for me. Now I can reboot it via a hand held remote.
-Set up a media closet that controls audio/video to 3 rooms and the backyard and just to be on the safe side, routed AC to go to the closet. To this day, I think this is why my first-gen 360 still works. (Knock on wood)

Um, I just really like The Cure, but only "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me" and before. Is that geeky?

Listen to Weezer.

Actually, if you have a railyard nearby, you might ask them for some scrap railroad track, which makes an excellent (and cheap) anvil that works just as well. Luckily, a buddy of mine works at a metal fabrication shop that can easily cut any type of metal we want at cost, so that saves me a ton in supply costs and I get to cheat a little because he cuts the patterns out, I just have to shape them from that point on.

"I mean, look, I'd still be with my old shrink if I hadn't cut across the
park the day of the Renaissance fair and realized that the man I tell my
innermost secrets to likes to, likes to put on a big giant beard and make
pretend that he's a blacksmith." -Dr. Cox, Scrubs

That still makes me laugh.

Winning a M:TG booster draft.

Being a M:TG judge.

I've trained in Eskrima and have a hard time with some SCA friends that also train this way.

Chainmail has a nasty habit of pulling hair out, so I don't know how good of an idea a chain bikini might be -- I guess it would be a little like drive-by tweezer-ing your, well, your hoo-ha.