Author: Marziah Karch

Marziah Karch lives in Portland, Oregon and is the author of multiple books and magazine articles. Bylines include Lifewire, Rodale's Organic Life, Tech Republic, WIRED, and GlitterSquid Marziah is currently a doctoral candidate researching the information behavior of independent game designers.

10 Things to Read Instead of Twilight

Marziah Karch

I’m not saying we ban any books. I’m just saying there are some fantastic books and series out there that are entertaining, disturbing, thought-provoking, and just plain better written. Sometimes it’s harder to find a female protagonist in young adult fantasy, but it can be done. Here are ten great young adult books or series for starters.

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Walls 360: Geeky and Awesome

Marziah Karch

Walls 360 makes stickers. Does that sound too boring? Okay, they insist that they don’t make stickers. They make re-positionable, self-adhesive fabric that doesn’t leave residue and sticks to just about any surface. You can wad them up, unfold them, and stick them to something else. They stick to brick walls, painted or not. They’ll stick to the outside of buildings. I stuck one to my purse for over a month, and I only removed it out of boredom. They are possibly the most geeky stickers I’ve ever seen, and that’s not even getting into the prints. There’s also a little geek pride in knowing the co-founder and creative director, Yiying Lu, is also the designer of the Twitter fail whale.

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4-H Is 4 Geeks

Marziah Karch

One of the biggest myths I hear about 4-His that it’s only for farming families. While it’s completely true that the organization was set up as a tool to promote “modern” farming methods through after-school agriculture clubs, that’s not the whole picture. There’s still a lot of farming in 4-H, yes, but there’s also a lot of science and art. In fact, there are even rockets and robots.

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Google Is Now America’s Most Awesome ISP

Marziah Karch

After a summer of waiting, Google finally emerged with details on their new Kansas City Fiber network. The price for Google Internet starts at free. That’s right, for the $300 installation fee, Google will give you free Internet at “today’s speeds” for at least 7 years. If you’re used to thinking of these speeds as fast, take a gander at this comparison and then imagine seven years of technology innovation.

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Marissa Mayer: Yahoo’s New Pregnant CEO

Marziah Karch

Marissa Mayer is a big deal. She’s Google employee 20, the first woman engineer, and the highest ranking woman there. Well, she was. As of yesterday, she’s a Xoogler. Mayer quit Google in order to become Yahoo’s new CEO. As if that weren’t enough, the same day she made the announcement, she tweeted that she and her husband were expecting a baby boy in October. That’s right, Yahoo hired her with a visible baby bump.

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Hack Build With Chrome for Pink Legos!

Marziah Karch

Josh Rowe, the creative director for Build with Chrome, let me in on a little Easter Egg. Legos come in all sorts of colors, but not so for Build. It turns out there were some issues with “WebGL shaders work and the complexity of the 3D scenes.” In other words, they could make it fast, or they could offer 150 colors. They went with fast. I’d say that’s a good call. Here’s how you get pink back.

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Disney to Tackle Oz

Marziah Karch

Sam Raimi, who will always be known as the director of Evil Dead in my mind (even if Disney would rather I mention Spiderman), is set to direct Oz The Great and Powerful. This one focuses on the origins of the wizard in the Wizard of Oz, as played by James Franco. I don’t know about you, but those two sentences alone make me excited to go see this move.

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Lawrence, Kansas: Secret Science Fiction Wonderland

Marziah Karch

Lawrence, Kansas is a great place to be a geek. It’s home of the University of Kansas and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Every year since 1979 they’ve handed out the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year, and in 1987, they added the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction of the year.

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30 Years Ago, My City Wasn’t Nuked

Marziah Karch

I’m a proud resident of Lawrence, Kansas, but 30 years ago they pretended to blow it up.
The Day After was filmed in the middle of the Cold War and tried to show just how devastating a nuclear attack would be by showing it from the perspective of one town in the midwest. A bomb goes off in nearby downtown Kansas City, leaving Lawrence partially destroyed and full of injured survivors.

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Nexus Q Aims to Be the Center of Your Living Room

Marziah Karch

The Google I/O conference officially kicked off with the keynote this morning. They introduced the Nexus 7 tablet – already leaked before the conference, but they also introduced a Nexus something new. The Nexus Q aims to build on the connected entertainment environment. It’s a tool designed to allow you and your friends to control your home music and movie experience.

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Pixar Was Brave to Keep the Accent

Marziah Karch

I gave up on trying to take notes in the dark fairly early on as I watched Brave, but one of the few I did manage was, “a princess donea stuff her gob.” Why was that noteworthy? Because they left it in.

It would have been all too tempting for Disney to step in and take the dialect out of Brave. Instead, Pixar encouraged the voice actors to make suggestions. There are a lot of vocabulary words that would be totally unfamiliar to the average American child, and there’s even a character that speaks in an incomprehensibly thick Doric accent. Rather than translate him – or anyone – the characters react and move on. That is as it should be.

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Tabletop Forge Will Make Google+ Hangouts Awesome

Marziah Karch

I used to tabletop game many years ago. And then I had kids, and all my games got shoved into the back of the closet and away from swallowing and scattering little hands. These days, there are many things that prevent me from doing it, including time, messy living room, storage space, childcare arrangements, and geographic proximity to other players. Tabletop Forge doesn’t have any time travel technology to give me a couple extra hours for gaming, but it can help with the other problems.

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Father’s Day Gifts with Ulterior Motives: iGrill

Marziah Karch

On Mother’s Day, they tend to advertise a lot of things like vacuums and ironing boards. I think that’s a little mean. It’s like giving someone a gift that says, “Clean my house!” I’ll admit that I’m occasionally guilty of doing this for Father’s Day, although my gifts usually say “Cook for me!” He likes cooking, and I like eating, so I refuse to feel guilty about it. This year, I received a review model of the iDevices iGrill, and I wanted to see if it qualifies as good gift encouragement for tasty smoked meats.

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One Time at Space Camp

Marziah Karch

The summer hasn’t even really started, but I’m already declaring it to be the best summer, ever. This year I was invited to attend a parent and child weekend at Space Camp. Yes, this is the same Space Camp that, if you were like me, you dreamed about attending when you were a kid. I’m happy to report it’s every bit as awesome as you’d imagined it would be as a child, except for the part where a series of mishaps mean campers must go on a real space mission to save the planet from impending doom.

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The Strange History of Star Wars and the Cow Con

Marziah Karch

It’s time for ConQuesT, the convention hosted by the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, otherwise known as KaCSFFS. (pronounced Kax-fiss). This year I’m one of the guests, so I hope if you’re in the area, you’ll come see my panel on TV shows that were cancelled too soon. And now for the cows. I’ll also get to Star Wars. I might even mention towels.

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Sherlock Season Two Starts May 6 on PBS

Marziah Karch7

Here’s a teaser for Sherlock Season Two, which will start its PBS Masterpiece Mystery run in the US on May 6th. The series chronicles a modern day Sherlock Holmes and his adventures solving mysteries. Knowledge of the book series is helpful but not necessary. The adaptations loosely follow the originals with modern twists. Sherlock was co-created […]

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Support Neurodiversity at ThinkGeek

Marziah Karch1

April is Autism Awareness Month, but if you’re like our house, autism awareness happens every month. That’s one of the reasons I love this shirt on ThinkGeek. Neurodiversity is a movement centered around the philosophy that autism isn’t a disease. It’s a difference in development. Sure, it’s also a disability, but that doesn’t mean we […]

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