Tired of carrying around an ever-growing dice bag? Well now you can wear your dice on your fingers with some new spinner rings. But you can’t own them just yet, the folks who created them have a Kickstarter going. Although there’s 57 days left, they’ve already blown past their $23,000 goal. As you can see, there are a few different versions, some for playing cards, some for those tricky yes/no decisions, etc. Seriously though, how bad do you want to play Dungeons & Dragons with the giant Price is Right wheel?

(via Geekologie)

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Instead of talking about what they’re doing for Maine people, they’re making fun of me for playing video games… In the last ten months, I’ve spent no more than forty five minutes playing WoW. I also knit socks—and that too has taken a back seat to my work and my campaign. - State senate candidate Colleen Lachowicz.

Lachowicz, running for a Maine senate seat, is under fire from opponents for having a video game hobby, and talking it in the way that any player would. To see more about how she’s responding to the campaign, which has included a door to door mailing and a website that implies she is unable to distinguish game life from reality, see The Daily Dot.

Previously in World of Warcraft and Socks

I think I know what’s cramping your skills, Penelope: your posture. Work that out, and you’ll be back to the gaming supremacy that is the birthright of all older siblings everywhere.

Yes. All older siblings. Just… don’t ask me for proof of this universal rule in my personal experiences.

(via The Hollywood Reporter.)

We all know that the response to Anita Sarkeesian‘s online harassment over her Kickstarter campaign has been supportive, but sometimes, it’s just great to see someone say those words out loud and make some goshdamn sense for once. That is what Jay Smooth (aka John Randolph) did in his most recent installment of Ill Doctrine, his video blog. And we think it’s a reassuring and positive way to end a week of otherwise gnarly internet behavior — with someone with something good to say.

(via Ill Doctrine on Vimeo)

Resident style contributor Elizabeth Giorgi takes some time out from DIYing Wonder Woman shoes to share some general advice and personal experience that’s just as relevant to anybody who isn’t dating a geek or isn’t a geek themselves.

I’ve been a self-identified nerd since I was 16, but I didn’t always date within my identity. I dated all kinds. Hipsters. Musicians. Wannabe hipsters. Bad musicians. My current boyfriend is a total nerd too, but I almost gave up on our relationship after our first date because he hadn’t read George Orwell’s 1984. (And he over-used exclamation points in his emails.)

Five years later, I’m so happy I didn’t let dystopian fiction and punctuation stand in the way of love. Here’s 5 rules for geek dating:

Call of Duty and other US-armed-forces-set shooter game franchises have never exactly been a font of female characters, regardless of whether they’re set in a time when women could or couldn’t serve in the armies depicted. Discussions over whether or not more women should be involved in the stories of the games often devolve in to talks about “realism,” whether having female soldiers is “realistic,” and whether “realism” is actually already present in rigorous amounts in a given video game. The Call of Duty franchise has covered a number of different eras of American history, from World War II, to the Cold War, and the modern “war on terror.” And while they’ve got a small group of female characters from French resistance fighters to Sarah Michelle Gellar (in a zombie themed map), the only playable female character in any actual CoD campaign has been Tanya Pavelovna, a sniper for the Russian army born sometime in the nineteen teens.

This week, however, developer Treyarch started to reveal more about the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops II, like how the game features a number of female npcs, and will eventually feature a playable female character.

Thanks to mobile devices and their wide availability, tweens — that is, young people between the ages of eight and 12 — are gaming a lot. And in an interestingly normal bit of news, half of those gamers are girls! It makes total sense, since roughly half of tweens are also girls! According to a survey by the site GirlsGoGames, a solid 50 percent of tween girls are turning to online gaming, whether it’s on the internet at home or a mobile device. Of course, some of those games are what you might say are “catering to gender stereotypes” — makeover, cooking, and dress-up games — but who’s to say that some of those girls aren’t slaying dragons, too?

Jackie Lee recently competed in Wizards of the Coast sponsored, Magic: The Gathering Baltimore Grand Prix. She faired well in her matches, making it to the semifinal round, but ran into a huge problem once she got there. The livestreamed semifinals led to anonymous insults being thrown at her, simply for being a woman. Not that it would make a difference but no, these weren’t comments from her opponents, just random viewers of the match. 

While this video game-style short, The Chase by Philippe Gamer, is very cool from the start, with a car chase fit for the likes of French Connection and The Blues Brothers, it isn’t exactly what it seems. We strongly urge you to watch the whole thing to the end. You will be very happy you did.

(via Red and Jonny)

Calling all rogues, wizards, paladins, druids and those who despised the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards of the Coast require your d20 for open playtests to make their 5th edition the best yet. In laymen’s terms, they’re looking for user input to make the game better. Hooray!