Nerd-girl Style Icons Vol. 1: Margot Tenenbaum

Hello hello there!

So, as promised...the first version (of many, I hope) of the Nerd-Girl Style Icons. Presenting...

MARGOT TENENBAUM

"I love you, kind of."

Margot Tenenbaum hails from the 2001 Wes Anderson movie "The Royal Tenenbaums." She's a thirty something playwright going through a personal crisis (writers block, failing marriage, in love with her brother, etc), and is as secretive as they come. Throughout the movie, her deadpan intelligence allows for some of the best one-liners. Played by Gwyneth Paltrow, Margot is one of my personal favorite style icons, and the throwback 1970's style of the movie suits her perfectly.

Wes Anderson, while not necessarily targeting the nerdy, has made a career out of awkward people with strange obsessions. Take the characters of The Darjeeling Limited, as an example: three brothers, one obsessed with his absent mother, one with his dead father (he is seen carrying his deceased father's luggage throughout the movie and even wears his glasses, even though the prescription renders him half-blind), and one with his ex-girlfriend (said ex girlfriend is Natalie Portman, though, so you can hardly blame him). Margot is no different; she is a playwright obsessed with secrecy; she has been a secret smoker for 22 years.

Why is she a nerd, you might ask? In addition to having off-kilter obsessions, there is a brand of nerd girl that I'll dub "the secret nerd." A fairly normal looking person with a deck of magic cards in their purse. (Guilty.) A cheerleader who stays up all night playing World of Warcraft...you get my drift. Margot is this "secret nerd," hiding her smoking habit at all costs, and in order to maintain her private life, she resorts to keeping an apartment under a pseudonym and locks herself in the bathroom for hours at a time.

STYLE STAPLES:

· shirt dresses
· penny loafers
· brightly colored hair clips
· long fur coats
· massive amounts of black eyeliner

[side note: an interesting part about this character and her style, and this was done on purpose by Anderson in regards to all of the Tenenbaum children, is that she is still wearing the same clothes she did as a child in the 1970s. This gives her a somehow alluring Lolita vibe. Another obsession?]

PRACTICAL APPLICATION:

Alright, so I'm just gonna go ahead and assume that not many of us have penny loafers in our closets, but subtle ballet flats will do the trick. All you need is a long coat, a dress that could also be worn by a little kid, and a pack of smokes. Oh, and lets not forget the heaps of black eyeliner. Cutting off one of your fingers is optional, and not really recommended.


Try it out! And if you do, I wanna hear all about it!

Have an awesome day!

Not a usual fan...

Okay, so, I like video games a lot. I've never played, nor will I ever play Call Of Duty, but this clip was too good to pass up.
Please enjoy the wonders of being unlucky.

Video Game obessions

I'm in love.

Seriously, I'm in love. With this:

[Not a Cyberman]

If you're a gamer of any kind, you know the euphoria that comes with falling in love with a game. It's always the little things, like the music, or the way that the menu is sorted the way you would've done it if you'd designed the game. For me, this new love affair comes from the suggestion of two of my most trusted gamer sources. They both, independently of each other, told me about Shin Megami Tensei when I asked for advice as to what game to purchase for my DS (I left all the games the TSA didn't steal from my stupidly checked bags in Chicago, again, stupidly).

For me, games are all consuming. If I like a game, I love it. And if I don't, I probably don't even want to be in the room while it's being played. I was mildly excited to see that the game came with a CD of the music when I opened the box. Now that I've sunk some serious play time into it, I'm ecstatic that I'll be able to annoy all my friends with music from the game. The only reason I put it down last night was because I died a few times (okay, ten) in a boss fight and couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. I tend to play a game through once doing all the stupid stuff I tend to do, then go back and, um, to use a term gamers often use, rape it. For that, I'll use gamefaqs and walkthroughs unabashedly, but for my initial play through, I try to do it for myself. I asked Morpheus (please review your Greek mythology if you thought the Matrix) for a dream which would present the solution. What did he give me? An epic battle tale which I might glean some knowledge from? Unless a flying cruise ship my father saved me from and a mall employee dropping my phone into a custard-from-whence-it-would-never-return counts, no.

THANKS MORPHEUS. I should send you back to the Matrix.

Anyways, which I'm trying to say is I'm in love with this game. There are a few of these games released in the US, and all in the Final Fantasy vein- all set in the same world, all independent stories. This particular installment, Strange Journey, chronicles the exploration of a strange void growing at the South Pole. It's a strange world you find yourself in where this is the smart-mouthed rebel:

His name is Jimenez. Isn't he suave?

This is what an angel looks like:

And yes, you fight these (and can ask it to be "my demon")

And this is a dude:

Oops!

And yet I still love it. It's originally from Japan, which will not surprise you. I'm not reviewing it or anything, because its been done. You can Google for a review and find about a million that would be better than mine.

I just needed to express my love.

Nerdy Burlesque?!

So I'll bet there are two things that I can safely say that EVERYBODY loves: cartoons, and ta-tas.

This was from an article in LA Weekly back in January concerning Devil's Playground's burlesque show, featuring Pikachu (squeee), Serena from Sailor Moon, Trixie from Speed Racer, and many others.

Check out the article about it, and the full photo gallery:

Devil's Playground Presents Anime Babes

Oh, this, too.

ALSO, somehow it slipped my mind that it is STAR WARS DAY (I say my mind because one of us *Lulu* has not seen Star Wars... which makes her a horrible human being).

For that, I have one more gift for my future/hypothetical children.

Enjoy, little ones:



















This book can be found here.

Ever name a character in a video game thinking there's one more slot than there is and end up with names like "chappingto"?

Because I totally did that while nicknaming my Pokémon character today.

Anyways...

As I am currently, shall we say, "between jobs" (really, I am, I work in theatre...), I have a lot of downtime.

Sure, I could go volunteer (I totally tutor a 2nd grader who's mind was blown when I asked him if he had both Pokémon black AND white), I could hang out with friends (which I totally do... online...), etc.

OR

I could be a good little geek girl and play catch up on all the video games I've been missing out on while doing that pesky "graduating from university in four years" thing.

OR

I could just lay in bed and Stumble all day.

Guess which one I picked?


if (you guess the first one)
{
you can stop reading this blog now, because you are clearly not the 8-bit runway demographic.
}
else
{
you guessed right.
}


And my Stumble knows me pretty well. We have a close relationship. If you want to check out my profile (and see the 513 sites I've "thumbs up"d), please feel free. Also, feel free to friend or follow me. Yes, I am a whore.

Here's the thing, though. Recently, I've begun to suspect that future me is trying to send me a message through Stumble. It comes in many forms, but this series of links I'm about to share with you will more thoroughly explain the situation.

I give you the awesomeness my future/hypothetical children will receive:














A pirate ship in the bedroom




















A Narnia playroom



















A Tardis cupboard















A real, working coin block (for weekly allowance?)















A Legend of Zelda Treasure Chest with sound.

Yes, future/hypothetical children, this is your future/hypothetical future. All these things and more may one day belong to you, although if you never exist, they wont, and I'll just be the coolest 40-something cat lady in the world. All the neighborhood kids will like me and it will be weird.

Felix OUT

... is also weird. And we shall never speak of it again.

A brief introduction...

Ahoy there!

My name is Lulu, I'm another contributor to the budding 8-bit Runway blog! The pseudonym "Lulu," by the by, comes from my favorite installment of the Final Fantasy series...and I'm pretty sure that I'm alone in that particular preference.

[I don't look like this.]

As Felix was discussing in one of her earlier posts, being a geek girl can mean a lot of different things. Maybe you're way into video games (hours spent indoors playing the N64 have left me with a milky white complexion. Thanks, Nintendo!). Maybe you're obsessed with something a little outside of the ordinary (I don't think my cockroach farm is weird at all). Maybe you're just a nerd by the very classical definition, a la Revenge of the Nerds.

Whichever you are, ladies, this blog is meant to pertain to the geeky girls out there! I look forward to contributing here, with upcoming articles about nerdy style icons, geek girls in movies and other terrifying things found in the dark corners of the internet. Much more to come, but for now, I leave you with this: