These geeks are having a good time
Where to find it: www.thinkgeek.com
These geeks are having a good time
Where to find it: www.thinkgeek.com
Who runs the site: This is a commercial site. Who better to run it than a crew of certified, card-carrying geeks? “Think Geek: Stuff for the Masses” is the company’s full name. Based in Fairfax, VA, it markets a host of fun things that nobody needs. The staff appears young, mostly male and includes two dogs.
Who is likely to use the site: Overgrown children, to be frank. The site’s offerings include items that elevate geekiness to cool. For the programmer who grew up getting shaken down for his lunch money at school, there are T-shirts with inside jokes, lots of toys that run off USB ports and the like.
Pros: The site features great architecture, making it easy and fast to navigate. It’s attractive and filled with a host of items unlikely ever to make it to the shelves of Toys R Us.
The “Cube Warfare” section, found under “Geek Toys,” offers garden variety light sabers, but it also includes a USB-powered foam rocket launcher that can be aimed and fired from a PC. Plastic tubes fire balls of air and there’s an impressive selection of marshmallow guns.
Radio-controlled toys include tiny planes and helicopters that can take off from the palm of a person’s hand. There’s also a wide variety of novelty LED lights and the like, even an attachment that makes ordinary water running out of a tap appear to glow, blue for cold and red for hot.
Cons: Unless you work in an office like the one at thinkgeek.com, most of the stuff offered for sale, used in an office setting, is grounds for immediate termination. On the plus side, none of the stuff sold appears to be likely to harm anyone. Text on the Web site even cautions against eating marshmallows that have been shot across the office.
