The BBook of Geek:

The Only Geek Humor Book You'll Ever Need Citadel Press 104 (hexadecimal) pages $14.95 Shop.Ars

Life doesn't present many opportunities to watch the entire Star Trek canon and call it "research," and when it does so, you'd be a fool to pass up the chance.

Brian Briggs is no fool, and when Citadel Press offered the BBSpot editor a contract to write The BBook of Geek, Briggs used the book as an excuse to burnish his geek cred. He watched every original Star Trek episode and set his phasers to stun. He watched X-Files episodes and wanted to believe. He watched Babylon 5 and, err... admired the Amiga-produced CG effects.

Oh, it might sound like fun, but Briggs worked hard. He resorted to watching sci-films at 1.5-2x speed with the pitch adjusted. He boned up on science at the Ann Arbor public library. And he was forced to play video game after video game.

The result is one of the few geek humor books on the market. It certainly has the "geeky" bit nailed; the book's pages are numbered in hexadecimal, cover the vi/emacs dispute, and feature a picture of Briggs in a "ROFLcopter" T-shirt.

As for the humor, that's a bit more subjective; its success depends on just how funny you find articles titled, for example, "Mythbusters to produce controversial 'Myths of Jesus' Episode."

So you want to write a book?

It's an opportunity that Briggs never expected. As he admits with a grin, the book project basically fell into his lap.

Briggs started BBSpot back in 2000, hosting the fledgling site on a trial basis using a free domain. He was working a full-time job, but by 2003 had moved the site to its own domain and was doing well enough that he quit his day job and made BBSpot a full-time gig.

Six years on, he remains the only paid employee and says he still loves what he does. If the site hasn't grown into a media empire, that's in part by choice; Briggs wants only to make enough money to keep doing the job, to "stay sustainable" as he puts it.

In 2007, he was asked to write a book review of Prank the Monkey for another site. After doing so, the author of that book introduced Briggs to his own editor. The editor asked if Briggs had ideas to pitch; he came up with some; one was accepted; boom, he had a book deal.

This can make for a spot of awkwardness when bumping into Ann Arbor writer friends who have struggled against the adamantine bonds of fate in their attempts to secure a similar deal or even track down a literary agent who will take them on. One imagines a bit of jealousy on their part when Briggs showed up for a book signing at the Ann Arbor Borders bookstore (the first Borders, and still the company's flagship) and attracted 60 people. Not bad for a geek with a basement office.

Getting your geek on

The format of the book couldn't be simpler. Briggs breaks his geeky topics into "pillars": software, TV, literature, gaming, movies, science, hardware, and the Internet. Each pillar is made up of suitably geeky blocks, and we aren't just talking Firefly references or the occasional Cthulhu nod (though those exist). Briggs digs deep: Visicalc, Perl, Red Dwarf, Nethack, Metropolis, Brazil (which, really, you shouldn't miss), Alan Turing, and Jonathan Coulton.

Each topic gets a two-page spread. On the left sits a brief description of the topic's "geek cred," followed by some geeky facts about the topic—only a few of which are true. A picture of Biggs inventively dressed up as the topic fills out the page. On the right is a brief, Onion-style news article, such as "Softer, Gentler Cthulhu More Profitable Than Ever Before."

Elder God Cthulhu has found marketing a softer, gentler version of himself to be more profitable than an "insanity-causing just because you looked at me" one. In the past, Cthulhu generated most of his revenue from donations from various cults, but the high cost of maintaining cults, along with the lower-income people who frequented the cults, led to a reimagining of its image. Now Cthulhu generates most of his revenue from licensing his image for plush dolls and bumper stickers. "People just don't understand all the costs associated with cults. There are the animals for sacrifice, the worshippers' compensation insurance; it gets expensive," said Cthulhu's representative, Zvilpogghua from the PR firm Han, Hastur, and Zvilpogghua. "We're finding it much easier to control people through mass media buys than mind control."

You get the idea.