David Waddell—plumber, city councilman, dedicated conservative—was fed up with all the government bureaucracy in Indian Trail, North Carolina. So he sent the mayor a latter saying he was quitting. Or, more precisely, "chaq DaHjaj QaQ jaj paj."

Yesterday, Community, NBC's sitcom about the odd and endearing relationship between a diverse group of community college students, was named TV Guide Magazine's fan-favorite comedy, and its fan-favorite ensemble. Its time slot competitor Big Bang Theory, the Caltech-set CBS comedy about a pair of nerd genius roommates, didn't win in any category.

Austin, TX—The cultural season has turned here at the South By Southwest Festival, now on day seven. With the end of SXSW Interactive on Tuesday, the internet obsessives shipped out and were replaced yesterday by the cool kids of SXSW Music. Can you tell the difference between rival camps?

Poking, he gets. Friending, the verb, he invented. But Mark Zuckerberg is still a little unclear on the whole concept of a high five, as evidenced by the above photo from his visit to Harvard earlier this week.

Every year at Comic-Con, San Diego's massive nerd fest which is happening all weekend, we see all sorts of photos and footage of the geeks and fanatics dressed in their overly ornate costumes for the occasion. Well, if that's what you really want to see, who are we to keep it from you?

Here's a video of a guy playing StepMania, which is like Dance Dance Revolution for computers. Standard, right? Nope! Shortly after he starts, our future Anger Management student begins freaking out over his mistakes—that's when things get good.

If Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera are battling for the title of "Most Awkward Young Hollywood Actor," Jesse might have just won. On Conan, he shared stories of his cats, geekery, and social ineptness. We just want to hug him.

A week or so ago, in the same galaxy we're all part of—at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, specifically—an events site called Newmindspace organized a lightsaber battle royale for 500 (yes, 500) geeky Star Wars fanatics. Here's what happened.

If you're on this site, there's a good chance that you read Gizmodo and Valleywag regularly. And you probably Tweet. And you have an Linked In account. Well, according to this spoof video, that makes you a New Dork.

With the whole Mark Sanford thing going down today it was not hard to lose sight of other, more important things going on in the world, like, oh yeah, Iran! And that situation just gets more and more depressing.

Esquire seems very earnestly convinced that their flashing e-Ink cover this October will revolutionize the print industry with awesome shifting pixels. There are only a few things holding back the revolutionary technology: it's thick as hell, it's not entirely flexible, the color on the e-paper is so bad that the magazine had to overlay a tinted sheet of plastic on the cover, and the magazine has to be delivered on refrigerated trucks. After these minor glitches are worked out, here comes the future! And while magazine readers might not like it, at least the new Esquire will be tailor-made for tech nerds:

Not only is "Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog" star Felicia Day magically dreamy and talented, she is also a total, massive geek. On her Twitter page today, she shows us all her shiny, shiny Dungeons & Dragons dice and chats enthusiastically with the commenters about the game. Fellow nerds, see it and sniffle and bite your lip here.

Check it out. An artsy, distant redhead dressed as a giant Chewbacca! [goldenfiddlr]

What was your first? The 2600? Pong? Colecovision? Good God, not Sega Genesis! Well, they're all here. [via cynical-c]

Remember in 1984 when you went to see Dune and you were totally psyched but 20 minutes into it you started thinking maybe you got a hold of some bad fish sticks at lunch? And after an hour the theater was all hot and twisting and you were sure you had mono? And then in 2000 there was that Dune miniseries that only had three parts but felt like it had a lot more? Well, Paramount is having another go at bringing Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel to the screen. Friday Night Lights director Peter Berg is signed to helm what producers promise will be a "more faithful" interpretation of the book. Is that a good thing? [Wired]

Attached to the hilarious — if technically inaccurate — chart I blogged yesterday is an appreciation for D&D creator Gary Gygax, who died last week, penned by Wired editor Adam Rogers. "Gygax's genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk." The unintended result: "Every time I make a tactical move, I'm counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice."

For some reason, Jeremy Piven and other Entourage people were hanging out last night at a party for Microsoft's new Office Live Workspace product. A CNET reporter went "hoping to find some people willing to talk about whether Office Live Workspace really is a formidable answer to the Google Docs that I've found myself using pretty frequently," but instead found a bunch of models there. Way to screw up a good Microsoft gathering, Jeremy Piven. [CNET]

"If you've never heard of PowerPoint Karaoke, that probably means you're neither German nor a hardcore techie." By god, we'll have to admit that that's an accurate statement. This trend may have been around in German techie circles for a while, but now that it's hit the media at large, expect to see it in as a weakly-attended theme night soon at a bar near you. The Boston Globe reports that the trend of taking a random PowerPoint presentation and putting together a narrative for it on the fly is just about as much fun as any crowd of "extroverted geeks" can handle. Plus they're all drunk at the time! Actually, it does sound like fun.

Beyond its obvious benefit to gamers, videographers, and other hobbyists, the Internet has enabled certain obscure non-media communities to flourish. Speedcubers, for example. Rapid Rubik's Cube solvers were rare for the last couple of decades, but the Internet brought a recent rush of enthusiasts. As Google engineer and speedcuber Lars Petrus explained in the documentary "Piece by Piece," a Rubik's cube fanatic is probably the only one in their city. Without the net, there's no way to find other fans. Now teens are catching on, thanks to online lessons, tips and solutions ("What's the trick?" asks another solver in "Piece by Piece." "Years of painstaking work") such as Petrus's site and the video below.

TIM FAULKNER — "The first rule of Fight Club is never talk about Fight Club," but some San Francisco tech workers have adopted their own rules according to WRCB TV. They've formed their own underground fight club, the Gentleman's Fighting Club, to release stress after work as programmers and engineers. Apparently, they are unaware that the film and book by Chuck Palahniuk is a work of fiction. Of course, geeks sometimes have difficulty discerning fantasy and reality and often take their favorite obsessions too far: whether it be Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Battlestar Gallatica... or in this case Fight Club.