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GeekDad is at PAX all weekend, and we’ll be adding pictures as we take them.

Image from Cartoon Network

[This is a guest post by friend-of-GeekDad Jayson Peters, who also blogs at Nerdvana.]

Since it debuted in 1969, Scooby-Doo! has always been about snacking, solving mysteries, snacking and unmasking phony monsters (except for a few excursions into “monsters are real” territory that are generally best forgotten). And did I mention the snacking?

But the latest entry in the mythos, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, is a different animal. While the basic foundations of the characters are unchanged, the show now has a story arc that goes beyond the monster of the week, along with a witty self-referential streak that will reward longtime Scoobyphiles for their fanaticism. And there’s also romance in the air — but it’s not between Fred and Daphne.

This Saturday, you can catch up on the new Cartoon Network series with a marathon viewing of the first eight half-hour episodes (check your local listings). You’ll learn why the adults in our young sleuths’ lives would prefer the children mind their own business, and you’ll be introduced to a shady new character, “Mr. E,” who hints at a dark fate for the last group of meddling kids to come out of Crystal Cove. In this “most haunted town in the world,” nothing is quite as it seems. If you haven’t seen Mystery Incorporated, fire up your DVRs and get ready for a wild ride in the Mystery Machine.

In other Scooby news on the horizon, Sept. 14 will see the latest direct-to-DVD release, the feature-length Camp Scare, with the same voice cast as the new TV series (longtime Fred and Scooby Frank Welker, recent Velma and Daphne voice talents Mindy Cohn and Grey DeLisle, and Matthew Lillard, who played Shaggy in the two live-action feature films and has taken over the cartoon role from the now-retired Casey Kasem).

October will bring us Curse of the Lake Monster, a live-action romp on Cartoon Network that reunites the cast of last year’s The Mystery Begins, which served as a prequel to the live-action movies of 2002 and 2004.

Ever since I took on the job of Editor at GeekDad, and would meet people at events like Maker Faire, the question I kept hearing over and over was “but what about GeekMom?!” Sometimes it was spoken with a bit of humor, but more often with a sense of real desire to see such a site.

To the best of my ability, I’ve always run GeekDad to be as much as parenting blog as it is a dad blog, to the point of including four wonderful geeky mom writers on our team. But it comes down to the fact that a site named GeekDad will always skew just a bit to one side of the gender line.

And so, with the help of our founding father Chris Anderson, we’ve been able to acquire the URL for GeekMom.com, and over the last couple months I the four GeekDad moms (Natania Barron, Kathy Ceceri, Corrina Lawson and Jenny Williams), with loads of help from GeekDads Michael Harrison, Anton Olson, Dave Banks, Nathan Berry and others, have built out the new site, gathered a tremendous team of contributing writers, and set ourselves the awesome goal of doing for geeky moms what GeekDad has done for us dads.

This is intended as a soft launch, and we’ll be taking reader feedback and tweaking the site and the content over the next month before the “official” launch (think of us as a Google beta, but with an actual end goal). So please, check it out!

Image via Wikipedia

Baker’s name is not one that springs to mind immediately, but you’ve probably heard his work many, many times over the years, watching cartoons with your kids (or, being a good geek, on your own). He is a prolific voice artist, with credits spanning animated series from Star Wars: The Clone Wars to The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. He’s also done his fair share of voice work on videogames, including Gears of War, the Halo series, Tony Hawk, Spider-Man and more. He should be especially lauded for voicing GeekDad favorite Perry the Platypus on Phineas and Ferb, and Captain Rex (and every other clone) on Clone Wars. Happy Birthday, sir!

Check out GeekDad John Booth’s interview with Dee Bradley Baker, and visit Baker’s website.

[A version of this article was published on GeekDad on August 31, 2009.]

Quick pointer to this awesome eye-chart, made with a different font from a famous sci-fi/genre show show or movie for each letter. Thus, you can check your visual acuity and your geekiness in one test.

Bite.ca, via Geekologie.

Image © Valve Corporation

If you’re worried your kid may be heading off to college with the intention of just playing video games all day, your suspicions may be proven right – and not to be such a problem. They’ll just be doing their homework!

Wabash College, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, decided to try something new this year with a course entitled “Enduring Questions:”

Enduring Questions is a required freshman seminar offered during the spring semester. It is devoted to engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives and fostering a sense of community. Each section of the course includes a small group (approximately 15) of students who consider together classic and contemporary works from multiple disciplines. In so doing, students confront what it means to be human and how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and our world.

In setting up the course, faculty member Michael Abbott, who also blogs as The Brainy Gamer, suggested Portal might just fit the bill as a contemporary entry point into those very questions. After taking his colleagues through the game, they wholeheartedly agreed, and this fall entering freshmen will, along side copies of Hamlet and the Tao Te Ching, find copies of Portal in their book bags and homework assignments requiring them to determine the truth, or un-truth, of the cake.

The GeekDads talk about Star Wars Celebration V, Harry Potter World, and the Jon Stewart Action Figure. Enjoy!

GeekDad.com is the parenting blog at Wired.com, edited by Ken Denmead, Matt Blum and Chris Anderson. It is a community of like-minded geeky parents writing about our experiences raising our kids in the digital age, and about our obsessions with technology, family-friendly projects, and pop-culture. The GeekDads podcast is a bi-weekly discussion of anything and everything that impacts us as geeks and parents.

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

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You can download or listen to GeekDad Episode 74.mp3.

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For those of you who enjoy our GeekDads podcast, we’ll broadcast the recording session live tonight. So if you’d like to waste an hour and participate via chat room, stop by right here at 7:00 this evening, Pacific Time. We hope to see you here!