Just for Thot: people who love the Age of Sail, head here.
Also, when Audra said “Casilda will back me up on this,” she proved to be a mind-reader 
Of course it depends on the field but there’s been a tendency in literary studies towards cultural studies, that is, widening what we see as our “archive” - we don’t just study novels and poems and plays, but also commercials and film and soap operas and graphic novels and comics and clothing and… 
in fact, I was reading a piece for my current project the other day that involved a reading of an educational comic (which, sadly, I haven’t been able to get my hands on); Scott McCloud has a few books (Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, Making Comics) that could be interesting to those who would like to look at them from an academic perspective. And I deal with some texts in my current project that aren’t the traditional purvey of my field, but they’re awesome, and add a ton to understanding the way culture is represented, remade, and resignified. So - yeah! What Audra said!
I didn’t phone in my “geek” story, but as I’m sure most of you could at this point guess, I was a reader as a child and most of my geekery was solitary, and came through books. I was lucky at one point to have a close friend with whom I could share my geekery, but sadly we both had to move away with our families. The cool part, though, is that part of how we kept in touch was by creating characters in one of the worlds of the books we liked to read, and writing stories back and forth about those characters. It was awesome.
