These are notes summarizing comments made by speakers and audience during this session:

• Are you a geek? When telling a story, how often do you elaborate on the details? Baseball stat geek, science detail geek, D&D geek, all about details.
• What actually constitutes a geek?
• Student: it’s good to be a geek, it means someone who is passionate about something.
• Student: Geek is starting to be glamorized. Big Bang Theory, Harry Potter movie.
• Radio Show Host: compares herself to scientists, and doesn’t think herself a geek, but the audience is geeks (Skeptically Speaking). Considers herself a translator. Geeks listen more closely to the show, and send emails. Geeks provide feedback.
• “You call it geekery, I call it passion.”
• Geeks distrust social niceties. Why aren't they just giving me the information straight? Tendency towards argumentation.
• What are Benefits and Pitfalls of a Geeky audience? Bonus is passion. Geeks get immersed in details, and have a self-generating energy and will keep working through things left to their own.
• Geeks don’t see correcting others as a slight.
• Accuracy VS Completeness: don’t ever say false things, but you don’t have to get totally immersed.
• Geeks are obsessive enough that they will voluntarily seek out details on their own.
• How to delineate between being too geeky and not geeky enough? Keep things entertaining as a means of keeping people with your content. If it’s entertaining, people will stick with you through the sciency parts.
• Make sure your headline and introduction are not for geeks, but you can geek out later in the story. Skeptchick uses humor to open all posts, post about Twilight.  Scicurious has posts that reach out to her audience, Friday posts about sex.
• Catchphrases and Inside Jokes create communities, but they also put up walls to communities.
• Surprise people with a story, ask a question to pique curiosity about how it will affect people personally,
• Whatstheharm.net – anecdotes. Turns on non-geeks, but turns off geeks because we want data. What’s the difference between whatstheharm.net and Rush Limbaugh using anecdotes to hurt science?
• Snark: a way of building a community, but causes pile-ons, turns off outsiders, PZMeyers’ fans attack whoever he points them too. Snark is the nature of the Internet. Radio difference: no snark rule.
• Use snark to empower the weak against the powerful. Use it against trolls against power.
• Try going with a private comment first before going public.
• Remember that it’s the internet, your tone doesn't communicate in the text.
• Don’t do threaded comments.
• You’re going to offend someone. Radio got called a Marxist for her show on gender. 

A summary of points from this conference session about portraying scientists in fiction and getting science facts right:

• Hollywood blockbusters carry so much weight, need to get more science into this medium
• Scientists need to be telling their own stories. There are only about 120 books about scientists.
• What does it mean for a story to accurately portay science? Getting scientific facts right? Or scientists reacting in a way scientists should react? Believes stories are about people, making them more important than the facts.
• Star Trek: Starhip Mine: “terrorists steal MacGuffin juice from the warp core” Barrion sweep on the enterprise, but barrions are in all atoms. LOL Cats as up and down quarks. Maybe the Barrions in ST were exotic sub-space barrions. We can use the episode to teach proper science.
• 2012 had a ridiculous premise, but the scientists were awesome.
•  Michael Crighton: Climate Change book was silly, Andromeda Strain was silly
• Jennifer: Percival’s Planet, example of good science story about the discovery of Pluto
• Science presented without scientific process is just magic.
• "Tron Legacy" was awful, but for me Tron, had Unix commands, mentioned genetic algorithms, I got much more enjoyment out of the film than the average viewer. Would including something about the game of life or evolving programs through natural selection make the film more interesting? The screenwriters were obviously familiar with the concepts, why did they shy away from giving the film more depth?