Got a special nerd in your life?  Well, you won’t find a better Valentine’s Day card than one of the geeky pop-culture Valentines designed by Garrison Dean over at io9.  There’s HAL9000, Robocop, Mass Effect 2, and even The Hills Have Eyes-themed Valentines for you to cut, write on, and give to your sweetie, cyborg, clone, Cylon, or space alien of choice.  There are also some great real-life scientist Valentines over at Ironic Sans.

While I’m far from a big Valentines Day kind of guy, I have to admit these are pretty awesome, and wonderfully seasonally appropriate without being too sappy or cheesy.  Just a little bit of light-hearted fun; just what this stuffy, forced-romantic season needs.

One of the best things about the rise of crafters on the Internet is that you can get pretty much any kind of geek-centric craft you can imagine, all thanks to your fellow oddities. Take, for example, these great video-game-themed home furnishings from Mental Floss.  There are a lot of Pac-man themed shelving units, which would go great next to those Pac-man ghost lights!

My favorite is definitely Soner Ozenc’s Tetris Mirror, but I have to admit they’re all really cool.  As for the Tetris mirror, it’s awesome because it’s in 13 separate pieces, which you can put together to form any Tetris shape you like!  It’s the perfect decoration for, say, a game room or a video gamer’s lair.  Or even a bedroom, since they’re gorgeous and not overtly nerdy!

That Donkey Kong shelf is a close second, if only because of how cool it looks with all those great Nintendo video games of the past arrayed on top of it.  The use of barrels as dividers adds a functional and aesthetic appeal, making it a great bookshelf for old video game manuals.

Created by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, the Futuro house was, for its time, an incredible leap forward in home design technology.  Not because of any special features the home contained, but because of what the homes were made of.  From the late 1960’s until the mid-1970’s, the Futuro was the ultimate in modern home design.

The Futuro was created for use in the harsh Finnish climate.  The round design and small size allowed the Futuro to serve as a portable skiing cabin.  You just hook it to a helicopter and fly it into position, settle it down and there you go.  It sat on four sturdy steel legs, had a drop-down entrance gangplank, and came with a variety of prefabricated insets to serve a variety of domestic needs, from kitchens to bedrooms.  The entire home was made up of roughly 16 pieces, and were surprisingly adaptable.  Made by plastics company Polykem, the unique saucer-shaped homes were made of polyester plastic and fiberglass.  This made them ultra-light and, when combined with built-in electric heating systems and integrated insulation, could heat the house from a chilly -20 to a comfortably warmth 60 in only half an hour.

The demise of the Futuro wasn’t because of its lack of popularity, but because of the oil crisis.  The reduction in crude supplies drove the price of plastic through the roof, and considering the Futuro is made mostly of plastic, that put an end to that little flight of fancy.  Of the 100 or so Futuros produced, some 60 of them survive to this day in one form or another, with a variety of enthusiasts working to preserve them today.

The earliest movie theaters were able to lure customers in just by having moving picture images projected on screen, but since then it’s gotten harder and harder to put rear ends in seats for the biggest blockbusters.  While a big draw for 1940’s audiences was ice-cold air conditioning, once the novelty of AC spread to homes and television grabbed the world’s attention, the movie theaters had to turn to increasingly strange gimmicks to capture ticket dollars.  One of the first of these was 3-D, but 3-D has changed a lot in the past 50 years.

One thing I can safely say is that I’m so very very glad the polarized glasses of the 1950’s are an anachronism.  While I enjoyed watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon with them on, when I took them off to rub my eyes the blurry color bleed effect on screen gave me a massive headache.  Plus, you kind of look like a goof with those Elton John specs on.  However, the increased manufacture cost of modern 3D glasses gets passed along to the consumer in ticket surcharges, which I intensely hate.

So, I’m kind of torn on the issue.  If I’m going to see a movie, I want to get the full effect, so I’ll grudgingly pay for a pair of recyclable plastic sunglasses.  I just wish I could reuse the same pair over and over again and save on the cost of the screening!

Twitter is kind of a trend right now, but it’s an odd trend.  I’m a big user (I even set up the Shakadoo Twitter feed!), so I’m secure enough to admit that it’s incredibly geeky.  It’s a combination of being hooked on Blackberry usage mixed with texting and blogging, which are like three of the nerdiest things you can admit to doing in public.  If only there was some way to work in science fiction… oh wait.

Adam “Apelad” Koford, artist extraordinaire, has turned up the nerd factor of Twitter by redesigning the Twitter icon to feature a wide assortment of science fiction, comic book, and video game characters.  There are some really cool icons here; if Twitter ever adopted a Google Doodle-style rotating Twitter icon, they should really consider getting Apelad’s designs in the first rotation.

I’m a huge fan of ThinkGeek.  In fact, I say if you see something cool on their website, then you ought to buy it, because they put out a top quality product and are more than fast when it comes to getting your new present out of their store and into your hands.  That’s why I can definitely endorse their 2009 Holiday Gift Guide for anyone shopping for the nerd in their life.

However, if you need things narrowed down for you a little bit, Inventor Spot has put together their list of the five geekiest gifts on ThinkGeek.  It’s a pretty fun list, but it’s also kind of traditional since the items listed are all clothing or accessories.  I mean, there’s a purse for mom and a tie for dad on there!  It’s both nerdy and a moldy old sterotype!

I love it when retailers play the “Anything you can do, I can do better” game.  Why?  Because the person who really wins is the consumer, at least when it comes to pricing wars.  For example, Walmart took on Amazon.com’s book prices, and Amazon lowered theirs in response.  Now, Walmart put out a deal where you can preorder their top 10 DVDs for $10, and now Target is taking them on by providing the same deal.  Everyone wins!

Here’s the Walmart selection.  And here’s the Target selection.  There’s no real difference between the two, except the Target top 10 has 11 DVDs listed.  It makes me wonder if the two companies will eventually have different movie offerings, or if it’s the same 10 DVDs for $10 from now until Christmas.

Most importantly, what’s Amazon going to do?  If they match this same deal, that’s an awful lot of copies of G-Force for very little money.

It’s a great combination of the old school and modern technology.  Take a gander at the awesome Cylon Pumpkins from Evil Mad Scientist’s Cylon jack-o-lantern kit!  I know, it looks cool, right?  Well, just watch it in motion!

isn’t that great?  Wouldn’t it be really cool to have on the front porch this Halloween (and to reuse those LEDs for future jack-o-lanterns?  It’s the perfect blend of sci-fi nerdery and Halloween fun!

Twitter, the microblogging platform that’s become the hottest thing on the Internet since Facebook, has really been taking off.  In fact, 20% of Americans have embraced Twitter.  Or at least Twitter-like microblogging services.  They’re not terribly specific on what services they count in the study.

Taking an in-depth look at the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s demographics yields some fascinating information.  For example, 26% of African American in the study are Twitter users while 21% of women use Twitter.  That 33% of folks 18-29 are Twitterers isn’t surprising, but in the sizable 30-49 demographic, 22% of people Tweet.

That kind of turns the steretype of young white male nerds as gadget-centric on its ear, doesn’t it?  Technology has truly become a democratizing force, if only because everyone uses it!  It does make me wonder how corporate Twitter accounts are counted, though.

I seriously have no words.  If I did, I wouldn’t be able to type them without a Klingon keyboard.