Release The Geek

Release The Geek hits 100 episodes! To celebrate, we throw co-host Vittorio Leonardi and The Variants Cover team of Limpho Moeti, Nas Hoosen and Greg Nell at host Les Allen to find out HIS geek origin story!

Creative parenting expert, Nikki Bush, joins us to talk about how parents can help guide their children in an ever-changing world of technology!

Nikki is THE "go to" expert when it comes to parenting in South Africa, a much sought after speaker and author who provides incredible and easy to understand insights on a very difficult topic.

Release The Geek co-host Vittorio Leonardi has always been fascinated by the strange and the bizarre and, in 2017, he'll be launching is new podcast, Urbane Myths! This episode of RTG is a sneak preview of what you can expect from Urbane Myths. In this episode, Vittorio talks about the Vela Incident, where a Vela Hotel satellite captured a flash of something in the Southern Indian Ocean. Thing is, the Vela satellites were designed to detect nuclear explosions ...

As a final lead in to all new 2017 podcast episodes, we present another fantastic ICON 2016 panel, which directly links to next week's podcast - South Africa's 'go-to' parenting expert, Nikki Bush, and South Africa's 'go-to' tech advisor, Arthur Goldstuck, took to the stage to talk about how to be a tech-savvy parent in an ever changing world!

Was back in the dark times of 2016, we chatted to the 'go-to' guy of SA tech, Arthur Goldstuck, about his path to geekdom. During the chat, he mentioned he'd written a number of books about urban legends and we were keen to here more - so we organised him a panel at ICON 2016! Join Les Allen and Vittorio Leonardi on stage with Arthur Goldstuck as we talk about South African urban legends!

Back in June 2016, #ICON2016 brought up the topic of the seeming 'rise' of speculative fiction. Master fantasy author Raymond E. Feist and SA author Fred Strydom took to the stage to talk about the idea that spec fiction is on the 'rise' and gets to the truth behind this common conception.

We are now well into the festive season, but there are plenty of you out there who either didn't take leave or who were denied it and have now been stuck at work (hopefully, it isn't that busy at time for you). This can be an onerous time, particularly for office workers who may not have a lot going on. To help you wile away the drudgery, the Variants Cover team has come to your rescue - there are hundreds, if not thousands of entertaining and thought-provoking webcomics out there that can help ease the passage of time. The Variants Cover team, in their ever so humble opinion, give you a raft of webcomic recommendations, along with the reasons as to why you might like a particular one based on other things you like.

With the festive season just around the corner, you're going to need help with gift ideas for the comic geek in your life (or even for yourself if you want to dip your toe into the deep comic pool). The Variant Covers team steps into the breach to help identify the best comics of 2017 to make your shopping decisions much easier!

On October 20 this year, Jordan Belamire posted an article on the Medium website detailing a recent experience she had playing the HTC Vive game QuiVr. In the game, she was 'virtually' groped and harassed by another player, moments after speaking in game - her voice identified her character as female, otherwise there would've been no way to know. In her article, Jordan related that while she was not touched physically, she related that the groping felt just as real, and it started a heated conversation online as to the various factors around sexual harassment and sexual assault in the virtual space - can it be called sexual harassment if its virtual? What are the legal ramifications? Can someone be charged? These are complicated concepts and questions and we needed some help to go through them, so we went to some of friends who are much smarter about these things: Avri Spilka, psycho-sexual consultant & educator and Pippa Tshabalala, our go to gaming expert, sat down with us to help us come to terms with what sexual harassment means, how this relates to virtual worlds, and how we might fix this in the future. A note: we go to some pretty deep and dark places, and some people who may have had experiences with topics such as sexual harassment, assault and rape need to be aware of this.

Back in May this year, GeekXP managed to secure a pre-screening session of X-Men Apocalypse, and the Variants Cover team were there to enjoy the movie. Of course, being the comics fans we are, we had to sit down and dissect it, and there are some very strong feelings around the content of the movie, its relationship to canon and plenty of discussions about the X-Men cartoons.