It’s been a while since I answered an e-mail from a reader. How about we do that?
Pat,
I just wanted to say I’ve loved The Name of the Wind for over a year now, but I just recently found your website. Your blog has kept me laughing for almost two solid weeks as I go back and read the archives. That’s something I’ve never done with a blog before.
Even better, your fundraiser was seriously amazing this year.
Seriously, how cool are you?
Jake
Jake,
You strike on a topic I’ve been curious about for some time. How cool am I?
As I’ve mentioned before in the blog, growing up, I wasn’t one of the cool kids. But things change, and these days geek is chic. I’m willing to admit to the fact that these days, I might actually be a little cool.
Your letter poses an interesting problem though. If you’d simply asked, “Are you cool?” I could have gotten away with answering “maybe” or “kinda.” But you’ve asked for a _degree_ of coolness. What’s more, you’ve requested that I *seriously* consider the problem.
That means we need to use science and shit. We need quantifiable units of coolness that we can plug into formulas. We need to be rigorous.
Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, the BIPM hasn’t established a standard unit by which we can measure coolness. I can’t just tell you that I’m say, 85 pascals of cool. Or 158 newtons. Or whatever.
That means if we want to determine how cool I am, we have to measure me against some sort of universally accepted standard of cool. We need to develop our own yardstick, as it were.
So, let’s pick two people who are undeniably cool. The king and queen of geek cool: Felicia Day and Neil Gaiman.
Now we need some numbers. While popularity isn’t quite the same thing as cool, you have to admit they’re closely related. Since I don’t have access to things like book sales or website hits, we’ll have to go to the lowest common denominator: Facebook.
(Yes, I know. Technically, Myspace would be the lowest common denominator. But there’s only so low I’m willing to go, even for science.)
A quick search of fan pages reveals the following stats.
Felicia: 192,000 fans.
Neil: 90,000 fans.
Me: 10,000 fans.
Now we could stop here and say, that I’m about .05 as cool as Felicia. Or that I’m roughly .11 of a Gaiman. Or something like that.
But drawing data from only one source strikes me as slipshod. To round things out, why don’t we take a look at Goodreads rankings?
Here’s a screenshot of their list of most-followed people.
[Edit: Yes, I know these numbers have changed since I took the screenshot. I’m not redoing the math.]
(Click to Embiggen)As a side note, you can see that according to Goodreads, I’m ever-so slightly cooler than Wil Wheaton. I like how it looks like his little Lego man is pissed at me for being above him.
“Curse you, Rothfuss,” Lego-Wheaton says. “How dare you get between me and Felicia day?”
“Takest not that tone with me,” Russian-dictator-looking-Rothfuss glowers from above. “Lest I crush you with my manly, blue-lit beard.”
“Bring it Hagrid,” he replies. “I’ll beat you like a redheaded stepchild.”
“What are you going to use?” I say. “Your kung-fu grip? Hell, you don’t even have any elbows!”
Wait… Sorry, what was I talking about again?
Oh. Right. Coolness. I guess I lost a few points just there.
Anyway, as you can see things stand like this:
Me: 383 friends, 308 people following my reviews.
Felicia: 2,710 friends, 380 people following her reviews.
Not pictured above, Neil Gaiman sits at #1 on this list. Topping the chart on a mountain of cool with 5,175 friends and 3,133 people following his reviews.
Let’s just combine these for simplicity’s sake:
Gaiman: 8308
Felicia: 3090
Me: 691
Because the Facebook numbers are really high compared to Goodreads, we have to normalize them by multiplying by .045. (Don’t ask how I got there. It’s boring. If you understand statistics, you know how it works.) That gives us:
Gaiman: 4050
Felicia: 8550
Me: 450
So we add these together and apply the bonus multipliers.
Gaimain:
Medium Bonus – Novels, Comics, Movies, Audiobooks: *1.4
Association Bonus – Engaged to Amanda Palmer *1.5
Flair Bonus – Accent *1.4
Appearance Bonus: Sexy *1.5
12358 *1.4 *1.5 *1.4 *1.5 = 54499
Felicia:
Medium Bonus – Television, Webisodes, Comics: *1.3
(The Guild comic is coming out soon, in case you didn’t know.)
Association Bonus – Works with Joss Whedon *1.6
Flair Bonus – Smells like flowers and PS3 *1.3
Appearance Bonus: Sexy *1.5
11640 *1.3 *1.6 *1.2 *1.5 = 47212
Me:
Flair Bonus: Beard *1.2
Penalty: Engaging in imaginary smack talk with Lego-Wheaton. *.09
1141 *1.2 *0.9 = 1232
You still with me? Now we have to create our yardstick for the measurement of geek-coolness. Imagine if Neil Gaiman and Felicia Day were somehow alchemically combined into one creature. Some ubercool, sexy, hermaphroditic, webisode-creating, rockstar, gamer, author thing.
I think it’s safe to say that godlike creature would be the ultimate amalgam of geek cool.
So if we add together the scores of Neil Gaiman and Felicia Day, we get roughly 100,000 units. These I hereby term Gaiman-Day units. They will hereafter be used to determine how cool someone is. 100,000 Gaiman-Day units is the coolest you can be without collapsing into some manner of singularity.
So there we go. Now we have a way to quantify how cool I am, Jake. I am exactly 1232 Gaiman-Day units of cool. Only about one percent as cool as it’s possible to be.
I hope this answers your question, Jake.
pat
