Our story begins in 1999 at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Fed up with the nerds around her constantly talking about things like framerate, bilinear filtering and memory bandwidth, a young woman named Monika coined a phrase.

“You guys with your wires and your megs and your, your … gig matrix!”

A short while later, a handful of those same nerds used the phrase as the name for a comic strip they planned to submit to the school newspaper. Alex, Aaron and Reuben created 11 comics for the paper, spending late-night hours at Taco Bell or gathered around Alex’s PowerMac. The comic eventually was rejected, but the phrase had become a thing.

Three years later, Aaron and Reuben started a Web site. They wanted a place where they and their similarly inclined friends, including newcomers Brian and Rob, could write about the stuff they liked: games, movies, TV shows. Coming up with a name was the easiest part.

In early 2005, Gig Matrix switched to a weblog format. Free of publishing bottlenecks (previously, everything had to filter through Reuben and his mess of tables and server-side includes), the Gig crew now rains wit and irreverence upon an unsuspecting (and largely uninterested) public.

The summer of 2007 saw another redesign and some slight reorganization. A new feature, the High Five, tracks the week’s most interesting tidbits, and with 95 percent less orange, the site is easier on the eyes than ever.

Those nerds still talk about wires and megs, and Monika still occasionally calls them out for it. But if she didn’t, Gig Matrix wouldn’t be a thing.