Oh dear sweet Jesus on a pogo stick...you have to see this.

I was recently introduced to the joys of Topless Robot, which is the kind of snarky geek/comic/videogame/anime blog I wish I could write, and which I highly recommend.  (It includes TWoP in its blogroll, and the humor does remind me of TWoP back in the days when it was funny.)  On Fridays they post something called, appropriately enough, Fan Fiction Friday.

Think of the worst, most disturbing fanfic you've ever been tricked into reading.  Then double the pain.  Then quadruple it.  That starts to give you an idea of the things that this blog has dredged up from the depths of the intarwebz.  Look, people...things that cause you to use the phrases "Care Bears" and "S&M" in the same sentence?  Just shouldn't exist.  Nor should erotic scenes between a Red Koopa and a Green Koopa.  Nor should femslash involving Lilo of Lilo & Stitch and the Powerpuff Girls.  After all that, the Night Court mpreg looked almost normal.

Lest you think I am making this shit up, you can find it all here.  I wish LiveJournal allowed longer tags, because I would tag this as both OMG That Is Horrible and Disgusting - Let's Show It To Someone Else, and I May Be Messed Up But At Least I Don't Write Dragon Ball Z / Anne Frank Crossover Fic.  (That last one is safe to click on, by the way.  The author keeps it PG, and gives it a happy ending, in which Goku defeats Super Saiyan Hitler and takes Anne to Australia and marries her.  And the mere fact that I can state that kind of thing is safe to read, shows you just how warping some of the other stories were...)

OK. To make up for my giant post of whine about my old job, and to celebrate the fact that my cold is finally gone enough that I feel almost human, I present to you a scan that was recently posted at the Fail Blog, that illustrates How Not To Draw A Comic Book Cover.

( Cut because technically it's perfectly safe for work, but...MAN. )

If fan fiction about this exists, I do not want to know about it.

I just discovered Science Fiction Studies, a journal of essays and reviews of, naturally, science fiction works. Oddly, it's put out by DePauw University, where a good friend of mine works, but neither of us were aware of its existence. It's put out three times a year and is $26 for a subscription, which I will be doing my best to cough up. I mean, these are the sorts of articles they are publishing:

Alec Charles: War without End?: Utopia, the Family, and the Post-9/11 World in Russell T. Davies’s Doctor Who

Abstract. -- This essay explores the ideological positioning of Russel T. Davies’s reinvention of the classic British TV series Doctor Who. Davies’s program has announced in its themes, settings, and allusions an unusually direct engagement with contemporary politics: specifically, the repercussions of the Al-Qaeda strikes of September 11, 2001. Like American television’s Heroes and Battlestar Galactica, the new Doctor Who argues against the totalizing strategies advanced by both sides in the war on terror, denouncing violent modes of pseudo-utopian fundamentalism in favor of pluralist and personal solutions to global problems. Yet it has also remained aware of its own protagonists’ potential to succumb to such forms of fantaticism. Exploring in detail the reimagined Doctor Who’s first four seasons (2005-2008), the essay shows how the series investigates, juxtaposes, and perhaps eventually reconciles two concepts central to its narrative: utopia and family.

After reading through my flist, I have decided that there are only three ways for fandom to cope with last night's  "character development" for Sylar:

1. Killing Tim Kring.
2. Crack (literal).
3. Crack (metaphorical).

After some analysis, I've determined that the least harmful of these three choices is probably the final one.  (I am, however, open to hearing arguments to the contrary.)  And so, I present to you my outline for a vitally important fic that I would like to write!  It is titled...

( Cut so as not to spoil anyone who hasn't yet seen last night's episode. And to preserve you from my insanity. )
All I'm saying is, if you're going to let 14-year-old fanfic writers write Sylar's storyline, then you should just fucking go full-out balls-to-the-wall with it, Kring.

Any additional plot suggestions for The Incredible Sparkly Adventures are welcomed! 

This month, Glarkware is offering their "Petrelli for Senate!" t-shirts again. And they've got a slightly different picture of it up.  Go ahead.  Take a look at it.  Just make sure there's nothing in your mouth that might be spit on your keyboard.

( Slash, thy name is Legion... )

If you have not been here, you should go. Now. And download the unicorn wallpaper.

http://whatwouldnphdo.com/

(Note: the site plays music, so beware of that if you are clicking at work.) 

I know I've been delinquent about responding to emails and comments lately. I've just been...not depressed, but having no desire to participate in life, either real or online. I am not sure what the problem is. Every time I think I'm starting to pull myself out of that, something happens to knock me back down.

So, I want to post this quickly. Normally I would flock (and filter) something like this, but this appeals to the cultural studies geek in me, and there may be people on my flist who know people who aren't on my flist who might be fellow geeks and would like to see this. At WisCon this weekend, I did attend the panel "Fanfic and Slash 101", and it was rather interesting. The panelists included someone who's just a massive fic writer, someone who's a massive fic writer and is a collegiate English instructor, and a woman named Anastasia Salter, who is about to complete a master's degree (in communication studies? can't remember) and is doing her thesis on this topic. At the end of the session, they offered us a list of academic publications regarding fanfic that we might be interested in perusing. Should that kind of thing appeal to you...here it is.



If you can find anything written by Anastasia Salter, I would also recommend reading her words. Listening to her gave me flashbacks to working on my degree, in a good way. Very near the beginning of the panel, she pointed out that there are plenty of people who would jump at the chance to see Wicked and would discuss it in detail afterwards, but would sneer at someone who said they write stories about Harry Potter. However, Wicked is fanfic. Gregory Maguire took a minor character in an established fantasy world and extrapolated a story around her, based out of canon.  It may have been made into a Broadway musical, but it's still fanfic.

obsessed fangirl [uhb-sest fan-gurl] noun. Someone who actually calls the CW to leave a message on their comment line begging them to pick up Moonlight now that CBS has foolishly cancelled it.

This was totally not me, by the way. It was, um, one of my friends who did this. Yeah.

(It's a sobering moment when you realize that you honestly don't care whether you ever own S2 of Heroes on DVD...but you tell multiple people that TPTB had damn well better put out DVDs for the sadly-abbreviated single season of Moonlight.  Dammit, the show was supposed to suck.  Instead, it was one of the best things about this TV season.  I blame Jason Dohring.)

(ETA: Also?  When did I become a new-school Doctor Who fan???  I totally blame Catherine Tate.  This world has become utterly and completely crazy...) 

(ETA2: This Sunday, Adult Swim is airing both the Robot Chicken Star Wars special - which I have not yet seen - and the Family Guy Star Wars special - which I've seen at least a half-dozen times and never tire of watching!!!!!!!!11!!!1!!!  O, my cup runneth over.  You wanna see someone geek out?  Maybe I'll try to record my face when the Fourth Doctor appears at the moment when the Millenium Falcon jumps into hyperspace.  Seriously.  Geek-out, every time.)

 (ETA3: OK, I realize I need to stop editing this post, but I didn't want to make multiple posts for silly little things.  Neil Gaiman has even commented in his blog about the BBC going after some poor fan who made Doctor Who knitting patterns.  Apparently, someone else was selling the end product on eBay...which, of course, means that logically the best course of action is to go after the fan who had no idea they were doing this.  Gaaaaaaaaah.)

(1) Jericho has somehow become totally fucking awesome. Like, last season, it was just a guilty pleasure. But this season? I don't think a single episode of Heroes set me off like tonight's Jericho did. Not even "Powerless". And speaking of "Powerless"...

(2) Tonight's episode of Jericho featured an Indian doctor giving an injection to the tortured antihero by shoving a needle into his arm rather violently. Seriously. No, seriously. I wish I'd recorded this episode so that I could get screencaps to show all y'all, since I know that only about 3 other people in the US watched tonight's episode. Okay, so the situation is a little different - Jake actually feels bad about the people he killed, and Kenchy has a tendency to be cowardly when he's not drunk, and there wasn't really any eyefucking (I think - I was busy choking on my drink) - but still.

(3) Did I mention that Hawkins is made of freaking awesome? (Actually, that's definitely a good thing.) He's just made of awesome, people. As is Major Beck, who is oh so freaking definitely a match for him. And speaking of Major Beck...

(4) All the new characters they're introduced on Jericho, unlike the new characters on Heroes this season, freaking rock. You like the ones you're supposed to like, and you hate the ones you're supposed to hate, and yet nothing is 100% set in stone (look, I hate that Ravenwood douchebag too, but you can't blame him for twisting the knife in Jake by mentioning that dead Iraqi girl, and okay he's not exactly a new character but I didn't think they'd actually bring him back), and they all work, and they all feel essential to the plot.  And that leads me to a thesis I have been nurturing over the past week, which is...

(5) Heroes needs to take a page from Jericho's playbook. Yeah. You heard me. Instead of being a sprawling epic taking place in multiple states, Jericho was forced to jettison 2/3 of its plot.  And with that narrower focus, it's actually gotten exciting.  Kring? Purchase a clue now, while you still have time.  Because Jake Green is starting to look really good to me.

(6) Also? Angela Petrelli was just trying to nuke New York.  Valente nuked NORTH KOREA AND IRAN.  There is officially someone out there who scares me more than Angela.

This video was posted by sinemoras09 . There is virtually no overlap between her flist and mine, so I'm a-stealing it and posting it here. Half of my brain is laughing hysterically at this...the other half is cowering in the corner whispering, "Bad touch! Bad touch!"  Let's just say that setting the original slash pairing to the music of Trent Reznor (and doing a damn good job at evoking the feel of the video for it) is something that the world probably never needed to have happen.





OK, now I feel bad for warping your fragile little minds. So here is something a little less disturbing: from Chaser's War On Everything, it's Brokeback Mountain: Christian Edition.