Deploy the Cheese chaff!

Via Warren Ellis:

Florida scientists have grown a rat brain in a petri dish and taught it to fly a fighter plane.

... I have no joke. Either this is incredibly cool, or God just did an enormous spit-take, stood up, and said "Right, time to fix this lot. Get me my smiting pants."

Nice tinfoil hat. Good work on the creasing.

Our friends at Visible Monsters have found a link to New York crazy-person streetlamp posters. Somehow, all this concentrated crazy just makes me miss the City more.

Geek Hierarchy

Because I keep sending the newbies to it, but can never remember where it is.

Geek Hierarchy

Feel the shame. It buuuurns.

Linktastic

A batch of political links, including Oliver Willis, who is way lefty even of me but I include because he's a fellow comic buff. And, his BRAND DEMOCRAT is clever as hell, even if I think it's time for a re-branding of center-left politics (the Progressives, or meld with the renewed Bull-Moose guys. Frighteningly, I think I actually am a Bull Moose supporter ...)

Also added role-playing game links and some more comics and more research sites.

Stop sending me horrifed e-mails about wandering over to Warren Ellis' site from here. I warned you not to go. I WARNED you. Seriously, I love the man, but there is stuff on his site I wish I could un-know. If you told me "I could take that memory from you, but you'd also lose the memory of your mother's laugh", I'd consider it fair trade.

Fandamentalism

Recently I linked to a Digby post, where he reported on a 5 year study on Fundamentalism. The neat kicker to this little thrill ride is that the researchers surmised that there isn't Islamic Funadamentalism, and then Christian Fundamentalism, etc., etc. There's just one, universal fundamentalist model, which is co-opted by various agendas. Like, a D20 system of intolerance.

(The excellent book I'm currently reading, Fundamentalist World by Stuart Sim, analyzes the rise of fundamentalism in various social aspects. It's a bit more about the "how" of fundamentalism than the "what makes it tick", but also worth your time.)

The (allegedly) universal agenda of fundamentalism consists of:

1. Men are dominant, rule the joint and make the rules.
2. All rules must apply to all people, no pluralism.
3. The rules must be precisely communicated to the next generation.
4. "they spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed." (spiffy fascism/fundamentalism parallel made here)
   
5. Fundamentalists deny history in a "radical and idiosyncratic way."

Here's where we get to the fun part of this whole blogging business. One of our new pals, 1031, noticed my completely unintentional mix of this link and the TRANSFORMERS riff. He jokingly asked if the 5 rules applied to genre fans ...

Holy smoking crap.

1.) Men dominate. -- Well, duh. Sure, there are more geek girls out there now than there used to be -- primarily because of Legolas' non-threatening sexuality, by the way. He's the boy-band of medieval fantasy heroism. Still, it's generally a strutting, macho joint in the hardcore fan bases.

2.) All rules must apply to all people, no pluralism -- we've all seen hundreds of these posts: "Anyone who doesn't agree with me that Kirk/Picard/Sisko was the best captain, is an IDIOT and ISN'T A REAL STAR TREK FAN!"

3.) The rules must be precisely communicated about the Next Generation -- Well, how much more specific ... wait ... oh, sorry. "to the next generation." Again, easy. How many "these are the great writers/books" retrospectives do Marvel and DC alone crank out in a year? Never mind the sci-fi "Seasons One through Four are great, Season Five is crap, Season Six has it's moments ..." conversations at each con.

4.) "they spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed." Such the softball. Go back, reread the soul-shattering genius of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Seriously. Try. It's like a spastic chimp hitting my pineal gland with a sockful of pennies.

5.) Fundamentalists deny history in a "radical and idiosyncratic way." -- "I'm looking forward to Episode Three."

Game, set, match.

All this allows me, in my quest for buzzwords, to create a new one: Fandamentalists.

" ... (noun, pl.); fans who violently believe the only valid interpretation of any entertainment source is a dogmatic adherence to their favorite version of that source. Any change to the smallest detail is inherently unacceptable (see also "heresy") and met with frantic scorn. See also Hal Jordan and Klingons, bumpy vs, smooth.

Thanks for your attention. Sometime this week, I'll clarify what I meant by 4th Generation Media. And those words aren't strung together at random because they sound cool; I'm quite specifically pulling ideas from this paper and applying them to modern entertainment.

"If Optimus Prime is a dump truck, I will KILL YOUR FAMILY ..."

Meeting with directors for Fatal Frame today, so it's a bit nuts. In the meantime, please read this excellent post at Digby, which pre-empts a piece about Fundamentalism I was writing so brutally and elegantly I'm going to pretend my rough draft was a hitchhiker buried in a shallow grave. Never happened. But that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.

Oh, and TRANSFORMERS fans are ... intense. At Don Murphy's request, I stopped by his boards and said "hi." Some TF fans are very, very nice. Some are filled with inchoate rage that I'm not James Cameron. (Hell, I'm angry I'm not James Cameron.) My favorite was a guy who, during his rant about how I was unworthy to write the movie, kept putting my name in quotes. "John". Like that was my alias. If I was going to use an alias, it would be cooler than "John Rogers." I might use my porn name (first pet + first street lived on), for example. Which would be "Midnight Mannstreet".

... Be right back. I have to register something with the guild.

... back. This is the first time I've ever even come near a swirling mass of fandom of this intensity. It makes me shudder at the world people like my friend Mark Waid lives in. Mark is spectacularly non-plussed about the constant gallons of crazy fire-hosed his way as he worked on such fan-favorites as Captain America and Fantastic Four. (There's a post in there about how stand-ups handle confrontation and writers need to, but it'll have to wait until later.) Mark did tell me the truest thing about being a genre writer I've ever heard, originally crafted by the dazzling Devin Grayson:

"Writers don't have fans. We just have people who want our job."

... You know what's REALLY cool? What's just beautiful synchronicity? I Googled Devin's name to check the spelling, and accidentally spelled it "Devon." What's the first entry under Google in that variant?

People on messageboards bitching about how she's ruined Nightwing.

Wow, sometimes the rhetorical gods just drop a softball, don't they?

TGC* #651 - Catwoman Edition

John: Actually, I haven't even seen the movie.
Partygoer: What?
John: Yeah, I read the final draft that came a year or so after I left, for the arbitration, but I missed the premiere, and never went to see it theaters. The one tiny shred of my artistic integrity I can take out of that process is that I've never actually seen the movie.
Andy: (passing) Isn't that like Hitler saying he's never actually visited the camps?
John: ... bastard.

* henceforth = True Geek Conversations. Long title was annoying me in post list.