Today’s dust-up involves one Jordan Burchette, who had some seemingly fantastic things to say about this past weekend’s New York Comic Con. Comic book conventions are among the few remaining refuges of sincere, unaffected fun in an otherwise odious leisurescape of extreme binge drinking set to techno or gun claps. They’re enjoyed by people of [...]
An Epidemic Of Bullying
Disclaimer: This likely is the single most rambling and incoherent mess of a thing I’ve ever written. It starts off in one place and ends up in another place that, while not entirely unrelated to where it began, evolves fairly artlessly and disjointedly over the course of the many paragraphs that follow from that beginning, [...]
Funeral As Spectacle
I admit it. I love the Westboro Baptist Church. Which is not to say I have any love for what they believe, or what they do. But I do find their stubborn and warped persistence, in the face of basically no one taking their particularly weird form of bigotry seriously, sort of charming while also [...]
Old South Whitewashed By NewSouth
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear up front: Alan Gribben of Auburn University and NewSouth Books have every right to publish their edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, since the work is in the public domain. That legal right, however, doesn’t mean they are right to do so. Twain himself defined a “classic” as [...]
Patton Oswalt’s Geek Singularity
Posted at some point yesterday but apparently mostly unnoticed until today is Patton Oswalt’s call for the death of geek culture. Worth it if only for the conversations it prompts, much of it reads like the construction of a giant sign wishing kids today would get off Oswalt’s lawn. Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet [...]