Yes, But What is It REALLY?

Twitter Sonnet #39

No-one knows a cure for delinquency.
No-one in Second Life speaks English now.
Schwarzenegger's on E.T.'s frequency.
Deanna Troi was a real tranquil frau.
The day's already lain its plans for you.
Calmly and quietly without complaint.
So quit trying to decide what to do.
The house is built, all you decide is paint.
Quests well begun is mostly levelled up.
There's no business like big bean burritos.
It's second to tequila in your cup.
Mark the merry massacred mosquitoes.
A transvestite and a mislaid letter
Might make Oedipus Rex even better.

Last night Tim ran my World of Warcraft undead warrior through some really tough place in the southern Barrens and I got a nice new axe called "Corpsemaker". I also found some cornbread--"I hope it's not that lousy Nostromo cornbread," I told Tim. I almost said, "They didn't have cornbread in the Middle Ages!" but then I found a blunderbuss.

I miss the blunderbuss in American McGee's Alice. I wish I could get my copy of that game working again . . . I've been meaning to re-read the Alice books again in preparation for the Tim Burton movie. Well, it's a flimsy excuse, really--I love those books, and the movie looks like it's going to resemble them as much as Ghostbusters resembles Hamlet.

Which reminds me, it looks like there's going to be a discussion panel at Comic-Con called "Was Bram Stoker the Joss Whedon of His Day?" I can answer that one for you right now;

No. No he wasn't.

He was the Bram Stoker of his day. Sure they had a thing or two in common--vampires, yes, though perhaps more saliently they put spins on older gothic conventions. But if you're judging an artist by his resemblance to what's come before, one could as easily say Oscar Wilde was the Whedon of his day, Shakespeare was the Whedon of his day, and Roger Cormen was the Whedon of his day. There are no original story ideas, really, and such similarities really only serve to illustrate patterns of audience reaction to art. Or, I suspect, in this case the similarities are discussed to impart some value to one or the other for people desperate for justification in honouring one while most think more highly of the other.

You know what, nevermind, people really are cattle, it's necessary. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. Alfred Hitchcock said actors were cattle, and he had a high regard for several of them.