"i'm out of it for a little while and everyone gets delusions..."

okay, i really do have zero (0) time to be blogging this week because i have a draft of a thesis section due friday and the little fucker is just refusing to sit down and co-operate and be written.

but.

during my daily sifting of rss feeds and websites that i look at every morning, i caught this blogger's rant about the l.a. times and san diego comic con. and i thought, "gosh. what the hell can the l.a. times have done that's so bad? and comic con? aren't they pretty much niftyness on a stick?"

(and i have to admit i also thought, "wow, it's a bad week to be a newspaper ending in the word 'times', because the london times got forced to out some poor blogger from the lancashire police force and the judge in the case is affected with loony virus." possibly more deadly than h1n1. there's also a really good reaction to the case verdict back there at that link you just passed.)

anyway. not the point. ahem.

i clicked into the link, read it, and thought things, well, things that i won't write here because they are very profane and, as the internets might describe it, "nsfw." mostly i thought, "what the fuck? aren't we all over this now, children? why, oh, why are we going back to the dark days of the late '80s? i thought we were all over this 'girls only like scifi with hot guys in it' crap. aren't we? c'mon, guys -- aren't we?"

and so, because i like io9.com -- unlike ign.com which, after the absolutely insane contest they chose to co-sponsor can just "bite my shiny metal ass" -- i clicked into the link of their article.

after a few minutes spent in taking the glory of the quotes they chose to excerpt from the times, i swallowed about half my cup of coffee, hung grimly on to the second half, and clicked into the primary source as it were.

let me say first off that anywhere there are squealing twilight fans, i will not be. i haven't read the books; i haven't seen the movies; i plan to remedy neither of those defects. the fans scare me, honestly, and i feel i've heard and read quite enough about them; i'm not a ya librarian; and i have a long reading/viewing list already (which does include true blood, because it was recommended to me). even michael sheen, wonderful though he is, will not bring me to watch the new twilight movie.

there are 23 pages of this rubbish starting off with a long paragraph about all the male celebrities currently considered attractive who may -- or may not -- be present. it's set up like a slideshow: publicity photos -- for the most part -- captioned with little snippets by bloggers from sites like zap2it.com, and latimes.com. and just for the record, i have no desire to do jake gyllenhaal's laundry. none. at all. i assume he can either hire someone or buy a washing machine.

take, for example, this representative piece of text illustrating a still from the upcoming film version of the time-traveller's wife:

"Picture the wonderful sappiness of "The Notebook," replace Ryan Gosling with equally appealing Eric Bana, and inject a different hapless conflict to keep him from Rachel McAdams. In this case, Bana's character's got a gene that causes him to leap through time without the wife. Oh yes, bring on the bittersweet tears."

thank you for informing me neatly and succinctly that i should avoid this movie at all costs. when's 9 coming out again?

while i am pleased to see that alex o'loughlin found work post-moonlight and that sounds like a movie i will see, this

"What more do you need than the hunkiest Aussie to ever play the undead ... alive and in the flesh? And as long as he uses his real accent, he can talk all about this murder mystery set in Antarctica. Male lead Gabriel Macht isn't too shabby either."

really just doesn't sell it for me and i feel bad for o'loughlin being described in these terms. he's better than that and the review reduces him to his physique, much as the snippet on prince of persia and the one on benicio del toro in the wolfman reduces gyllenhaal and del toro to theirs. a shame in all cases since all three men deserve better.

i really got bogged down around slide 10 or so after i was told that the only reason i would go to see tim burton's new alice in wonderland was because johnny depp was in it. lovely photo to illustrate a totally moronic point. the photos which don't actually have the caption text suggesting the male actor in question will be mobbed like the beatles by female fans are for children's movies -- where the wild things are, toy story 3 -- which suggest that women will be interested in these either because they can take their kids or because they're fluffy, happy fun; or they're looking for a chicklit/flick-style experience with a witches of eastwick adaptation that sounds like charmed-redux. (if you miss charmed, go rent the dvds. better yet, watch early buffy. better yet, watch firefly, farscape, or torchwood. don't thank me; it's all part of the service.)

did it ever occur to anyone writing this rubbish to check with an actual female person who was actually going to the con and ask why she -- or they! find a group! make some friends! -- were actually going? i mean, i'm sure people -- of all genders, sexes, or personal convictions -- show up because jake gyllenhaal is hot or alex o'loughlin has a cute accent, but i'm equally sure that more people show up because they want to hear about the shows or the movies or the books or the comics. that being, y'know, the point of the thing.

the con didn't sell out because brad pitt might show up to push a quentin tarantino movie.