Geekzapoppin

To those of you not in the “know”, this past weekend I was at the Wizard World 2001 comic book convention, here in Chicago. I spent ridiculous amounts of money and met Kimmi (see preceding article), and also:

afterwards she stabbed me and he went 'thwip'
Elektra: Assassin and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man were on hand to demonstrate the perils of wearing spandex too frequently. Oh, the rashes!

this one goes out to all tha sexy lay-days in tha hizouse
James Marsters, aka “Spike” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, appeared briefly on the convention floor, rapped freestyle for a few minutes, and turned to mist.

intergalactic planetary planetary intergalactic
Optimus Prime asked to bum a cigarette off me. I didn’t have any. I asked him to transform, but he wouldn’t. Asshole.

When it rains, it pours

I feel like I’ve been scooped. On Monday, Salon.com ran an article about the “camgirl” phenomenon. In a nutshell, the trend is young girls – aged, say, 15 to 21 – setting up websites that have a daily blog, not unlike my own, and a webcam image that is updated a few times a day. Many of these girls also link to Amazon wishlists, and generous lonely old perverts purchase items for them, which get shipped anonymously. The article makes a few good points, but it is largely one-sided with the “Who’s Exploiting Whom?” angle. I think there’s a lot more to this than exploitation. More in both the positive and negative senses. And the article sensationalizes that these girls “show skin” – some do, but as a generalization it is wrong. (One of the girls profiled, Katneko, had other issues with the article… read them at her site.) So anyway, this article is run, and now they’re talking about it on MSNBC, and these girls are getting booked on Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones, and here I am in the middle of writing a script, one which I spoke of a few weeks ago (THE INADEQUATES was the working title at the time; I don’t know what it is now), about a meek 16-year-old girl whose parents get her a new computer for her birthday, and it all goes downhill from there… and now I’m all, FECK! I’m just following a trend now! KRAP! You can see the position I’m in. I mean, I think that my take on the thing might be unique enough to still be interesting, and my character doesn’t have much in common with most of the girls mentioned in the article, but it’s no longer a subject that’s all mine to plunder.

If you steal any of my ideas, I will beat you.