…an entire table full of mousepads, where the mousepads are Japanese anime girls and the wrist protectors are their titties.

FLAPJACKS: Man, I never knew there was so much shit I didn’t want.
ME: Really.
FLAPJACKS: I assume I wanted most shit. But I don’t want any of this shit. I came here to spend hard-earned money and look at this crap. Who the fuck wants GI Joe Minimates?
ME: People who like GI Joe, but wish it were blockier.
FLAPJACKS: Who the hell are those people?
ME: Cubists?
FLAPJACKS: These are collectibles of collectibles. Look at these things. The giant super-deformed doll things with the enormous round heads.
ME: The Mighty Muggs.
FLAPJACKS: Whatever. You can get the entire cast of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the whole Marvel universe too. In super-deformed doll form. Who came up with this? Was someone sitting around saying “boy we sure could see more Red Skull toys if only he was shaped kind of like a fatter version of a Troll doll but with no hair?”
ME: Probably, yes. There’s a market for it.
FLAPJACKS: But who?

—

ME: What is that cosplayer’s costume?
FLAPJACKS: Which one?
ME: The girl in the three-piece suit with the fangs, the weird lock of hair shaped like an upright candy cane, and the ginormous rifle.
FLAPJACKS: She is dressed up as Twistlock, the lead character in Vampire Formalwear Gunfighter.
ME: You know, for a second there, I actually thought you were serious.
FLAPJACKS: Yeah, I’m kidding.
ME: Well, of course.
FLAPJACKS: It’s actually called Vampire Pantyhose Formalwear Gunfighter.

—

FLAPJACKS: Oh, dude. Is that guy dressed up as Bloodshot?
ME: You mean Valiant comics Bloodshot? Yeah, looks like.
GUY DRESSED UP AS BLOODSHOT: BLOOOOODSHOOOOT! YEEEEEAAAAAH!
ME: So I take it you like Bloodshot.
GUY DRESSED UP AS BLOODSHOT: Valiant comics were the best comics! They were better than DC! Kicked Marvel’s ass! Vertigo was nothing compared to Valiant!
FLAPJACKS: Fuck YOU, Drawn and Quarterly! Did you come up with Dr. Mirage’s second life? I think not!
ME: How about when Valiant got sold to Acclaim?
GUY DRESSED UP AS BLOODSHOT: Fuck Acclaim! They ruined everything! You know what I’m talking about!
(GUY DRESSED UP AS BLOODSHOT exits.)
ME: Well, at least he paused in his hyperbole to recognize how Valiant got fucked over. That’s a real fan.
FLAPJACKS: The sort of real fan who is willing to paint himself all over in white bodypaint except for a big red dot on his chest, and then explain to everybody that he is cosplaying a briefly popular superhero from fifteen years ago.
ME: The sort of real fan who can say with a straight face “yeah, okay, Sandman revolutionized comics storytelling, but did it have a guy with two guns in it shooting mobsters? I think not.”
FLAPJACKS: The sort of real fan who is willing to spend all day explaining that he is not, in fact, dressed up as an alternate-universe Captain Atom.

—

FLAPJACKS: Do you wanna go to the DC panel?
ME: No, I wanna play boardgames.
FLAPJACKS: But you’re a comics guy.
ME: I like comics. I don’t know that I qualify as a “comics guy.”
FLAPJACKS: Whatever, Mr. I’m Too Good For The DC Comics Panel.
ME: I don’t want to go to the panel. I have better things to do than listen to Dan Didio bullshit for an hour.
FLAPJACKS: The Marvel panel?
ME: …or listen to Joe Quesada bullshit for an hour either. There are two types of people who go to panels like that: the bored and the fanatic. I’m not bored, and I’m not a blind follower.
FLAPJACKS: So you’re saying nerds are blind followers?
ME: What’s the most common costume you’ve seen at this convention?
FLAPJACKS: Imperial Stormtrooper, why?
ME: Exactly. The Imperial Stormtrooper. The rank-and-file bad guy in the Star Wars movies. There’s one guy I’ve seen dressed up as Vader, a couple Jedi, and there’s like a hundred Stormtroopers.
FLAPJACKS: That’s not really a fair comparison. I mean, there are that many Stormtroopers here because there’s a Stormtrooper play-group who are guests.
ME: That doesn’t make it better. Given a chance to assume a role in their favorite movie, all of these people chose, of their own free will and volition, to be the boot stomping on a human face forever.
FLAPJACKS: And possibly missing, because they are Stormtroopers.
ME: That’s disturbing. That’s actually more disturbing than Civil War re-enactors who portray Confederates. At least they’re trying to honor their ancestors or something. The Stormtroopers are honoring what exactly? George Lucas’ taste in flannel shirts?

—

FLAPJACKS: Oh, man, will you look at that knife?
ME: Wow. It has multiple blades sticking out of the hilt.
FLAPJACKS: Exactly. Someone considered the knife and said, “nice, but I think we can make it even more knifey.”
ME: And then they cut themselves when they tried to hold it.

—

FLAPJACKS: The Soup Nazi is here!
ME: That just rubs me the wrong way. That guy has made a career out of being the Soup Nazi. He shows up at conventions because he was the Soup Nazi. He does other commercials as the Soup Nazi. He makes appearances on TV shows as “the guy who was the Soup Nazi.” He was in one frigging episode of Seinfeld. He didn’t come up with the catchphrase or the idea. And people want his autograph. That makes no fucking sense at all. At least the other people here signing things have actually done more than, say, five minutes of screentime to make themselves famous.
FLAPJACKS: Hey, he gives away autographed ladles!
ME: Arrgrgrgggggggh.

—

FLAPJACKS: So you only came to this convention to play board games?
ME: Pretty much. I’ll do some shopping, but I came to play games.
FLAPJACKS: That’s really stupid.
ME: Why? I like board games. And there’s a prize if I win the tournament.
FLAPJACKS: Are you going to win the tournament?
ME: Probably not.
FLAPJACKS: How much is the prize?
ME: Fifty dollars in store credit at the sponsor’s store.
FLAPJACKS: How much did you pay to get in here?
ME: Fifty dollars.
FLAPJACKS: So even if you won, you would be breaking even.
ME: But I get to have fun playing board games.
FLAPJACKS: Don’t you own most of these board games?
ME: …not all of them.
FLAPJACKS: So you could have stayed home and played board games with friends, for nothing, but instead you paid to come here. That’s quality thinking. I think you need to go apologize to the Stormtroopers.

If you have ever thought “The one thing that would improve Montreal is more people in Starfleet uniforms,” you would have been mightily pleased by this year’s Worldcon. Possibly the funniest thing about the con was that it was held in a really staid part of town, at a convention centre that normally hosts business and professional conferences; I think I must have had a sign on my back that said “Normal-looking guy,” because I can’t count how many locals stopped me to ask just what the heck was going on.

Now, my experience with cons is limited, but I can tell you this: compared to the big comic conventions, Worldcon is very low-key. There’s certainly no Hollywood presence, no movie premieres of sneak previews, nobody who’s famous outside the field and no booth babes (there was a woman dressed up as Psylocke at one booth, but since I later saw her still in costume in the subway I’m pretty sure she was there of her own volition.) In fact, costumes on the whole were fairly scarce, and most of them turned out to belong to people who were participants in the Masquerade (though many of those wore their costumes for the rest of the con as well.) The Masquerade was interesting because almost all of the costumes were drawn from comics, TV, video games and anime, none of which had any presence at the con at all — the focus was almost entirely on written SF, which made the Klingon guys seem a little out of place.

Costumes aside, there are a number of identifiable con “looks”:

Dressed for comfort: shorts, T-shirts and either sneakers or sandals were definitely the most common look. “Dress like you’re at home” was this crowd’s motto (or in a few cases, “Dress like you’re at the beach”) and in a few cases people seemed to actively reject the idea that other people will see what you wear. To be fair, it’s a long con — four days if you go to the whole thing — and the temperature at the convention centre never dropped much below “uncomfortably warm.”

Dressed up: a fair number of the attendees, mostly ambitious semi-pros like me, were treating the con as a business opportunity and dressed accordingly. Of course given the overall level of formality, “dressing up” meant pretty much what “business casual” would anywhere else — a buttoned shirt, chinos and shoes, the first two preferably recently ironed. This had the drawback of being extremely hot at times but had the advantage of letting you feel superior to people around you.

Hawaiian shirt: if there is a single definitive Worldcon uniform, it is the Hawaiian shirt. This was most common among pros who had nothing to prove, and its advantages are obvious: you can wear something comfortable and colourful without looking shleppy. It beats dressing up as a way of getting into the fan aesthetic (a good Hawaiian shirt is halfway to a costume) but allows you to get away with wearing sandals if you absolutely have to.

In terms of content, Worldcon is about equal parts programming and parties. The programming, while often interesting, suffers a bit from the unusually high number of pros and semi-pros relative to pure fans, so during panels the aspiring writers get annoyed at the amount of time that’s spent fielding fan questions and the fans get annoyed at the time spent on writing questions. There’s entertainment programming as well, but aside from the Masquerade it’s pretty much roll-your-own stuff: small screenings of movies, staged readings of plays and radio dramas as well as filking, which sounds like a disgusting sexual perversion but in fact is.

From my perspective as a Worldcon newbie, the most surprising thing was definitely the degree to which people are there to party. It’s sort of like an SF fan’s dream of high school: parties every night where everybody wants to talk about science fiction. (You certainly get the sense that there are some people for whom conventions are their main arena for socializing.) I can’t deny the appeal of that: for two nights and three days, this nerd was at home.

It’s an odd feeling to realize you’ve been reading a comic for more than twenty issues based entirely on inertia. As I flipped open Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight #27 yesterday it occurred to me that I had no real memory of what had happened in the last issue, or much genuine interest in what would happen in this one. And yet I keep reading, even though I dropped the parallel Angel comic after the first storyline (largely due to the art — I watched the last season of Angel on a thirty-year-old, aerial-only TV on a UHF channel coming from 200 miles away, and it still looked better than the comic.)

How did things come to this? I was a die-hard Buffy viewer back in the day, following plotlines eagerly, laughing at clever dialogue and making fun of American viewers who had to wait months to watch the Season Three finale. I had never checked out the spin-off comics until the announcement that Joss Whedon himself would return to launch a new comic which would be an actual continuation of the series, rather than stories that stood awkwardly around in the darker corners of the TV show continuity and tried to keep their heads down. Now here we are, three-odd years later, and I have next to no memory of any of the stories, up to and including the latest (I hazily remember something about a submarine in Tibet.)

The most obvious answer is that when we wished for more Buffy the Whedon Genie, wanting to teach us to be careful what we wished for, gave us more of the show’s last season — the one that spun its wheels for months on end before wrapping up with a twist ending that basically ignored everything that had happened before. It’s true that the last season is part of the problem, because the ending left the writers with an almost unsolvable problem: suddenly every potential Slayer in the world was fully-functional, which means that in the comic they have to deal with hundreds of superhuman vampire killers. (Of course, even that ending was an unfortunate compromise: what they should have done was make every woman on Earth a Slayer, the logical conclusion of the show’s female empowerment fantasy.) Not only does this make it hard to come up with believable villains, but it makes Buffy herself a lot less special.

How have the writers dealt with this? By ignoring it, mostly. The Slayerettes make plenty of appearances as spear-carriers (should that be stake-carriers?) and cannon fodder, but somehow when there’s constabulary duty to be done they’re never around. This frees the writers to recycle plots from the series or, if they’re feeling unusually creative, borrow well-worn tropes from other comics. Xander falls in love! Then his girlfriend is killed! But he’s okay, because in the next issue he’s wisecracking as usual. (Probably because his girlfriend had absolutely no personality, so it’s reasonable her death would affect him less than getting a stain on his favourite T-shirt.) Buffy and the others are pursued by an evil being too powerful for them to defeat! (Again?) They’re on the run from the law! (Hey, guys, how long has it been since we last did “Legion on the run”?) They’re hated and feared by the society they’ve sworn to protect! (Did Whedon have it written into his X-Men contract that he could take that with him when he left?)

That last is an interesting one, because it is a great example of how the comic has gone completely wrong. Apparently the world has gone ga-ga for vampires and, consequently, decided that Slayers are icky. This happened because Harmony did a reality show about vampires and, because people love reality shows, they’re now cool with the idea of people who see them as ambulatory Big Gulps. Now this could have been a good idea, a joke on how things like Twilight have defanged vampires, except that the writers don’t seem to realize that in order for something to be satire it has to, you know, satirize something. What might have worked is if someone had written a Twilight-ish novel based on Angel and Buffy’s relationship, casting Angel as the brooding, tortured character and Buffy as the heartless Slayer who eventually spurns him, but instead we get a simple shot at reality TV in the apparent belief that name-checking something is the same as satirizing it.

In the end, I think the problem is pretty simple: Joss Whedon hasn’t written anything particularly good since the last season of Angel. He’s written things that were good in spots, or that had the potential to be good, and his genius for casting is as strong as ever, but if you look honestly at his post-Buffy/Angel work there’s nothing that would, for anyone who wasn’t already a fan, rise much above a “meh.” Whether this is because since becoming JOSS WHEDON he’s started to believe his own press, or whether he just had a few good ideas in him and is now slowly joining Kevin Williamson in aging-wunderkind-land, is hard to say, but he’s certainly not bringing his A game to the Buffy comic.

Top comment: Why the heck DIDN’T they put Grimlock in the new movies? — Beacon

Because car companies aren’t manufacturing dinosaurs, I guess. — Evan Waters

“Lord Vetinari is subtly training Sam Vimes to be the next Patrician.”

versus

“Lord Vetinari is subtly training Moist von Lipwig to be the next Patrician.”

Discuss.

Also: Hobbes. Magic tiger or imaginary friend?

Top comment: Wait… Hobbes wrote Leviathan?? Then he IS real!! — Al

but I am in the mood for a “nerdiest sentence ever typed” competition.

So I shall lead off:

My Hogwarts homebrew expansion for “Settlers of Catan” needs tweaking.

Beat that, nerds!

EDIT TO ADD: I would like to thank Mark S. for making the first Dr. Strange joke within the first ten comments, thus allowing me to win my side-bet with a friend. My twenty dollars is because of you, Mark S!

Top comments:

Oh, oh. Someone help me out. How do you say “It’s a TRAP!” in Klingon? –Zifnab

nuvonlI’!

… Yeah, I can’t believe that was on Google. — Emma

Bit of a busy day today, so in short of any meaningful original content, here is relatively meaningless unoriginal content.

(All this post needs is a Battlestar Galactica reference and it would be the nerdiest post ever.)