Perez Hilton reports in Party Like a Vampire that convention booths are insufficient to entertain Twilight fans, so the series will be getting a large convention in Dallas dedicated to Twilight. The event is, perhaps not surprisingly, called TwiCon. It features a variety of comedy troupes who create respectfully humorous Twilight spoofs and a line-up of bands, most of which are inspired by the movie, but one of which, 100 Monkeys, is notable because it includes Jackson Rathbone who plays vampire Jasper Hale in the movie and its forthcoming sequel The Twilight Saga: New Moon later this year.

Popular Twilight fanfic site Twilighted is doing a fan fiction contest as part of TwiCon with a theme of romance 100 years in the vampire future. Would it be wrong if I mentioned that the only other individual fandoms which tend to receive dedicated conventions are Star Trek and Star Wars. And Star Trek really jumpstarted the erotic slashfic type of fanfic. I’m not sure whether it is technically accurate to refer to sexy fan fiction as a genre with a series of sub-niches, but it feels kinda accurate. Maybe if Star Trek is getting a sexy modern makeover, someone needs to write some threeway erotica fanfic involving Bella and Edward and Spock. Or not.

The $1 BlueBlood.com sale is going to be coming to a close in just a few days.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama and the new administration, the world expects the economy to pick up. He could do nothing different and people’s expectations would help the economy. So much of how paper and digital money works has to do with trust and faith.

So we have faith that, pretty soon, everyone is going to be able to afford more than $1 for a BlueBlood VIP membership. There has never been a Blue Blood sale this discounted before, and there very likely never will be again, and this one is almost over.

The site currently featuring tens of thousands of photographs of 387 hotties and counting. From punks who like to smash things to ethereal gothic beauties to fetish deities, Blue Blood features the most stunningly and uniquely beautiful. A battalion of coffee table book and nightclub photographers have contributed to BlueBlood.com. Not to mention erotic fiction from some of the top names in genre writing and just a dab of video. The BlueBlood.com megasite offers excellent value with all the content from the multigirl gothic, punk, and rubber subsidiary sites produced by Blue Blood, as well as the world famous signature couples content, and the erotic fandom science fiction and fantasy content. And your BlueBlood VIP memberships pay to keep BlueBlood.net free.

And right now, you can check all that out for one dollar. Channel your inner Bixby Snyder and say, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” (Robocop references optional.)

Although generally less unsavory than the sorts of webcomics I tend to like best, Weregeek is a genially humorous comic by the very talented Alina Pete. It is the sort of thing you will appreciate best if you think Cylon when someone says Scilons.

The comic gets its name from its normal guy Mark. Mark is working on coming to terms with his taste for geeky fun. Hence Weregeek.

In today’s comic strip, Mark, who is in the process of coming over to the geek darkside, is chatting with more classic geek and DM Dustin. A gothic girl has been aggressively hitting on Dustin in their coffeehouse hangout, but he is clueless. Mark gives him some clue, but is a wee bit concerned when Dustin says the goth girl wanted to run a character who is a Gungan Sith Lord.

Footnote: Jar Jar Binks was a surprisingly poorly-animated cg and possibly racially-offensive character in one of the Star Wars movies which don’t count. Everyone knows Star Wars is for action figures, and Jar Jar Binks was a lame bid for a non-ironic plush toy. Jar Jar Binks was a member of the amphibious “Gungan” species from the Naboo planet. Sith Lords, of course, are the sexy Jedi types like Darth Vader. It is no surprise when a goth chick likes a powerful bad boy who has gone over to the dark side. There has been an extensive, largely tongue-in-cheek movement in online fandom to demand a Gungan Sith Lord from George Lucas. I think the feeling is that, if he feels compelled to eff up one of the greatest science fiction movie franchises of all time, he might as well really go for the gusto. Running a Gungan Sith Lord character in an RPG game would be pretty annoying, especially if the gothic girl talked in the horrible Jar Jar Binks Gunganese dialect e.g. “Meesa so hornyem. Meesa loven yousa longisha timen.”

Personally, I believe the original Star Wars was primarily directed by his ex-wife Marcia Lucas and George Lucas just got credit for it, the same way everyone now knows that best-selling fan favorite author Alan Dean Foster wrote the original Star Wars although George Lucas accepted awards for both directing and writing. I believe the more recent Star Wars movies appear to present a different vision because they are genuinely put together by entirely different people.

If you can tell me how to improve my Gungan dialect, or you just got heated up over what I wrote about credit for Star Wars, or if you actually have any sort of developed opinion on any of these Star Wars issues, you’ll probably enjoy Weregeek.

I am fascinated by the idea of exploring how comic book style superpowers would impact real world human beings. In literature, last year’s Soon I Will be Invincible from Austin Grossman is the reigning champion of this sub-genre. I kind of felt sorry for David J. Schwartz having his novel Superpowers come out around the same time as Soon I Will be Invincible. He probably sold some extra copies via Amazon “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” recommendations, but comparing a pleasant enough light read with the brilliance of Austin Grossman’s book seemed almost cruel.

So it was in the television world with Tim Kring’s Heroes and The 4400 from René Echevarria and Scott Peters, but that is about to change. I found The 4400 because of the Netflix “Enjoyed By Members Who Enjoyed” feature. The first season of Heroes featured a set of interlocking stories about people from different walks of life who suddenly discovered they were special in a superpowered kind of way. Season One of Heroes was elegantly written. A politician discovers he can fly. A cheerleader discovers she can regenerate almost any injury. A uniform beat cop discovers he can read minds. A low level cube employee working at his father’s company discovers he can bend space and time. An artist discovers he can paint the future while shooting smack. A homecare provider discovers his empathy allows him to pick up abilities from other superpowered indivduals. A watch repairman discovers a method for killing people and absorbing their abilities into his own roster of skills. There is a shadowy Company trying to keep it all contained. There is a morally ambiguous and conflicted Company employee who also has a superpowered adoptive daughter. Season 1 of Heroes has a complex yet elegant and well-structured storyline where the tales of each of the many characters are interwoven into a satisfying whole piece with a logical conclusion.

The basic concept of The 4400 is that all the alien abductees from the past upmty-ump years are returned by their futuristic UFO captors all at once. None of them have aged and many seem to have developed extraordinary abilities. The 4400 started off with two special agents as the sort of center of the show. Tom Baldwin is the action-oriented agent played by Joel Gretsch who is no stranger to either law enforcement or SF roles. His partner Diana Skouris from the CDC is played by Jacqueline McKenzie. (Incidentally, that would be the Jacqueline McKenzie who played the Gabe character in Romper Stomper, doing full nudity fucking multiple skinheads and her father, and it doesn’t appear to have hurt her acting career one bit.) Although there are some overarching story arcs, each episode of the early episodes of The 4400 centers more around new characters discovering new abilities which are investigated by this lead governmental team. The show features in particular an interesting exploration of how the government would respond to finding a sudden influx of missing persons with superpowers. There is also quite a bit of variety in how different returnees react to having extraordinary abilities. On The 4400, scientists find that something in the blood called Promicin appears to be responsible for the various abilities people develop and, as the seasons progress, ways are found to give many people Promicin-catalyzed superpowered abilities. As with many television shows, however, as the seasons go on, the show’s writers try to keep it fresh by having many of the characters start acting . . . well, out of character.

Compared to the new season of Heroes, however, The 4400 had a deft touch. Not only that, but the current season of Heroes is blatantly riffing on ideas from The 4400, down to casting some of the same actors including Chad Faust. If you are, for some inexplicable reason planning on watching Season 3 of Heroes and you have not already watched the first few episodes, I recommend you stop reading now as spoilers are forthcoming. All right then.

So Milo Ventimiglia’s empathic Peter Petrelli from earlier seasons now has multiple versions of himself, all of whom are unsympathetic. He is a talented guy normally, but it is like he totally forgot how to act. The rumor mill says that he and Hayden Panettiere, who plays the cheerleader Claire Bennet, are or were romantically involved, so maybe that explains why, when she shoots one of his many versions, she says she always loved him and it comes across as creepy and incestuous. But actors should be able to play uncle and niece so that it does not seem like they are fucking, even if the real life actors are. Ew.

I guess heroin is no longer okay on a show about heroes and heroines because now lots of characters can get inaccurate visions of the future, without the bother of shooting up first. Now they can drink fictional African drugs, which is like totally more socially responsible.

So the serial killer from Season 1 of Heroes is now supposed to be a good guy. Maybe it is a trick and that is why his acting seems so bad, but long scenes where actors are acting like people acting badly are never a good idea. Plus serial killer Sylar or Gabriel or whatever the Heroes writers are calling him today has the most messed-up looking eyebrows ever. He had really thick eyebrows in the earlier seasons, but they look freaking drawn on in this one to a really distracting extent. (It was so distracting that I researched it and apparently he is playing Spock in the new Star Trek. He actually makes a kinda hot Spock, which just proves gothic eyebrows are sexy.)

Zachary Quinto’s eyebrows notwithstanding, one of the most jarring things about the current season of Heroes is that it is like all the actors decided they wanted to look more like movie stars than like their characters. Some characters have future versions of themselves who wear leather pants. The male actors all look like they have been passing the steroid injections around and spending all their time at the gym. Nothing wrong with wanting to be fit, but it is just implausible that all of these characters would be uber-buff. The styling on the show used to be really convincing and realistic and now it just seems like they are not even trying. Well, if the characters were all playing high end Hollywood escorts, I would consider it to be putting effort in, if they were all hellbent on working out and wearing designer clothes and too much expensive makeup. Seems less like trying when we are watching a fandom show which is supposed to feature characters from different walks of life. Even the good-guy scientist academic looks bizarrely ripped and spends most of his screen time with his shirt off. Then again, he is also either serial-killing or using spider powers to imprison people to function as lab rats. Or both.

Season 3 of Heroes brought in two of my favorite actors from The Wire and it still sucked. The talented Andre Royo who plays sympathetic junkie Bubbles on The Wire comes in as a mistreated and unjustly imprisoned vortex-making superpowered guy and it is obvious from his first moment on screen that things will end badly for him. Sexy badass Jamie Hector who played hard up-and-coming drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield on The Wire is a cool bad guy, with fear-fueled superpowers, on Heroes, but having the bad guys be the only cool characters is sorta off for a show which used to be about trying to do the right thing.

Masi Oka’s Hiro Nakamura, who used to be one of the characters the largest number of viewers could relate to, has been described by many media critics as the moral center of the show, the character from whom the themes spring. Well, this most recent episode featured Hiro stabbing his best friend Ando, played by James Kyson Lee, in the heart. I don’t care if the writers come up with a lame way to excuse it as not being real or some such nonsense. If the guy most bent on being a good guy has turned into a condescending prick who would stab his best friend, then I am done watching this show. I wish I had stopped watching after the wonderful first season. There is so much to dislike in this current third season that I could just keep going.

The Cardinal Rule of writing science fiction is that a universe may be incredibly fantastical, but it should be internally consistent. At this point, Heroes could not be more inconsistent if the writers all had a bar bet going for who could introduce the most inconsistent plot point or character action.

The only plus of the current season of Heroes is that they brought back David Anders’ charmingly chaotic neutral and essentially immortal Adam Monroe character, who, as forum readers know, is my first choice for who I would want by my side during a zombie apocalypse. But, even his engaging screen presence can’t save a show which has lost both its moral compass and any logic whatsoever. There is even a long scene where Hiro bullies Adam who he has been torturing for a long time by burying him underground in an airless tomb where he repeatedly suffocates to death and then regenerates back to life. I know the theme of the current season is “Villains”, but it seems more like it ought to be called “Assholes”. I guess they would have Kevin Smith Zack and Miri Make a Porno problems putting “Assholes” on their bus stop promos though. The characters are not evil masterminds; they are just jerks; assholes, if you will.

Heroes is officially canceled from my TiVo queue. When the Nielson’s for time-shifted (TiVo and web) viewing came in for the beginning of this season, it really raised the show’s ratings. I’m guessing that, after last week’s ridiculous episode, there won’t be any more numbers like that, although you can watch the season so far for free on the NBC site. The first season of Heroes was a rare and special flash of network television brilliance and I still recommend watching it on DVD or Netflix Watch Instantly. But, if you enjoy themes of ordinary people with extraordinary abilities, The 4400 wins for quality longevity over the long haul.

Still, critics seems to pretty universally agree that Knight Rider is the worst new show of the current television season. So, of course, fans desperate to defend Heroes: Assholes Villains are at pains to tell any critic to go watch Knight Rider if they no longer love Heroes. The kind of hilarious irony here is that I don’t think most of them realize that Heroes creator Tim Kring got his start writing for the original Knight Rider series back in 1982.

Soon I Will Be Invincible is out this month in paperback from Random House’s Pantheon. The hardcover was my favorite fiction read of last year. Which is saying something because I go through an average of a couple hundred books a year. From some of the promo when the book was first released, I sort of assumed it was going to be a geek chic thing. If there was ever something I was into that I had thought nobody would pretend to like just to be cool, it was being into fandom and having a big brain. Which just goes to show that, no matter how smart you are, sometimes you’ll get it wrong. When I finally got around to picking up Soon I Will Be Invincible, I couldn’t put it down.

The story is an exploration of the issues of alienation and self-confidence which face someone who is exceptional. A person can be different from the other children without being technically lesser, yet there is still enormous alienation which comes with being different. In a very real way, a top scientist or a top athlete or a top musician is truly alien, in the dictionary sense that he or she is estranged and unlike those who should be his or her own. I have often observed among my friends and acquaintances, in real life, that those who are just a bit above average often seem to function best in society. A person with a 120 IQ succeeds in a general way more often than a person with a 180 IQ. Human beings are social animals and that is just the way the system works. Which is not to say that someone who is exceptional should just throw in the towel, but exceptional people need to have exceptional self-confidence, because being genuinely different can be crushingly difficult. Soon I Will Be Invincible is a deep and sensitive exploration of alienation and how self-confidence can be the main difference between success and failure and, at least in society’s perception, the main difference between good and evil.

The actual plotline of Soon I Will Be Invincible alternates points of view between supervillain Doctor Impossible and beginner superhero Fatale. Doctor Impossible has been at the supervillain gig for so long that he finds himself matching wits and powers with his enemies’ children now. Fatale was turned into a cybernetic superwoman after a fairly recent accident and she is just adjusting to working with a super team. Fatale has lost her memories of growing up, while Doctor Impossible is tortured by his own memories of coming of age.

“I didn’t cultivate friendships, just a nerdy camaraderie with the top few science students. But I was the usual combination of petty arrogance and abject loneliness. I was ashamed of my desperate eagerness to please, and unable to control it. Why should I be singled out from other people as uniquely gifted, and uniquely worthless? I ate my lunches alone, and it’s a small blessing my diaries were destroyed . . . The humiliations build up, and you know you’ll never get back at them, even though somewhere inside you’re better than they are. The real you is somewhere else, someone invisible, unknowable. Someone impossible.”

Doctor Impossible suffers from MHD or Malign Hypercognition Disorder. The basic idea being that most people at the very top end of the bell curve of intelligence will be susceptible to turning out “evil”.

“My peer group is largely a collection of psychotics, aliens, and would-be-emperors.”

Truthfully, Doctor Impossible craves acceptance, appreciation, and respect more than he wants to do wrong, so it is hard to see him as evil evil. He might tell the President of the United States to call him Emperor, but it is not like he is particularly cruel. The only places where I can’t relate at all and his morality bothers me are first when he admires a double-crosser and later when he takes an opportunity to be the bully for a change. There are few things I loathe more, for example, than a gothic club kid who exults in finally getting to be the one who snickers with comrades at the person who is different but wants to be accepted. I think the goal should be a better social paradigm and not just changing roles, but I digress. Doctor Impossible has a 300 IQ, super strength, and a gnawing frustration over his continuing failure to achieve global domination, but he does not wholly feel like he really had a choice. He feels like there is an inadequacy hard-coded into his being which makes all his gifts irrelevant.

“Maybe I should have been a hero. I’m not stupid, you know, I do think of these things. Maybe I should have just gone with the program, joined up with the winning team, and perhaps I would have, had I been asked. But I have the feeling they wouldn’t have wanted someone like me. They’d turn up their noses or just never quite notice me. I knew some of them in high school, so I know . . . If you’re different you always know it, and you can’t fix it even if you want to.”

Raise your hand if you have ever felt that way. Yup, expected to see a lot of hands raised on that one. Doctor Impossible’s portrayal is very sympathetically written. He is shown being bullied as a teen, while those who would grow up to be superheroes did nothing to protect the weak then. He generally toils alone or with a few friends, while the superhero teams have corporate sponsorships and governments backing them. When the supervillain Doctor Impossible speaks of his time fighting for prize money in unlicensed hero fights, the parallels to academics who end up in the underworld in general are inescapable. Although the dalliance with self-harm and a potentially unusual haircut might resonate as well.

“. . . the first time I met anyone at all like me, ones who had found the power but said no to the mask and cape, to the role. Of course, most of them were nothing like me — criminals with no advanced degrees, some of them hadn’t even been to high school. But like me, they’d said no, and they hadn’t found anything worth saying yes to. It’s the closest thing I’ve felt to belonging.”

Doctor Impossible chooses his arch-nemesis CoreFire based partly on his deep envy of the apparent ease with which CoreFire strolls through life with things going his way.

“He always fulfilled expectations, as if he’d never had to make a decision at all . . . I never understood CoreFire or liked him particularly . . . He could fly, which was reason enough to resent him. He didn’t even have the decency to work for it, to flap a pair of wings or at least glow a little. He seemed to do it purely out of a sense of entitlement — something about it suggested that the rest of us have simply knuckled under to gravity . . . When I think about it CoreFire must have . . . a story too, something better than that a smug, popular jock accidentally became a smug, popular superhero. No one could possibly be as boring as he seemed.”

I have the personal notion that things are not always quite so fated. I think I base that feeling on having moved around so often that I got slotted into a lot of different roles, without noticing huge differences in myself. I am inclined to believe that, if I do the right thing, even if my current closest circle of acquaintance is not into it, somewhere there is a group of people who will be. And that makes caving to social pressure unnecessary. There is no you-and-I-are-a-lot-alike speech in Soon I Will Be Invincible, but I don’t think I am reading too much in when I say that the hint is there, with a character who switches sides and other things, that one could choose to take a different path, that we do have freewill.

Now that I have gone on a bit more than intended about the psychology of Doctor Impossible, you can probably glean who the real protagonist of the book may be, supervillainy or no. I could relate to some of the other viewpoint character, the rookie superhero Fatale’s insecurities as she joins a highly-respected and storied super team. They had a very frosh year of college or first year in Hollywood sort of feel, where she wonders if she will be up to the challenge and is awed by the abilities, accomplishments, celebrity, wealth, and easy charisma of her teammates.

I don’t know whether author Austin Grossman suffers from Malign Hypercognition Disorder or not, but he is certainly a genius. In USA Today, the brilliant author bucks the modern trend towards pretending to have invented the wheel and credits his literary influences, citing,

“Alan Moore and Frank Miller, “who really opened up the superhero genre. The rest is a mix — bits of Catcher in the Rye, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and a dash of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.”"

Those who know their Marvel and DC Comics universes, and especially fans of Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, are sure to enjoy the superhero and supervillain psychoanalysis of how powered individuals would really behave and feel in the real world. But I think that Soon I Will Be Invincible will speak to anyone who has ever felt alienated for being different, like what should be their gifts just set them apart and gave them extra obligations and extra loneliness.

“There is a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.”

So, after knowing each other for nearly a decade, and working together on multiple projects, over many years, I finally finally got to meet Scott Owens of EroticBPM fame in person! We once almost met in the flesh when he got stuck at LAX on a layover, but I’d just finished being somewhere one good friend of mine was attempting to sleep with the husband of another good friend of mine and having to give a police report on some psycho who was incoherently threatening me outside a nightclub for firing a girl she just met and barely knew but had a crush on or something. So anyway, I didn’t think I’d be at my charming best when I got to LAX, which also happens to be my least favorite California airport.

Anyway, Forrest Black, who is in charge of the look and feel of all Blue Blood sites, and I visited Portland and stayed with Scott and his charmingly negative head coder Antisocial and his beautiful bride (who, in a flash of small world, turned out to be a model from some of the earliest naughty sets I published from photographer Tom Hunscher.) We had an amazingly good time just hanging out in their gargantuan Pacific NW headquarters with them and their three very cute and almost disturbingly friendly and well-adjusted cats.

We also got to see old friends from our DC stomping grounds. We shot new stuff of the always fun Voltaire and of Rachel Face. Rachel has a new clothing line and we shot that, as well as a whole passel of new hotties. Parts of the trip were really bizarrely and gratuitously stressful, but most of it was really super nice. Portland is so beautiful and the air is so clean and we got to go up on the volcano which is the largest within city limits in the USA.

But the point I really must make here is that, when I wanted to connect to the internet from EroticBPM HQ, one of the networks was named Quark. I asked Anti if this was after the software, the TV show, or the actual thing. Having a background in particle physics, he didn’t mean the software or the show, but I told him I was going to pull his Dork Card for being unfamiliar with the show. Rather than having to resort to such extreme measures, modern technology allows me to share the show with you all.

I first saw Quark on the US Military television stations while living in Germany, on either ACTA I or ACTA II I believe. Basically, the Department of Defense at least used to provide American television channels to US servicemen and diplomats abroad. I wasn’t really allowed to watch TV, so I didn’t see much, but I did catch some re-runs of a sort of Star Trek spoof called Quark which struck me as absolutely hilarious at the time. I admit it doesn’t really stand the test of time and might seem a little, err, dumb now. Anyway, without further ado, I present Quark for your viewing pleasure and personal edification:

To a current sensibility, the BBC’s Hyperdrive is really probably a better bet.

Last night, I went to see Beowulf with a bunch of my unsavory pals. This was our third attempt to put together a group of people to see it, but third time is a charm and there ended up being around a dozen of us including Blue Blood hotties Scar 13, Tassy Pink, Joel Awesome, and Kitty Von Klau, Blue Blood Creative Director Forrest Black, Allan Amato who shoots for Scar13.com and more. It was kind of cool because it seems like it is becoming less common to have a bunch of people get together for something simple like seeing a movie. Yes, I’m thinking of going to see a movie with naked vikings fucking water sprites as a wholesome activity. You have to consider what the rest of my existence is like to put it in context.

We saw Beowulf at the Arclight so we could view the 3D version. The Arclight has extra-comfy chairs and prides itself on its high tech theater equipment. This is Los Angeles, so the front hall featured a display with actual costumes worn by actors in the movie. I sort of thought they were all in motion suits and they made the flick video game style, but I guess physical outfits were involved at some point. I liked the clothing anyway. I think I need to start wearing a royal cape around. The Arclight personnel handed us 3D glasses on the way into the theater.

Spoiler alert: If you didn’t read Beowulf in school (or at any other point), then the rest of this might include spoilers. I studied all the Icelandic sagas in school. When I was in college, I actually took a class called “Kinship and Law in Medieval Iceland.” And now it is my job to do things like write up the Beowulf movie. I guess I wasn’t wasting time and money at university after all. Phew.

Most of the Scandanavian sagas came from many troubadours through oral tradition and they were about heroism and adventure. And possibly about the fact that vikings tended to drink mead stored in flasks which were fabulous breeding grounds for hallucinogenic fungus. Beowulf, by contrast, believed to be by one author of English or German origin, is almost a satire of the saga genre. In the book, it is unclear whether the hero Beowulf or the monster Grendel is really the protagonist. Grendel is a sympathetic monster and some scholars feel that he represents nature in the epic battle between man and nature. It seems like, in these environmentally conscious times, the movie makers would have hit the green message a bit harder. Personally, I buy recycled where I can, even if it costs a bit more. But I roll in a big American car and I leave my air conditioning on when it is hot, whether or not I’m home. So this didn’t exactly damage my enjoyment of the movie.

The main deviation from the original poem is in the nature of Beowulf’s relationship with Grendel’s mother. Scholars disagree vehemently with one another on whether Grendel’s mother was a heroic female warrior who, in response to the killing of her son, simply carried out the requirements of blood feud and debt. Or whether this descendant of Cain was monstrous in appearance. In the poem, Beowulf is described as killing her with a magical sword and then using that same sword to decapitate Grendel’s corpse and bring his head back to the mead hall. It is entertaining to think that the screenwriters looked at this and wondered why the warrior would have only brought back one head if he had slain two monsters. Their explanation might not be so true to the original, but many things can be explained by Angelina Jolie’s wet, buoyant, gold-slicked, CGI boobies. Many scholars believe that the original Beowulf poem was a Christian propagandist restructuring of familiar tales to impose Christian values on them. So one can hardly blame a modern retelling for imposing current rules of cinematic story structure on the film. Beowulf’s relationship with Grendel’s mother not only allowed Robert Zemeckis to bring us hot naked viking/water sprite sex, but it also honestly ties the Grendel portion of the Beowulf saga and the dragon portion together much more neatly, for modern sensibilities, than the original does. Some feminist scholars argue that Beowulf has a three part story structure where the battle with Grendel’s mother is as important as the one with Grendel and the one with the dragon, although the story is generally viewed as having a two part structure. It would probably be reaching to call the Zemeckis adaptation a feminist retelling, but it is tidy modern story structure for a modern audience.

Much as the original saga was almost making fun of the braggadocio of its predecessors, the Beowulf movie is sold as a costume adventure blockbuster, but it points out that maybe the adventures just are not really that great. When Beowulf kills Grendel, the monster is tragic and, despite Beowulf’s humorous and aesthetically pleasing nudity, the warrior comes off as a bully, brutalizing a monster who is no match for him. It is uncomfortable to watch and the monster takes an agonizingly long time to die in his mother’s arms.

The movie pretty immediately switches tone from a certain almost cheesy brashness to a dismal and depressing ever after. The plot goes briskly from the warrior king yelling “I am Beowulf!” Flava Flav style to telling his young slave girl that none of it was as great as it should have been, not the battles, not the treasures, not the kingdom, not the women. She seems distressed that not even the women excited him in a particularly pleasant way, but he pretty much confirms that he can’t even summon interest in sex.

Beowulf set out to do battle for glory rather than gold, but he has acquired both through his exploits. Beowulf’s closest companions revere him. He is a king. He has wealth and many followers. People keep telling him that his praises will be sung after everything then alive has turned to dust. But, basically, nothing feels good.

Unusually, for a Hollywood blockbuster, the writers of the movie get top billing in the closing credits. The screenplay was written by the very impressive duo of Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. Neil Gaiman is very well known in comic book and science fiction and fantasy circles. If you are gothic, you are probably familiar with his Sandman comic (or should probably at least fake like you are.) If you are more fandom-identified, then his somewhat tongue-in-cheek novels may be more your thing. Although Quentin Tarantino is the name everyone knows from Pulp Fiction, Roger Avary also has a screenwriting credit on it and has said in interviews since that he can’t hang out with Quentin Tarantino because the man just sucks the ideas right out of him. Roger Avary is probably best known for having written and directed the solid film adaptation of one of my favorite books, Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction, (which Forrest Black and I shot some promo for with Scar 13 years ago.) There is some buzz about whether the technology involved in making Beowulf will ultimately somewhat replace actors, or at least turn them into licensable clip art. I will be interested to see if this sort of technology will ultimately mean that writers and scenic designers and people like that will receive more credit for how a movie turns out. Before I knew anything about how Hollywood works, it used to trouble me, as a consumer, that whether or not I enjoyed a movie depended very much on plot and story structure, only movies were never advertised as “written by the guy who wrote that other thing you liked.” A great actor with a horrid plot is generally Michael Madsen in that awful poker movie which comes on late night cable only. No Oscars there.

Perhaps because the original Beowulf saga mocked the more traditional sagas, although the movie is marketed as an epic adventure for fantasy fans, it feels almost like the viewer is being told that what they were coming to see is not as terrific as they might think. After the credits ran, most of my group of mighty thanes went to get shabu shabu. Everyone kept asking each other if they liked the movie. Except for Scar, who had promised to dislike the movie beforehand, no one seemed to know if they felt like it was a good movie or a bad one or somewhere in between. I know the film left me feeling a little extra aggro such that I wanted to attack the waitress when I asked her for a sparkling Voss water the seventh time. Not that people doing their job badly doesn’t annoy me normally, but not in such a visceral way. I think Joel Awesome and I might have been the only ones who were somewhat familiar with the saga genre. (Wait until you all see the super hot signature couples set of Joel and Kittie which Forrest and I shot for BlueBlood.com. All that hotness and smart and well-read too!) I think the movie was well-done and technologically interesting, but, being familiar with the original, I was mostly sort of kicking myself for being surprised that it was not a feel-good movie.

The message of the Beowulf movie seemed very much: “Look upon my works, ye mighty, with 3D glasses, and despair.” (Joel says that, when he was little, he used to confuse Gilgamesh and Grendel, so I can stick Ozymandius in my Beowulf if I want.) Fortunately, we had to give the 3D glasses back to the Arclight after the movie. It was disorienting, at first, to look at the world without them.

The Friday of the 2006 Comic Con, I only busted out my camera when really motivated because we’d gone on the Superhero and Supervillian-themed party bus the night before and, after a couple of days in the oppressive San Diego heat, I was slowing down. Still managed to shoot a nice little photo gallery for your viewing pleasure.

I was super-excited to get to see the very entertaining horror screenwriter and producer Sean Abley. Oddly enough, although he and I live literally across the street from one another, I met my neighbor online first and neither of us remembers precisely how. At any rate, he is a great wit and his Dark Blue Productions darkly humorous science fiction feature Socket is showing at the Los Angeles Outfest this Friday, so I highly recommend Angelenos stop by and check it out. (More on this later.)

Those of you who have been with us and Blue Blood since before the beginning will of course remember Black Leather Times, my punk humor zine, more affectionately (or hostilely) known as BLT. Drew “Vladimir Drakovich, King of Mars” Boyd wrote and, with Max Glick, co-wrote a number of humorous articles for BLT back in the crew’s DC days. I had the pleasure of running into Andrew Boyd in our booth at Comic Con and he hooked me and Forrest Black up with some kindly personalized Scurvy Dogs. Andrew Boyd’s publisher AiT/Planet Lar classifies Scurvy Dogs as a cult classic on their web site. This tale of pirates gone astray, co-written with Ryan Yount, absolutely deserves the status.

Sometimes I find conventions difficult because my mental Rolodex is kind of full and I always feel awful when I forget people, but I’ve met a heck of a lot of people over the years. Weirdly enough, when Andrew Boyd stopped by the megabooth, I was just like, “yay, hi Drew!” and it didn’t even occur to me until later that it was vaguely odd that I knew him immediately, without having to give placing him any thought at all, when he has, for hell’s sake, grown facial hair since I saw him last. (More on this later too.)

BlueBlood.com hottie Diana Knight was also in the house. I took photos while riding the giant escalator to show how cool some of the architecture of the San Diego Conventions Center actually is. A hot Asian artist stopped by the megabooth and I took a few snapshots of him. When I say hot, in this instance, I mean as in sexy, as opposed to as in warm or popular. He might be super popular, but I was pretty wilted from how hot it was (in temperature in both San Diego in general and the building in specific) so I had more trouble with the language barrier than I generally would. He had a professional illustrator badge, but his name was in (I think) Japanese. Cool costume anyway and getting to know people is harder at West Coast cons than East Coast ones, even under ideal circumstances. Maybe this is why I still have instant recognition for my pals from East Coast punk and fandom misbehavior.

So, I’ve told my web pals and reminded those with us since the print days about why I like eclectic content.

But there is a dark side to this approach when the internet is thrown into the mix and it knocks me totally off-kilter on what sorts of information to select to share with you all. The net is overwhelming.

There are so many people. So many of them probably have cool and interesting and good aspects to them. But there are only so many hours in the day. Once you have done your work, your art, and your laundry, how much time can you truly devote to getting to know other people in a meaningful and genuine way?

There are so many sites. The smallest micro-niche of an interest probably has a site devoted to it. Want a site with photos of women who are both goth punk-looking and wearing rubber? Got one.

So, if you have broad interests and a true curiosity about the world around you, the options quickly prove boggling and paralyzing. I used to feel like it was possible for me to be aware of, and have an opinion on, every goth-industrial music act around. But, now that there are bands across the globe with MP3s on MySpace and thousands of other sites, I don’t feel like I could even sift through just that one genre.

Over the course of the past week, I got tons of cool and creatively-satisfying work done and went out on the town and had some fun as well. I also meant to go to a big fashion convention with Forrest Black and Blue Blood hottie junk princess this past weekend, but I just kinda spaced on it. The weekend before, I wanted to go to a big science fiction convention, partly because my pal (and Blue Blood writer) Thomas S. Roche from Eros Zine was in town to go, and partly because I feel like I could really explore West Coast fandom much more.

So the multifarious nature of my interests leaves me feeling always left out and off-track. I think this is kind of a normal way for people like me to feel. If you are not a narrow person, pretty basic exploration of the world around you quickly becomes crushingly too much.

Which brings me to my point. It is difficult for me, as an editor, to determine how to best serve you all on BlueBlood.net. With the hundreds of thousands of you who visit this site every month, I feel like I ought to have more to say. I feel like I ought to be publishing a whole lot of like-minded authors again too.

Not that I don’t have a lot to express. But I’ve always written and edited for an audience in the past. Even with the very first issue of Blue Blood in print, when I wasn’t sure how many people with much in common with me were out there, I was still selecting what to share with the audience based on who I hoped was out there. Even, when I was in college, and founded a sex-positive feminist adventure magazine, I knew the audience was going to include some pissed-off people, but I kept them in mind when editing the publication.

So, anyway, I feel a little lost in the cacaphony of the web. If you are like me and have moved through many subcultures and areas of interest in your quest for self-actualization, then I bet you feel a little drowned as well. If you’ve got subjects you’d like to see covered more on BlueBlood.net, I’d love for you to post suggestions here or send me a message or submit your own articles on what you feel would be of interest to everyone here.

At the end of the day, for better or worse, I still think of myself first and foremost as a writer. Sometimes, between spending so much time online and living in glittering bookless Hollywood, I forget. But I always come back to it. So expect to see a lot more of my words in the near future. And, if you feel like the subject matter is too eclectic and you need to get your mind opened up a bit more, you can always head on over to BlueBlood.com for high quality erotic art photography and other sexy stuff.