Stuff We Like This Week: June 19 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: June 19 Edition

Jun 19

In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.

Sarah: Okay, so when I first saw the now-infamous LA Times Girls’ Guide to Comic-Con, I phased into a hazy sort of fugue state: eyes blank, mouth agape, fingers poised over the keyboard in frozen claws of rage. I couldn’t believe that we were still…here. That the impression of geek girldom is still that it’s either non-existent or that the girls attending Comic-Con are only there for, like, hunky Twilight hunks of barely-legal man-meat. I thought about writing something, but felt like I had nothing to say, except “Me mad, you = wrong!” I’ve said that! I don’t want to say it anymore! Rargh rargh CLAWS.

Anyway.

What happened after the article started spreading throughout the nerd masses was…awesome. The LA Times got a near-universal hand-in-the-face. The amount of “WHATEVER” dumped atop their little slideshow was epic. Real geek girls wrote their own guides. And explained, clearly and perfectly, why the idea behind the whole thing was stupid. And of course, Matt came up with his own Guys’ Guide to Comic-Con, which made me laugh ’til I wheezed.

So what I like this week — what I love — is how the amazing online fangirl community (which includes our kick-ass fanboy friends) stepped the fuck up and showed the LA Times how dumb and dated and just plain wrong their “guide” is. They all said what I felt like I couldn’t and reminded me that even when you feel like you’ve already said it and you can’t say it anymore and rargh rargh CLAWS…it’s still worth saying. So fuck off, LA Times. You = WRONG.

Matt: I seriously hope there were a few very tense and uncomfortable meetings at the LA Times this week, huge “what the fuck were you thinking” sessions with editors and writers staring down at their fingernails with embarrassed eyes.

When I was in seventh grade, our school’s music teacher traveled to London for vacation, and the highlight of his trip was seeing the original West End production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. He started playing songs from the show for us in music class, and we did a medley of hits from Phantom in our school chorus, and I sorta became a crazed obsessive Phantom phanatic, playing the two-cassette cast recording till the tapes fell apart and devouring everything I could about the show and everything that had come before (the book, the Lon Chaney silent film, etc).

Looking back now, it explains SO MUCH. I spent most of my high school and college years convinced I was some kind of deformed freakish man who could never know the love of a real woman because of my tortured, inscrutable soul. The worst of it was when the lead in our high school production of West Side Story made the mistake of wearing a Phantom sweatshirt to rehearsal one day. I spent the next few months gaga over our white Maria, who was literally PAINTED YELLOW WITH MAKEUP. (This was the same girl who also once wore an original series Star Trek T-shirt, which means she was some kind of mystical vortex for my teenage geeky longings.)

So yeah–guilty pleasure time, true confession, or more likely, shame-free proud admission–sometimes I’m still a bit of a Phantom phanboy. Ovation aired a two-hour behind-the-scenes special on the creation of Phantom this week, with interviews from all the principal cast and crew of the original London production, and it was a fun way to reminisce and enjoy some trashy theater stories about how bitchy Michael Crawford is. Watching it brought me right back to my bedroom in high school, where I’d slip on my Walkman earphones and click “play” to hear the strains of Webber’s outlandish score, lathered with strings and the occasional ear-piercing scream.

Jeff: I’ve been having a pretty nerd-averse week, maybe. But the stuff that’s gotten me excited this week has been:

The Historian. As engaging as I found the front half of Elizabeth Kostova’s Dracula novel, it falls into this “Father took me to Athens. We had tea and then he talked about Vlad Tepes for ten minutes. Then we went to France and saw a castle, and father talked about Vlad Tepes for ten minutes.” kind of thing. But just before the halfway point the book builds up some serious momentum, like a roller coaster cresting that first big hill.

Atomic Robo. I get Robo through Heavyink, so I have to wait a few days to dig into it. The most recent issue is the title character and Charles Fort chasing an Elder God-possessed H.P. Lovecraft through 1920s New York while Robo attempts to convince Nicola Tesla that he’s actually studying for a physics exam. It’s like that one episode of Growing Pains, except it has Lightning Guns.

Sonic. You know how sometimes you see a movie or hear a song or meet a girl or whatever and you ask yourself, “How did I live without this?” Or maybe have a weird Dawn-Summers-y thing where it’s like that thing has been there the whole time because it’s actually a magical key instead of a whiny little girl that makes bad life choices and gets turned into a centaur by its cuckolded demon boyfriend? Well, I ate at a Sonic for the first time ever this week (the first franchise within about 2 hours of me just opened earlier this month after advertising on the local stations for roughly 100 years), and I kind of feel the way I described above. Seriously, that cherry limeade thing? If you made that, hats off to you.

Summertime. It’s been a dreary June in the northeast, but you can still tell it’s summer sometimes. And I love summer. That’s the reason why I wanted to teach, you know. The other night, I was eating a soft-serve chocolate and vanilla twist cone and sitting on a bench with a good friend and I thought, “This is pretty okay.” So, you go, summer.

The Admiral Snackbar’s Seafood Shack Pin I Got With My TPB of The Rack. It’s a treat, and it counts toward my required pieces of flair.

What Sarah Said.