The last few weeks of
term sent me a little wild. I hadn't managed my time too well, and I
had a huge amount of work to pull off in not very much time. Because
I have only two registers of discourse – dry understatement and
wild exaggeration – I lamented my plight in grandiose terms,
wishing only for some free time in which to sleep and watch TV to my
heart's content.
Well, I got what I
wished for, and in
true
Aesop fashion, it's biting me in the ass. I've had two weeks of
hols so far, and I'm bored as shit.
I'm spending about half
my time with some of the only friends who are still around, and as
long as I'm with them – watching NewsRadio and
Futurama, playing an
assortment of zombie-related games, even doing their damn dishes –
I feel okay. But then I go back to my ghostly quiet dorm building,
and it gets to me.
Part of me wants to laugh maniacally and turn cartwheels naked in the
corridors, because I HAVE THE WHOLE PLACE TO MYSELF; part of me wants
to just crawl into bed and hibernate until everyone's back, because I
have the whole place to myself.
This ambivalence is doing strange things to my head, and I'm afraid I
might find myself doing something drastic to alleviate the boredom.
So,
as always in times of crisis, I turn to my best friend: the internet.
Perhaps
you too, dear reader, find that at two AM you are still awake,
cursing the ceiling, wondering if that odd noise in the walls is a
monster in your walk-in closet or a monster in someone else's walk-in
closet, talking out loud to the spider in the corner. If so, may I
recommend to you some of my favorite things to read on the internet
of late.
Mark
Does Stuff began a couple years ago as a little Buzznet community
with a simple premise: Mark would read the Twilight books,
chapter by chapter, and review them. What none of us knew going in
was that the Twilight books would make Mark very, very angry.
His reviews were funny, they were furious, and they were
heartbreaking, pouring out the bitter memories of his abusive
childhood.
Then
Mark read Harry Potter, and we learned that the only thing
better than angry Mark was squeeing fanperson Mark. Now there's a
whole Mark Does Stuff community, based around Mark's
chapter-by-chapter reviews of books and episode-by-episode reviews of
TV shows. He's done a ton of stuff, including Doctor Who,
Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, The Hunger Games,
His Dark Materials, and A Song of Ice and Fire, but at
the moment he's reading Lord of the Rings and watching Buffy
the Vampire Slayer. The hook is, he's never been exposed to
either and has no idea what he's in for. He makes wild predictions,
he makes snap judgments as he goes along, and it's all incredibly
entertaining for the fan of this stuff who knows what's in store for him.
Actually
the whole
Slacktiverse
blogging community is a goldmine of interesting things to read, but
the
Left Behind deconstructions are the undisputed highlight.
If you're unfamiliar with the
Left Behind books, Fred Clark
the Slacktivist is happy to explain to you precisely why they are the
Worst Books in the World – in excruciating detail. He reads them
with a fine-tooth comb, picking apart each agonizing page to
demonstrate exactly why these evangelical bestsellers are (in his
words) “evil, anti-Christian crap.”
Fred's
been at it on a weekly basis for eight years now, and he's only just
finished the second book. At this rate, his deconstructions of the
full series should keep us entertained through 2067. If he can
continue to be as viciously insightful and witty as he has been so
far, I'm content to keep reading him for the next half-century. (The
best part is, he's spawned some top-notch emulation of the
obsessively-detailed-deconstruction format, especially from Ana
Mardoll, who's doing a terrific job on both
Twilight
and
Narnia.)
Don't
be fooled by the rather off-putting design. FerretBrain is a hell of
a lot of fun. The “
Random”
button in the sidebar is your best friend. On more than one occasion,
I've been up past three in the morning, hitting that button over and
over, skipping past the articles that don't interest me (mostly the
ones on videogames) and reading with fascination the ones that do.
The FB crew review a lot of fantasy novels, but also movies, TV,
comic books, theater, and sometimes just whatever is on their desks.
The site's selling point is that the reviews are just so damn
good.
They're detailed, thought-provoking, concerned with combating -isms,
unafraid to express very strong opinions, and quite likely to
challenge some of your warmest and fuzziest feelings about the things
you love.
Some
of my very favorite FerretBrain articles:
Don't
They Shine Beautiful? is a very long and absolutely brilliant
essay on Stephen Sondheim's
Sweeney Todd (as filmed by Tim
Burton). You'll probably need to be a bit of a musical theater geek
to appreciate this one, but if you are it's well worth reading.
Gosh,
just writing this up has made me feel a lot better. See you sometime
in 2012 – assuming I ever manage to extricate myself from
TV
Tropes...
