Fantastic

I noticed that I may have lost my mind recently. While this does not surprise me, or even worry me, it does make me feel guilty.

I am feeling guilty that maybe you didn't sign up for this. I feel like maybe I have pulled of an epic bait and switch, much like say George clooney did in this.

You see, the Rick Roll, which I know I overuse, and I promise that I will stop for at least 2 weeks, I swear, is perhaps the world's best example of the bait and switch. You go in expecting something, are told in fact that you will get something, and then instead you get Rick Astley telling you lies about never giving you up.

I think this blog has become one long Rick Roll. I made several claims as to what you can expect from this sorted little affair. I made some vague outlines of what you can expect here; however, as vague as they are, I still feel like I have lost touch with that and treated this stupid thing more like my personal journal and less like my Internet musings on ridiculously unimportant subjects.

So let's get back on track. Let's remember that Star wars references, Kevin Smith resets, bewbs, and bad tunes is what brought us here in the first place.

We need to breath new life in to our Internet courtship, lest we end up in divorce court arguing over google visitation and who gets to keep the porn collection.

To that end, let me begin the new era....of returning to the old era, by keeping the present era inline with the old era's vision of the future era (friggin Roddenberry made time travel so confusing)by simply stating....


WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?!?

By people I am referring to fans of stuff. It really doesn't matter what stuff. Any stuff will do....apparently. There is a fan for almost anything these days. I used to think that people who wanted to have sex with duct tape were the craziest thing on this planet until now.

Don't believe me? Go back to that toilet paper fan site and type the weirdest thing you can think of in to the search field. The Internet is a wondrous, and all too scary place. This is not really about that. This is more about how scary the human mind is.

For some reason, when someone becomes a fan, they loose all sense and reason. I understand that fan is a shortening of the term fanatic, and fanatic is defined as:


fa·nat·ic
/fəˈnætɪk/ Show Spelled[fuh-nat-ik] Show IPA
–noun
1.
a person with an extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal, as in religion or politics.


yet, the shrinking of the term to just fan should have also carried with it a shrinking definition.

fan 2 (fn)
n.
An ardent devotee; an enthusiast.

An enthusiast makes sense. I enjoy xyz. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, sort of like watching a kitten....get blended....uhmmm did I type that out loud?

But really, an enthusiast sounds so tame, and much more in line with what I have in mind for my fandom.

I like certain things, like say Wil Wheaton. I like Wil Wheaton. He is generally funny and occasionally insightful in a manner that speaks to me. I can say this and also say. Wesley Crusher was the most annoying television character of all time. I can also say sometimes, he misses the mark and bores me, or tries to hard and I look at him with pity. Sometimes, he just isn't entertaining or insightful. It happens. I would also tend not to compare said Wheaton with say...I don't know, George Carlin.

Carlin was a master at entertaining and insighting (it is a new word, shut up) me and many others. He is one of the all time kings of comedy, and a true master of his art. Wil Wheaton, as much as I like him is no George Carlin.

Now, why am I saying all of this?

Because I had a true WTF moment earlier. No it isn't about why fanatics seem intent on wishing dead people a happy birthday, but rather because some tool decided to make the following statement (real geekshit incoming)

DL (dragonlance, a series of novels and a campaign setting for dungeons and dragons, which was pretty entertaining when I was a kid)is in no way near the the same literary standing as LOTR. Maybe so, maybe not. Again, I suppose we will just have to wait and see.


This person, on an internet webboard thought it would be within the realm of serious discourse to suggest that maybe draginlance and lord of the rings were on the same level.

Hands up everyone who knows what dragon lance is.

Thanks geekiest of the geeks.

Now, hands up everyone who knows what lord of the rings is.

Ok, I can't count that high, so put your hands down everyone who doesn't live in a third world country or a shack outside of civilization in the middle of Pennsylvania.

Need a slightly more dramatic example?

Ok. So the reference that this person was making was in regard to the dragonlance movie. A movie which this person felt should have been done slightly differently.

Here is the imdb site for said movie. In case you are wondering, when IMDB writes video inside the bracks with the release date, they are denoting a direct to video release.

Dragonlance the movie was treated the same as all 7,834 (or so) Olsen twins movies.

So I can see how you could compare the value of that product with say, the 2 billion dollar release of the Tolkien masterpiece.

Right well I can see how you could say a live action version might have done well, and the following qualifying statement might apply:

Personally, for me, this series could dethrone LOTR if the movies were made right.


The important part was where the person said "for me" because that means in their eyes, it might have been better. You and all six of your closest friends may have thought that way.

That is the difference between fan and fanatic. The difference between enthusiast and uncritical devotee. The difference between thinking Beiber and Lennon are the same and Wil Wheaton isn't bad, but he's no Carlin.

I could sit here and inform you about how Dragonlance steals many of it's architypes from LOTR, I could show you how setting is the only major difference between the struggles faced by each group, and thus the only true difference between the two series would be in the quality of the writing, and if that is true, then one needs not go very far in determining this person is off their rocker.


Why can't people enjoy something based on its own merits and resist the urge to compare it insanely to masterpieces?

I can draw stick figures, and I may be able to brain wash one person in to thinking that I am a better artist than Van Goh, but that doesn't make it true.

In short, no name mac and cheese is not KD. Stop saying it is, and stop trying to say it is as good or better than. It is a pale imitation. Acceptable when the real thing is not available, but seriously, it is not as good.

Stop thinking that all this new crap is better than the old crap just because it has a shinier coat of paint. And for the love of Paladine, stop thinking a second rate imitation of quality groundbreaking work is new and innovative and can dethrone the master.

Sometimes something new can be better, but most of the time it is just a water downed version of it. If you don't believe me, check out the new Santana album. It is all covers of guitar awesome songs. On the surface you would think, good guitar songs, done by a good guitarist would be good. Yet here's the thing:

He brings nothing new to the table, nor does he honour the old. He simply repackages the old, puts a new coat of paint on it and tells you you should buy it.

This is the difference between loving the old song, and hating the new one.

The difference between hunting down the vinyl for the original, and downloading a free copy of the Sanatana (and then promptly deleting it in a vein attempt to wipe it from the official record of reality).

This is the difference between a 2 billion dollar oscar winning theatrical release and a direct to video release.

Dragonlance may be cool, but it isn't as cool. Thank the ground that LOTR walks on for proving to the industry that fantasy is a viable genre. Don't complain when they realised that as viable as it is, the individual sub genres are only worth a few million bucks from us weirdos.

All of a person's complaints about generalizing or making a story more accessible to a broader audience are what make it a viable production and worth spending the money on. If the audience is so narrow as to provide only a certain level of profit, then all you are going to get is what they can afford to make for that profit.

In the end, just because we are all crazy about something, doesn't mean everyone is.

Beauty and quality are always in the eye of the beholder.

Not everyone is going to find what I like as cool as I do, but generally, I don't care about them, cause they're stupid.


Note 013/06/2012 - I actually began re-reading the Dragonlance series and watched that movie.... The books are good, well thought out and generally of good quality. That movie is tremendously shitty.