Thursday, October 20, 2011

My legs have finally stopped hurting

Three days of nonstop walking through the Javits Center take their toll...you will never truly experience Comic Con NY until all feeling has been lost below the knees and your hips feel like iron spikes are being driven in with each step.

Painful...yes. Excruciating...undoubtably. Worth it? Without question.

One observation-paranormal romance/urban fantasy continues it's conquest of the reading public, judging from the offerings at the publishers booths. I recommend the Iron Druid series by Kevin Hearn. Think Harry Dresden but only more Irish and with more bloody swordplay...





Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Death to the Snark! (or a brief rant on the decline of polite discourse)

SNARK
 
noun 
Combination of "snide" and "remark". Sarcastic comment(s). 
Also snarky (adj.) and snarkily (adv.)
His commentary was rife with snark. 
"Your boundless ineptitude is astounding," she snarkily declared.



We live in a golden age of the biting comment, the ironical putdown, the hurtful rejoinder. When snideness and low-cutting bitchery replace wit and intelligent observation. Where taking the high road has resulted in a wrong turn down into the deep end of the green sea of envy.

Yea, weep my brethren, for are cursed to live in the Time of the Snark.

You see it everywhere, in ads on the street, in all the hip post-modern nonsense clogging the cable channels and movie theatre. Most of all, we see it on running wilds in the untamed frontier of the Internet, a eight-legged, nine-headed beast consuming all in it’s path and leaving behind a long trail of cutting sarcasm defecated on the skeleton of what was once Western culture. The snark is an omnivorous beast, taking of a fertile forest and leaving behind a parched desert of irony and ennui from which nothing worthwhile shall ever grow…

Well I say enough! Time to put an end to this. Hunt down the snark, beard the beast in his den! Shoot him a thousand times with silver bullets soaked in holy water, burn the corpse to ash, then shoot the ash. Load it into a cannon and fire the remnants into the sun! A fitting fate for such a beast, the devourer of intellect, the bane of intelligent discourse! Death to the Snark!

Here endeth the rant….