Enthusiastick Journal

Behold, the triumphant return of Because Its Wednesday:

In my current temp gig I work for a market research company. The department I work for is concerned primarily with surveys. Clients work with us to design a survey that they believe will tell them something about their customers. We administer the survey and analyze the results. Mostly its relatively mundane stuff, but every so often something interesting turns up.

Today, for instance, I got to thinking about one question in particular. Its part of a block of questions of the type you've probably seen before. The kind where you rate a series of statements on a numerical scale, with a low number meaning you don't agree with the statement and a high number meaning you do. Incidentally, in case you didn't know, the scale is usually intentionally more finely calibrated than it actually needs to be. For example if its a 5 point scale (that is to say rated from 1 to 5) then whether you answer a 4 or a 5 doesn't actually matter. They both count as the "top 2 boxes," a phrase I heard used in Sorkin banter but never connected to anything until now.

Its possible this is rudimentary statistical and demographic knowledge, but I'm bad at math, so I didn't know.

Anyway, what got me thinking was a single statement that's part of a larger block of statements about purchasing behaviors. How you decide what brand you're going to buy, and how much you're willing to pay, and how long you spend thinking about it, that sort of thing. And the statement in question reads as follows:

I would pay more for products consistent with an image I like.

Now maybe I'm just cynical (and its highly possible that I am) but as far as I'm concerned anyone who doesn't answer that they agree with that statement is a total fucking liar. Don't get me wrong: I'm not particularly image-conscious. If I stop and consider it then I would say that I try and base my purchasing decisions on utility rather than style. I buy clothes that are comfortable, food I like the taste of, etc. And I'm relatively thrifty, so I generally try and get the best product for the least amount of money possible.

Which is all well and good, except I own an iPod. And yeah, the first iPod I owned was bought for me as a Christmas gift. But I still wanted that gift, and actively asked for it by name. Despite the fact that there were and are any number of equivalent or even superior products on the market, several in significantly less expensive price ranges. I can justify the decision in my head, rationalize and make statements about compatibility and such, but the fact of the matter is that part of why I wanted it was because it was cool.

Which isn't the point I'm trying to make, really, its just meant to be an illustrative example. The fact of the matter is that everyone, whether consciously or not, has certain things they are willing to spend more money on because they have in some way been influenced by the advertising or image of a product. Which is why you get hippies who will thoughtlessly pay more for food with the word "organic" on the packaging without necessarily stopping to check for truth in advertising. Or geeks who buy "special edition" DVD boxed sets that don't bring much to the table in the way of bonus material -- we'll complain loudly about that lack, but we'll still shell out and buy it. Or pretty much the entire success of the American Eagle clothing brand, just to name one shameless ripoff succesful brand imitation.

The results for the survey in question showed that fewer than half of the respondents felt that they agreed strongly that they'd willingly pay more for image. Its one of those things we as consumers are resistant to aditting. We don't want to believe its true, at least not of us. 'Other people allow themselves to be unduly influenced by such trivial things,' we say to ourselves, 'but I'm smarter than that.' Well I for one say "bullshit." On some level I'm influenced by image, even when that influence impacts my wallet, and I'm not ashamed.

I'm a little late in writing this one, what with the topic having been extensively discussed prior to demiurgent's vacation. Now things have at least tentatively started back up over at Websnark, and I'm discussing an issue that's months old at best. But it wasn't until I was listening to Eric's guest spot on the Keencast that the thought really took shape. His appearance concluded with everyone saying they were excited by the prospects of posts over at the 'Snark, and one of the regular hosts quipped "And godwilling he may actually talk about webcomics again."

And that was when it hit me. A thought I'm sure I've had before, but never with such force behind it. And never with such a strong desire to put it down on paper (metaphorically speaking.) To record the words for posterity, in a place where everyone I know can read them. Maybe even the man himself. And that thought was this:

I don't give a damn if Eric Alfred Burns never writes another webcomic snark ever again. Never again submits a strip without comment. Never distributes another biscuit, whether tasty or otherwise.

Bear with me for a second here. I'm not saying I want Websnark to go away. Just the opposite, really. I'm as excited as anyone that Eric is provisionally back in the saddle. I am a fan of Websnark. I belong to the snarkoleptics community. And more to the point I am a fan of Burns, and of his writing. He's more to me than just some guy with a blog, and I'm glad Randy Milholland reportedly disabused him of that notion.

And I understand the impulse on the part of the webcomics community (insofar as such a thing exists at this juncture.) I really do. Eric may not have done it first, and there are those who argue he doesn't do it best, but Eric got people talking in a way no one else had before. He bears a significant share of responsibility for The Dialogue. And as a result of that there's an impulse to enshrine him in that position, to turn him into some sort of Yogi Berra of webcomics, cleverly and succintly dispensing ideas and wisdom not about any particular webcomic but about the medium itself. Where they are, where they're going.

But... well... personally I resist it. Because I've been reading that blog for a while now. And I've enjoyed a great deal of stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with webcomics. I enjoyed the period of time where the focus of Websnark shifted away from webcomics criticism as much as I enjoyed everything that came before. It boils down to the fact that I don't think of writing about webcomics as Eric's life's work. And I'm willing to wager neither does he.

These days every time I see that Eric has snarked a strip I get a little afraid inside. A little wary that he's done so because he feels obligated, because so many people are clamoring for him to influence The Dialogue and he wants to meet that demand. And I know that he burned out on it once, and I don't want him to again. Because I don't want him to retreat out of view. I don't want Websnark to go away. I do want Gossamer Commons to come back eventually.

And I would absolutely love for him to finish, and publish, his novel. I'd love to buy a copy, and hold it in my hands.

Let Burns be Burns. That's what I say. I like it so much I might even have to have it printed on a t-shirt, if only for myself.

(I thought about cross-posting this to the snarkoleptics by the way, because in my heart I believe a number of them agree with me. But it seemed like unnecessary shit-stirring. This is my opinion, these are my words, and I take full responsibility for them.)

So for no other reason than Because Its Wednesday, allow me to ask: what the Hell happened to Aaron Sorkin?

For no particular reason A Few Good Men keeps showing up on my premium cable channels, mostly during the week, after 10:00 at night, presumably under the rationale that no one is watching. I'm watching, obviously, but generally because there's nothing else on. I never much liked that movie before, but its starting to grow on me. Certainly I'm paying more attention to it than I ever used to.

The movie isn't particularly gripping until the trial spins up, and that's pretty late in the game. And then suddenly you've got that heated confrontation between Jack Nicholson and pre-public-insanity Tom Cruise and the closing credits are rolling -- although not before there's a large and totally unfathomable "The End" splashed across the screen in a yellow cursive script. They don't generally put that sort of stuff in movies anymore, unless they're trying to be ironic, and one gets the sense that was not the intent here. The producers must have understood even as they were filming that this was designed (destined?) to be a classic, in the cinematic classic tradition, and therefore no one would be particularly jarred by the atavistic "The End" text. No one who didn't watch the damn thing over and over again, anyway.

I bring all this up because I've found myself noticing more and more that there's a whole lot of movie before those memorable scenes. A whole lot of Tom Cruise and Demi Moore and the ubiquitous Kevin Bacon yapping at one another. Only they're not just yapping, really. They're doing a lot of Sorkin dialogue.

For the uninitiated, Aaron Sorkin's dialogue is something of a signature style, a sort of rhythm that one can feel and track. If you've seen enough of his stuff you find yourself anticipating the beats and flourishes, so that you can hum along even if you don't precisely know the tune. The phenomenon is of course not unique to Aaron Sorkin. Joss Whedon springs to mind as another screenwriter turned all-purpose creator whose conversations tend towards some inescapable patterns. Its not necessarily a flaw, but it can be an interesting thing, because once you've heard it, you can never go back to not hearing it.

I am at this juncture in my life fairly well immersed in Aaron Sorkin. I have the early seasons of the West Wing on DVD, as well as the entire run of Sports Night. I've got A Few Good Men seeping into my consciousness, and the American President has become a network television favorite (TBS I think), particularly around the holidays. That by itself presents similarities that are impossible to ignore. There's an exchange between Michael Douglas and Martin Sheen concerning the phrase "proportional response" that's almost directly replicated in an early episode of the West Wing (with that as its title, no less) only Martin Sheen has changed roles from advisor to president.

The cute minor female characters with unusual names that end in -ley. The articulate lawyers with high moral standards named Sam. The episodes titled "What Kind Of Day Has It Been." The tendency of every character to respond to minor stresses with the phrase "This is a nightmare. This is a [problem category] nightmare." Its all just sort of congealed in my brain into a lexicon of Sorkinisms, so that these television shows and movies all come to be viewed as part of the same essential thing. And the thing is, for all that I'm mocking it, I'm actually a huge fan of the Sorkin dialogue. I kid because I love. And ever since Sorkin and Schlamme made their famous exit from the production staff of the West Wing, its hard not to notice that the guy has sort of... languished.

There's a new version of A Few Good Men on stage in another country, but that's hardly a big deal to me. And there's the screenplay about Filo Farnsworth, but that's apparently in development Hell, and quirky little projects like that usually can't escape that particular quagmire. I hear rumors of a television pilot slated for next year, but a suspicious lack of specifics. So I am forced once again to ask, what the Hell happened to Aaron Sorkin? I know he lost a good deal of his status as a Hollywood beloved during the withdrawl from the West Wing, but c'mon man! You used to be prolific, and now its been literally years since I've heard anything new from you. I need to hear new characters speaking Sorkinese, and only the man himself can make that happen.

I left the house without a wallet today. Seems about right.

A bunch of things have been percolating in my brain lately. I've been writing more. Not that I have any evidence of that in the outside world. Regardless of my total creative output, generally less than 5% of what I produce ever gets shared with anyone, or sees the light of day. I've been writing, for lack of a better descriptor, scripts. Scripts for a collaborative project devringalbrath suggested to me, that appears to have momentarily run out of steam.

Maybe it has something to do with NaNoWriMo, and my disappointment in my inability to write anything long form. Or the fact that the Rent movie premieres this week, and I’ve been listening to the soundtrack. I'm not certain.

I think it has something to do with Platform Occupation. Yes, that's another old Wednesday White essay. This whole Because Its Wednesday thing all ties together thematically, although I would be lying if I said that was anything other than a happy accident.

I've got myself thinking about what I do for a living, and what I do in my spare time. My hobbies. Thoughts on my current Exalted chronicle are all mixed up in this. Its a mediocre game at best, but for the first time in a long time I don't hold myself primarily responsible for the game's failings. Its boastful to say it, but by trial and error and emulation I've become a significantly better gamemaster in the past six or seven years.

And I think on that, on how happy I am with what I've done. I think about the stories I’ve told and the ones I want to tell. I like to think of myself as a Storyteller. I’m not an actor anymore, and I’ll probably never be a rockstar. I could still be a writer, though, or so I like to think. That’s another one of those things I feel like I’ve always wanted to be, always striven to become. But like Marty McFly and his father before him, I’m afraid to put my money where my mouth is. What if they don’t like it? What if they tell me “kid, you’ve got no future.” And the words of Wednesday’s essay (admittedly paraphrased) come echoing through my head.

"Shut the fuck up and write something. Shut the fuck up and write something. Shut. The fuck up. And write. Something."

I think about what demiurgent has done. What he's accomplished. He's modest to a fault, so he probably doesn't see it this way, but he's really molded himself into something amazing. A series of blogs garned him a fandom, and a fandom gave him the ability to do something. To, in a truly fundamental way, make art. So now we've got Gossamer Commons. Its Rob Gordon in the High Fidelity movie: the professional critic, or professional appreciator, turning around and putting something new into the world.

And what's more, he didn't stop there. He wasn't satisfied with just writing a webcomic, so now he's working on a novel, too. One that he intends to polish up to the point where he can publish it. Who knows if he will find success? I hope that he will, but that's entirely beside the point. The point is that he's doing something.

Shut the fuck up and write something.

Scott Kurtz has written about this too, for the record. Its not a unique thought process to Eric & Wednesday. Kurtz brings my problem into sharper focus; he talks about the tipping point, the point at which one truly becomes an artist. For him it was breaking a pencil through overuse. He sat down and he drew his strip every day, and eventually a rather sturdy mechanical pencil just wore down and cracked.

Shut the fuck up and write something.

Robert Heinlein is jumbled into my thought process as well. I read Stranger In A Strange Land at a fairly formative age, and loved it. And like most Heinlein fans I loved Jubal Harshaw. Harshaw is an archetypal character for Heinlein. He’s the old crank that everyone loves despite the fact that he’s irritable and sometimes irascible. And he’s surrounded by pretty girls. What sets Harshaw apart from Lazarus Long or Johann Smith is that he’s also a writer. Its what he does. And as a result of that he’s probably the character that’s closest to the crazy old man Heinlein became.

And in Harshaw’s voice Heinlein talks a bit about writing. About how it was something he couldn’t help doing, like an addiction, a monkey on his back. Once he started doing it he had an absolute need to sit down at the typewriter every damn day and squeeze something out, no matter how terrible.

Shut. The fuck up. And write. Something.

... I want to be a writer. I don’t know what, or when, or where. But I’m lying to myself when I say I don’t know how.

Allow me a moment of meta-analysis:

When I originally conceived of Because Its Wednesday as a sort of feature for my livejournal, I didn't actually intend for it to be all about Wednesday White. The point was to pick an arbitrary day of the week, preferrably one on which people would be reading their LJ friends pages, and just write something for it, every week. The idea was to force myself to do something more than just a summary of my day-in day-out activities. Writing about Ms. White specifically was just sort of serendipity, but clearly it was serendipity that quickly got out of control.

I promise that I'll be returning to that original idea as I move forward. I can't promise there won't be more BIW columns that mention Ms. White, but not all of them will. Maybe not even most of them, we'll see. But some mention of W. White has to be made this week, because last week Eric admitted publicly in a snark that he and Wednesady are dating. (That's weds and demiurgent, for those of you people who are wholly LJ-centric and/or too lazy to follow an external link.) So if nothing else I have to say congratulations to the happy, geeky couple. With that out of the way, on to something other than my entirely dorky fandom of Wednesday and Eric...

Um...

How about some random thoughts about (relatively) famous people?

Is it wrong to be angry with Taye Diggs for having the unmitigated gall to marry Idina Menzel, who is clearly too beautiful for marriage, or at the very least ought to be married to me?

Pauley Perrette deserves better than NCIS. Not only is it a CBS television series (bleh!), but its supposed star is Mark effing Harmon, an actor known mostly for his role in the forgettable 80s movie Summer School.

Justin Long is a really underappreciated comedic actor.

I have to remember to buy the Demetri Martin stand-up CD, whenever it finally comes out.

And finally:

From a certain point of view Eminem is the ideal choice to play Spider Jerusalem in the movie adaptation of Transmetropolitan.

EDIT: OK, so they're not all going to be winners. Maybe I should start preparing these in advance. That was also in the original plan, but, y'know, laziness.

Behold! New icon-age. When I renewed my paid account (the same day it lapsed) I sprang for more icons. Now I have so much room to expand its terrifying.

While I was standing in the shower this morning waiting for full consciousness to come upon me, I found myself thinking about the RIAA. I know, its easy enough to forget about the RIAA (except when some quirky news story comes up) but the fact remains that they're still out there, merrily suing people people and trying to cram the digital djinni back into the bottle. And it occurred to me, in true Sam Kinison fashion, that it was a lot like in the book of Genesis.

You see the RIAA acknowledges that illegal digital music is out there, all over the place, just waiting to be downloaded -- ripe, as it were, for the picking. And although the RIAA is certainly annoyed at the hapless users doing the downloading, they have discovered they have very little legal recourse against them. The people they can pursue and punish, for the most part, are those people who upload to P2P networks rather than downloading from them; they're after those people who push content rather than those who receive it.

And that's like looking at Adam & Eve in the garden of Eden, their chins still wet with the Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and blaming God for making the tree. (No, its not blaming the Serpent. Leave the Serpent out of this. In this metaphor the Serpent is just your goofy friend extolling the virtues of free illegal music downloads.) Which is not an argument without merit in my opinion. But I was briefly amused that the RIAA, in their struggle for the moral highground, could from an allegorical point of view be seen as making war on God.

Was that random enough for you? No? Good. Because its time for my second edition of Because Its Wednesday.

Now, last week I said that there was really no commentary I could make on the sublime Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon columns that would add to them in any way. And that's still true, really. But do yourself a favor, if you haven't aleady. Go here, and read, and when you've finished that go here. Sample the hillarity.

This week the darling Ms. White brings us a pretty snarky meta-analysis of Full House sparked by Orson Scott Card's review of Serenity. Before I say anything else, allow me to acknowledge that I think her snark is dead-on, and pretty funny, too.

Now, for me, Full House falls into a very particular category of shows. All of ABC's TGIF lineup, at least during my early adolescence, were actually in the same boat. These shows occupied a sort of nebulous space in between Scooby Doo and the shows I would actually watch and enjoy as a young adult. I use Scooby Doo in the general sense here. Scooby Doo is representative of a certain type of show you watch endlessly when you're a child, and find completely enjoyable and fulfilling. And then one day you sit up and realize that every single episode is exactly the same, and this is actually boring drivel. And then you change the channel, and you can never go home again.

Full House is representative in much the same way. When the revelation hit, it was a bit more subtle, a bit more shaded, but it shared some essential characteristics. Every episode of Full House was not, in point of fact, exactly the same. Things changed, albeit at a glacial pace. Children grew older, adults changed jobs, new characters (other than Scrappy Doo -- don't get me fucking started on Scrappy) could even be introduced. And while the show had a certain essential same-ness, it was that meaningful 5% less formulaic than shows in the Scooby Doo category.

And the revelation, when it hit, was that the show was still crappy. Its amazing to me how much utterly mindless pabulum I used to watch (and OK, let's not kid ourselves, still watch -- but its different pabulum now, and I know what it is when I watch it). The end result with the Full House category of shows was exactly the same as it had been with the Scooby Doo category. Seemingly overnight they went from cherished to completely unwatchable. There was even the same period of hanging on, clinging desperately and trying to recapture the magic only to discover that innocence lost is lost for good.

I don't especially lament the ability to really enjoy an episode of Full House these days. In order to do so again I'd probably need some form of lobotomy, or at least severe head trauma. But its interesting, because as far as I know the next major category of shows in which I got that invested can be epitomized by the WB flagships Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And y'know what? I'm still in that place, mentally and emotionally. But thinking about it gets me worried that one day I'm just going to wake up and not enjoy them anymore, either.