So Long - And Thanks for All the Fish

Fun Contest + >350 geeks + Terry Cloth + Music = This Vid.

Which, by the way, is made of win.

Thanks to @thinkgeek for a fun Towel Day contest, to @osu_elf for making this vid, and to all the hoopy froods in it for being, well, hoopy froods! (Incidentally, I'm starting to feel famous. First in a vid with Nathan Fillion and now David Hewlett!)

Food for Thought

I've spent several free minutes today downloading pictures of Hit Girl.  (How else am I supposed to make that costume?) In doing so, I came across an article that truly intrigued me. This is an excerpt:

The final issue at hand involves the somewhat preposterous fear that young girls will find a way to see and decide that Hit Girl is a role model for their play fantasies. Damn right they will. And you know what? Who cares? We have no qualms about young boys idolizing murderous womanizers like James Bond or Tony Stark. We never bat an eye when an eight-year-old boy wants to dress up as that genocidal, galaxy-destroying, slaughterer-of-children known as Darth Vader. And that's not even counting the countless fantasy games based on horror-film boogie-men of the moment. More than once, I dressed up for Halloween as an undead former child molester turned murderer of teens who sliced and diced innocent kids using a glove with knives for fingers. I turned out OK. As I wrote last November regarding the Twilight series, no one complains when our nation's boys emulate somewhat immoral male protagonists from various mainstream blockbusters, but we're up in arms about the questionable morality of female protagonists. Let's trust our young girls just a bit more. Any young girl who watches Kick-Ass and thinks that she wants Hit Girl's life is probably just as wrongheaded as the countless young boys who grew up really wanting to be Batman or Spider-Man. Which is, of course, partially what Kick-Ass is really about.

The entire article is worth a read, and it can be found here, but I have only two things to say about this. One, bravo! And two, fucking A for mentioning Tony Stark. I swear to Steve the Fruitbat that if I come across one more "Tony is all reformed now that he has Pepper" story anywhere on the internet, I'm going to implode. So. Not. EVER. Going. To. Happen. (And if it did, Pepper would be dead within two issues. Just sayin. And any of you who read Invincible Iron Man - don't spoil! Yes, I have read the World's Most Wanted storyline, and uh...guh!  But really. Don't spoil.) Oh, and three (because it's my LJ and I can do what I want): I role played James Bond as a kid. Who didn't? And Bruce Wayne was awesome! I didn't meet Tony Stark until high school, but I liked him, too, thanks. Smart engineering types who could build their way out of anything and didn't have superpowers per se was my secondary MO. (My first, of course, was bad-ass martial artists.) And those were my choices. There weren't too many cool girl characters out there. So I say thanks to Hit Girl for giving my nieces gender-appropriate kick-ass (ahem) characters to play with. And you know what? I'm the cool aunt. Maybe in a few years, I'll let them see Kick-Ass. After all, my dad let me watch RoboCop and Platoon one weekend when my mom was out of town. That was a great weekend.

Also (yes, that's four - what's your point?): thanks to the writer of this article for knowing how to use hyphens in superhero names and representing both Marvel (my life's love) and DC (my first love). Here's to parity!