Cultural Creepage

Joss Whedon’s often said that one of the things he wanted to accomplish with Buffy was to seep into Pop Culture like a virus. It’s worked, in far more ways than this article lists, but certainly in these as well:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a type of literature. Buffy is a text that people care about. The language used in the show is eloquent, it expresses things very precisely.
One example of precise expression is Xander’s “Does anyone else here feel Keyser Soze’d?” Adams described this morphing from noun to verb as “brilliant,” and it is in its sharp, concise description of being hoodwinked in the most elaborate of ways. It’s a pop-culture reference that turns grammar on its ear in a poetic way. It sort of coaches the audience to then use other references in the same sort of way.

I’ve done that — hell, I did that recently when I described someone with a lot of combat training as being able to “Trinity” a room (been watching Animatrix stuff a lot). My long-time favorites, however will always be words like “Wiggins”, which aren’t mentioned in the article.

Time to reprioritize the budget

Take the Zire frame, give it the same processor, hi-res screen, one-handed navigation tool, and memory capacity as the Tungsten, add a built-in digital camera and MP3 playback…
Then sell it for a hundred bucks less.
Daddy like.

Dang

Roger Ebert doesn’t screw up too often — as a reveiwer, he’s the sort of guy that generally seems to ‘get it’ in the same way that I and the rest of my heathens (tip of the hat to JillMatrix for that phrase) get it — so if a genre anime or adaptation movie hits the screen and seems to be getting panned by every critic that ever pulled free of the pond muck, I check out Ebert’s take over at the Chicago Sun Times, looking to see if it’s a dissenting voice or a unanimous vote of “suck”. He’s the guy that’s going to say “this is a hell of a fun movie” when everyone else is saying “Why did anyone think Tank Girl was a good idea?”
Sadly, it looks like Bulletproof Monk isn’t going to live up to it’s previews — there’s too many people saying ‘what the hell were they thinking’ for it to be a good sign.