Sick: NYT Promotes Fairies, Fey Lifestyles

A celebration of pure evil. Or, True Neutrality. Whatever.
Not Good, no matter how you slice it.

Unconventional conventioneers:

THE yawning atrium of the Holiday Inn in Memphis had been silent all morning, but by noon on a Friday in late March, it began to bustle and hum with the whispering thwip-thwip-thwip of cards being shuffled and the clacking rattle of dice being rolled, with the shouts of victorious adventurers and the death throes of impaled orcs.

Seated at a table slightly removed from the other would-be knights and wizards, Richard Irby, a burly young man from Jonesboro, Ark., with an easygoing manner, a thin, adolescent beard and a ring piercing his lower lip, was showing off his collection of rare Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards.

"Sometimes it’s actually looked down upon,” Mr. Irby, 18, said incredulously as he explained his hobby, in which card collectors face off in imaginary battles whose outcomes are determined by drawing cards from each player’s deck. “Some people just don’t understand it.”

Welcome to Earth. We call this strange gas "air."

Officially, the 25th annual staging of MidSouthCon, a three-day-long celebration of science fiction, role-playing games, fantasy artwork, medieval weaponry and just about every leisure pursuit that prefers to envision the cosmos as it might have once been or might someday be, would not begin until later that afternoon.'

[Some attendees] were in the hotel lobby engaging in cosplay, a kind of masquerade in which participants behave like the fictional characters whose costumes they wear.

I feel dirty.

...

Nigel Sade, a graphic artist from Kent, Ohio, does not consider himself a cosplayer, but he does dress as a 17th-century buccaneer. Though his sartorial choices have become more acceptable since the success of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, Mr. Sade said that some conservative science fiction fans still weren’t ready to embrace him.

“I don’t even deal with them,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Whatever, man. You be from outer space, or from ‘Lord of the Rings.’ I’m going to be over here.”

You can pretty much hear him scoffing "Freakin' geeks" under his breath in an above-it-all sneer. And he'd pull that attitude off, too, except he's dressed up like a gay pirate.

One last image. A couple of "Valkyries" do some kind of dance.

If that's what a Valkyrie looks like, Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta have like totally lied to me.

Thanks to Checkers McBamp.

Dan Riehl Is A Lunatic: Seriously, the guy is a maniac. An obscure name pops up in the news and five minutes later he's got five hundred web references to it.

But this is really over the line. For no especially good reason, Dan decided to search for Nigel Sade, the prancing pirate guy mentioned above.

He actually found him on the web.

That's Nigel Sade on the right. No, really, it is.

Dan, ease up, ease up. The transaxle's gone. You're just grinding metal.

posted by Ace at 06:33 PM

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