Hi. Can I ask you a question?
Have you ever pissed off a bunch of Wiccans?
Have you?
If you have, then you understand the trepidation hanging in the air of the Geek Speak mailroom this month. We keep checking to make sure we haven’t been turned into newts.
It all started with an ill-referenced (since fixed) Buffy quote in Sara Paige’s wonderfully comprehensive and entertaining Top 13... Pop-Culture Witches...
Mikki Barry, of the Church of Universal Eclectic Wicca, had this to say
Interesting article. I'd like to point out one important caveat, however. "Wicca" and "witch" are not interchangeable. Wicca is a religion, and witch is more of a methodology. I doubt very much that the Wicked Witch of the West subscribed to the Wiccan faith, and I'm certain Morgaine Le Fay wasn't, as the religion antedated her character. To be a member of the religion of Wicca is to be a Wiccan, not a "Wicca." Thanks!
Elizabeth was even more outraged...
I wanted to read, and like, the 13 Pop Culture Witches article, but I couldn't get past the "Why She’s a Badass Wicca" headers... which is grammatically incorrect or at least seriously non-standard. First of all, most of these witches are not Wicca practitioners. Secondly, most Wicca practitioners call themselves witches, not Wiccas. A friend had lured me in with the intro, but once I arrived I simply couldn't read the rest of the piece.
Sara (who, by the way, holds a degree in Comparative Religion), responds:
Dear Elizabeth,
Thank you for catching my entirely intentional grammatical error. The “badass wicca” section was taken from a Buffy quote in the episode “Choices”.
Willow: “And besides, I've got a shot at being a badass Wicca.”
I did it on purpose because I thought that many visitors to *Geek Speak would get the quote. Although you are correct, it is the wrong usage (and rather jarring to boot!), it was also an adorable turn of phrase when Alyson Hannigan says it.
Thank you for pointing out that not everyone loves the same quotes we do! We will put in a note. Please though, do not let this stop you from reading the list, because it is really cool!
Yes it is, Sara. Yes it is.
We also heard from a few disgruntled Facebook users this month, with The Great Facebook Friendship Fake...
It all started with this Post:
TO ALL MIKE'S FRIENDS: You have been involved in a social networking experiment. We at Geek Speak Magazine would like to thank you for being so kind and welcoming to someone who does not exist...
The funniest response to this came from one Christine Miller, who posted:
Personally, I think it is a little (maybe more than a little!) F'ed up! Friended "Mike" because "he" was friend of others. Guess I shouldn't be so nice. So, who are you selling my info to? :(((((
Rachel responds:
Uh, no one, Christine. Quite frankly, there is no need for anyone to purchase this information about you; you give it away for free! (And thank you for rather proving my point for me.)
On a happier note, Mike got this lovely friend request from Lizzit:
Hi Mike, I read about you on Geek Speak, and I thoughts I’d send you a friend request. I’ve always wanted to have an imaginary friend.
And later, when Mike updated his status to this:
Mike Reynolds does not exist.
Lizzit commented:
No Virginia, Mike does exist in the hearts and minds of good little netizens everywhere.
Awwww. And suddenly the whole experiment was made worthwhile.
(By the way, Mike now has 230 friends, less than when the experiment came to an end, but Sarah -- who was invented as an emergency afterthought an hour and a half before the 24-hour experiment’s end, and who had 165 friends when the article was published -- now has 280. Unbelievable.)
Changing tacks, let’s go now to best-selling author David Weber’s Out of the Dark, a controversial novel that is being almost universally panned by readers the world over – who apparently don’t get the joke.
Amanda had this to say about our review:
Was linked here by a friend and I loved the line "As usual in the Weber oeuvre, the carnage is absolute, people we like die, and we get a lot of details of things we could perhaps carry on without. In particular, my knowledge of the interleaving state highways of the American Eastern Seaboard is now greatly broadened; if every map of the area in existence were to be destroyed, we could navigate around the Carolinas just by using the directions in this book."
Rachel responds:
Yeah, not to mention all the overly detailed gun make and model description. As long as a single copy of this book survives the coming global Apocalypse, future historians won’t need things like or ordinance manifests to know exactly how we make war on each other nowadays.
I still maintain this book is a prank.
Thank you for your thoughts, Amanda!
Our thanks, also, to Abla Kandalaft, of www.mydylarama.org.uk, who said:
Hi Guys
I am writing because I stumbled upon your magazine through a review posted on IMDB. Love it! Keep up the good work. I myself have recently become editor of the French section of a cultural criticism website and I had written a review of The Human Centipede which incredibly isn't at all well known around these parts -london or paris! - so I read yours with delight. Very funny. Loved the facebook fake friend experiment!
Abla is referring to this review, by David Baldwin, in case you were wondering.
And on that bright note, we'll end. Thank you for all the mail, you guys! As always, we can’t print every letter we receive, but we read and deeply appreciate each one. You guys rock. And also rule.
See you next month!
By the way, are you watching The Walking Dead? If not, you should be!
-- The Geek Speak Staff