Meme-ocalypse

Responding to David Isaak's general blog challenge. Yes, just when I was talking about how Blogspot really isn't like LiveJournal at all, I run into a meme.

Now, apparently this isn't just any meme - it comes from a blogger with the rather iconic name of Fiction Bitch. Said Fiction Bitch (now, is this a bitch that writes about fiction, a bitch that writes fiction, or a bitch of fiction?) is apparently an Important Person, because she has been nominated for an award. And if there's one thing on the Internet I love, it's jumping on a bandwagon.

The meme is "Eight Things About Me." By the time it's reached David's blog, the criteria have mutated to "eight random facts/habits or embarrassing things" about oneself.

1. I have a blog.

2. As a child, I once wrote and drew a complete comic-book adaptation of The Hardy Boys Volume 2: "The House on a Cliff". The comic-book starred anthromorphized dinosaurs in a Looney Tunes-inspired style. Frank and Joe Hardy were bright green and yellow Stegosauruses. (Stegosauri?) Humorously Fat Best Friend Chet was a red Dimetrodon (actually a pelycosaur), and so on and so forth. I was well into an adaptation of Volume 3, "The Secret of the Old Mill", when I got distracted by drawing the dinosaurian/pelycosaurian stars in unintentional parodies of old Western TV shows.

3. Speaking of which, I'm teaching a class on creating comicbooks at my university for the third semester running. Here at the U.C. Berkeley, you don't even need to be a professor to teach classes, if you can find one who will sponsor whatever random crap you can come up with.

4. I regularly read more "great works" of literature when I was around nine than I do now. (Some of my favorites: Julius Ceaser, Silas Marner, The Prince and the Pauper, Great Expectations, Much Ado About Nothing.)

5. I run a lot. Everywhere. I look a little ridiculous sometimes. But I'm a terribly impatient person.

6. While most of my interests fall under the umbrella of the humanities and social sciences - which is code for 'artsy crap' - I absolutely love any science relating to animals (including extinct ones). At community college, I was the only Art major (ex-Art major now) enrolled in zoology class. And I aced the class, dammit.

7. Though I've written a wide variety of things, I've been mentally working on the same fictional universe since I was twelve. (I'm twenty-two.)

8. I love the comicbook medium, but I do not collect superhero comics, despite - or perhaps because of - having a terribly extensive knowledge of them. (Go ahead. Ask me who the three Robins were. If there's any birdwatchers reading this, the answer is not "American, European, and Australasian".) I'm not inclined to start, either - many if not most of the plots sound cooler in concept than in execution. The superhero comic is actually anti-character development - Superman can't grow and change as a person. This may not be a bad thing (the Greek gods never grew or changed as people either, and we're still reading stories about them) but there's such a glut of superhero stuff on the market that the whole thing just gets tiresome.

However, I will defend the medium itself to the death.