Next time I’ll be returning to more traditional geek fare, but I thought I’d indulge a rather far-out whim and talk about censorship and my stuffed animals. That might sound weird but I’m very close with my animals. I grew up calling them my Babies and treated them basically as such. They all have distinct personalities and relationships with one another and while Snuggle Bear and I have a unique bond and sleep together almost every night, I always also have a second in my arms which rotates among the others.

In honor of the Organization for Transformative Works’ October membership drive, I thought I would devote a column to the organization, why I support it, and how it is meaningful for LGBT culture. It’s also an excellent lead-in for a multi-part series on intellectual property and queer remix geekery that I have coming down the pike.

I almost titled this column, “Why I don’t wholly despise <i>Twilight</i>” because I did for a long time profess that sentiment, but after devouring the book last week, I’ve been left with a much more complicated and honestly confusing view.  All I really knew going in was that it was a vampire story and that the female protagonist was in a relationship in which she was ignored, degraded, and manipulated but she liked it.  I knew those facts and that it had an overwhelming young female and gay male fan population.  So how could I not hate it?  What was there to like?  And that is, of course, why it shocked me when I finished the first volume and realized that it had managed to take me in.  It turned my stomach, actually, as I realized that, in fact, the author, Stephanie Meyer, had brought me to the point of identification with Bella, a girl whose outlook flew in the face of everything I thought I believed about gender politics.

I generally have a pretty poor gauge of what the average American is aware of in my areas of interest. Even given that, though, I would be shocked if many people had managed to entirely avoid this summer’s buzz about the BBC sci-fi drama, Torchwood, as it launched a five-part mini-series third season both here and in Great Britain.

I’m told it’s recently become hip not to care about genre.  Apparently the people professing this outlook fancy themselves sophisticated enough to see movies and read books that are recommended to them or that have enticing trailers regardless of the tropes and motifs used in the story.  Now I don’t really want to knock that outlook, nor do I think it’s completely disingenuous.  I’ll be the first to support openness and trying new things, but the truth is that it’s a foreign feeling to me.  I am very concerned about genre and as geeks, a lot of us really have to be.

esterday, I went to see the IMAX release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, which, for DCites, is playing with 3D segments at the AMC Hoffman Center in Alexandria, and without at the theater in the Natural History Smithsonian. This was my second viewing – the first being the midnight show, obviously – and having already been stunned by the visuals and angered by the plot changes, I spent this round paying particularly close attention to the way Michael Gambon (and for that matter, the director, David Yates, and screenwriter, Steve Kloves) portrayed the character of Albus Dumbledore. Half Blood Prince is, after all, the first major release for the franchise since Jo Rowling outed the character at a Q&A panel in October of 2007, so I was keen to see how the revelation might be subtly integrated into the actor’s performance, or otherwise apparent on screen.