Am really busy today doing actual work for pay, so in order to keep y’all entertained in the meantime, I share this…
Since Burl Burlingame brought my attention to Felicia Day back when I first mentioned “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” I have done a modicum of research in the hopes of finding more cool-geek Joss Whedon-type stuff.
What I found was some interesting (academically interesting, interesting in the abstract, of course) stuff such as the above video. This Miss Day seems to be quite the Web entrepreneur, from video to social media and everything in between. Being a gamer (proving they’re not all pimply-face males) as well as an actress, she has written and starred in a fantasy-game based, comic-book-style Web series called “The Guild,” from which the video is derived.
But the video itself is fascinating on a number of levels. Not only is the music written by Joss Whedon’s brother Jed (who gave us “Freeze Ray”) with lyrics by Miss Day herself:
Do you wanna date my avatar?
She’s a star
And she’s hotter than reality by far.
Wanna date my avatar?
… but it really takes the whole “fantasy” thing and has ironic fun with it. I mean, you can’t miss the fact that what she’s doing is making fun of music videos that present females as objects of desire. Yet at the same time, she, as the star of the video, is undeniably a highly desirable, um, personage. (So she both mocks nerds while enticing them, which seems rather unkind, but there’s such a spirit of fun.) Speaking abstractly and academically, of course.
You can see, standing back and viewing the thing objectively, that to a certain sort of male — say the 17-year-olds Burl and I were when we graduated from Radford High all those years ago — she would exert a certain attraction. In fact, seeing something like this actually makes me sort of embarrassed for all guydom. Look how easily a smart woman can grab our full attention even as she’s acknowledging openly to us that she’s mocking the very process by which she is pulling our eyes from our sockets. I mean their eyes from their sockets.
I mean, I just posted this for Burl, not for me.
Of course, while you were posting this, I was posting this idiotic comment on FaceBook:
Hi-def TVs look so nice. Would it be wrong to freeze-frame on Renee Zellweger and keep the picture on all day?
Felicia Day — I’ve interviewed a lot of actors over the years and most of them, let’s say, should not be mistaken for the clever characters they play. And yet some of them are smart, creative people with interests ranging far beyond acting. Day is clearly one of them.
Andrew Koenig is another. (You probably remember his father Walter as Ensign Chekov.) I hope this isn’t a tragedy in the making:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2010-02-22-actor-koenig-missing_N.htm
Acting is a tough gig if you want to make a living at it. Those who are happiest treat it as a serious hobby, as Felicia Day does.
Brad says, “…seeing something like this actually makes me sort of embarrassed for all guydom…”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
But I’m embarrassed for all humanity.
LOL… Felica and “The Guild” cast actually did their Comic-con panel in these costumes… It was hilarious… I was going to mention “The Guild” in the previous post comments but thought it might have been to nerdy… Guess I was wrong… 🙂
You can’t get “too nerdy” for bradwarthen.com…