My friend Seth W alerted his twitter followers a little while ago, directing them to this wonderful piece on wired.com written by Patton Oswalt, who played Kevin James’ buddy in King of Queens. I normally don’t like the strain of comedy in sitcoms that don’t go beyond penis jokes and battle of the sexes one-ups, and I didn’t know he did standup, so I was taken aback by Oswalts’ insights on the easy consumption of otaku, or geek culture.
Oswalt argues that it will implode, or reach critical mass, or some other self-destructive phenomenon, because of the Internet’s speed and ubiquity. It will form a infinitely-dense point of existence called Etewaf (Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever), however…:
This will last only a moment. We’ll have one minute before pop culture swells and blackens like a rotten peach and then explodes, sending every movie, album, book, and TV show flying away into space. Maybe tendrils and fragments of them will attach to asteroids or plop down on ice planets light-years away. A billion years after our sun burns out, a race of intelligent ice crystals will build a culture based on dialog from The Princess Bride. On another planet, intelligent gas clouds will wait for the yearly passing of the “Lebowski” comet. One of the rings of Saturn will be made from blurbs for the softcover release of Infinite Jest, twirled forever into a ribbon of effusive praise.
Think of the Junkions from the first Transformers movie (the animated, good one), where the planet of Junk is inhabited by robots whose language is a pastiche of phrases and film clichés received from Earth-origin TV transmissions. Multiply that by roughly a million.
But I was amazed to see that Oswalt has a writer’s soul, and he even gives a nod to A Confederacy of Dunces.
Hopping onto his site I found out he just released a book