DorkNation

Since I’m an unabashed fan of the Coen Brothers’ 1998 cult classicThe Big Lebowski, I got about ten emails last year when screenwriter Adam Bertocci debuted a website devoted to a Shakespeare/Lebowski mash-up entitled “Two Gentlemen of Lebowski.” Remixing the Coen Brothers’ language into Shakespearean English, a key scene at the beginning of the movie [...]

This week, a second attorney has asked to be removed from the case of Harvey Almorn Updyke Jr, a fanatical Alabama Crimson Tide football fan accused of poisoning the oak trees at Toomer’s Corner near the University of Auburn. The lawyer in question, Jerry Hauser, claims he has too many conflicts in interest in a [...]

Comedian Patton Oswalt, whose humorous essay collection Zombie Spaceship Wasteland recently hit bookstores, wrote a great article for Wired about the ubiquity of fan culture in the 21st century. Entitled “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die,” the article explores the Japanese concept of otaku, which “refers to people who have obsessive, minute interests—especially stuff [...]

Yesterday, Peter Farquhar of Australia’s News.com website reported on the concept of “slash fiction” — a quirky subset of fan fiction wherein (mainly straight female) writers transform seemingly straight male characters into passionate homosexual lovers. “It’s been around since the late 60s,” Farquhar writes, “and it’s a genre that was practically invented to explore the [...]

A couple years ago, I was amused to discover that the legendary Beat author Jack Kerouac, the epitome of open-road cool for several generations of Americans, secretly played a fantasy baseball game of his own making. As Charles McGrath reported in the New York Times: Almost all his life, Jack Kerouac had a hobby that [...]

My investigations into the world of fandom began a couple years ago, when I joined over 100 die-hard Star Trek enthusiasts on a one-week fan-cruise from New York to Bermuda. I didn’t embark on the Trek-themed cruise because I was interested in science fiction, but because I was intrigued by fandom in general. As a [...]