First, Ethan Gilsdorf reads from his new book about nerds, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.

Then, Jillian Venters reads from Gothic Charm School, a book based on a website that intends to teach people how to become goths. The author is local. There will also be a screening of a short film.

Elliott Bay is the place to be today, nerds.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here. And if you're planning on staying in and you're looking for personalized book recommendations, feel free to tell me the books you like and ask me what to read next over at Questionland.

I've written about this before, but it's getting very close now: The 33rd issue of McSweeney's is going to take the form of a Sunday newspaper titled The San Francisco Panorama:

It'll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more. We're going to try to sell this thing on the street in San Francisco, but it'll also go out to our subscribers and be in bookstores all over.

You can pre-order the Panorama here. Unlike a normal Sunday newspaper, it costs $16 (unless you live in the Bay Area). But I'm really excited about this, and I think you should be too.

The fan was complaining about Charlotte Braun, an ill-fated female Charlie Brown analog. Schulz made it sound as though he was deleting Braun from the strip due to this one fan's complaint:

I am taking your suggestion regarding Charlotte Braun and will eventually discard her. If she appears anymore it will be in strips that were already completed before I got your letter or because someone writes in saying that they like her.

He also included a sketch of Braun with an ax sticking out of her head. Weird to think that he was so receptive of this one fan, though; if Schulz had lived long enough to see the dawn of the blog comment, he never would have gotten any work done.

Charles Schulz is responsible in large part for expressing the neuroses of the modern age in popular culture, but Ditko aged Schulz's neurotic children into teenagers and then full-grown men and women. You look at his artwork and you see the doubts in your own head spread out on a page in spidery lines. He's really something wonderful.

This seems like a pretty appropriate video to watch just before Halloween weekend:

I appreciate how the narrator gets all the tricky Lovecraftian pronunciations exactly right.

(Via Topless Robot.)

From Publisher's Weekly and offered without comment:

Apparently Michael Jackson was working on a comic book for years with friend (and son of Deepak) Gotham Chopra and now Random House’s Villard imprint is prepping to release the fruits of this seemingly unlikely collaboration. The book, Fated, is about a Jackson-esque pop icon named Gabriel Star whose fame has left him isolated and emotionally cut-off. After a suicidal swan dive from his hotel one night, Star survives only to see his celebrity grow and discover that he’s becoming, per the publisher, “something not quite human.”

Slog Tipper Rich points us toward an anti-feminist website called The Spearhead, which is currently arguing that women are fucking up science fiction, and that science fiction belongs to men, and women should butt out. It begins "Science fiction is a very male form of fiction," and it continues:

The current generation of boys will not have this inspiration from science fiction, at least from science fiction on television and in movies. That’s because there is an undeclared war on real science fiction on TV and in movies. The former Sci-Fi channel, now “Syfy”, is a good example of what has been happening to science fiction on television. In 1998 Bonnie Hammer took over the Sci-Fi channel and declared that “more female viewers were needed”. Over the next several years, the Sci-Fi channel became increasingly feminized losing many of its traditional male viewers in an attempt to go after women viewers. This included making the logos “warmer and more human” because the logos before were “too male and too dark”. The biggest change was in the feminization of the programming shown on the Sci-Fi channel. The re-imagined re-delusioned Battlestar Galactica is a good example.

Also at fault for ruining sci-fi? The gays:

• "It's good being a man, isn't it? Just a couple of men, doing man-things. Yup, that's us."

Things are worse in Britain. A few years ago Doctor Who was brought back. The man who brought back Doctor Who was Russell T. Davies, a gay man who proceeded to add a recurring character called Captain Jack who comes from the 51st century that was bisexual omnisexual. Yes, omnisexual as in not only is this character bisexual, but he has no problem with having sex with non-humans too. If you read interviews with Davies and the writers they use the term omnisexual to describe Captain Jack. Davies has also admitted in interviews that he believes everyone will be “omnisexual” by the 51st century. Davies had more plans like this for Doctor Who, but there were so outrageously bad and obnoxious that the leftist BBC actually put a stop to him doing that (citing that Doctor Who was traditionally a “family show”).

Thanks to Slog Tipper Rich for sharing the Spearhead with all of us. Rich also points out "I have a feeling that they don't realize that the name of their site would be the coolest gay bar name ever."