I’m going to hell for this. I’m not sure if it will be an intellectual hell or a moral one, but I’m definitely heading that direction in a fairly ballistic manner. Because the best thing to me about this article about Small Beer Press is not that an old essay of Bruce Sterling’s about Slipstream is quoted fairly liberally, and not that these people are publishing stuff that almost no one can read and the few of us that do quickly realize we can’t have conversations about it with “normal” people because it’s so far out there and we barely understand it ourselves. What really strikes me is the awesome fashion statement made by wearing a skirt over jeans! To go there you have to be so pathologically concerned about how fat your ass looks that you might as well wear a 55-gallon oil drum with the two ends cut off. Or maybe not. Some segment of the population apparently finds this to be “hip.” Hip. Ouch. But seriously, doesn’t this defeat the selling points of both skirts and jeans? I mean take away the skirtily refreshing breeze between the legs and the ass-showiness of jeans and you’re left with an ensemble that makes you simultaneously chunky, sweaty and likely to get caught in machinery. Is the statement here supposed to be “I’m so hot, I can get away with anything, and be incredibly uncomfortable doing it!”?