Some years back, at the Toronto WorldCon, I heard Neil Gaiman read his short story, "A Study in Emerald". It's a Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft universe crossover story. It works far better than it ought to. (Probably because it manages to get in that shock of realization at the end: that the universe is a weirder and scarier place than you ever knew. All good Lovecraft stories have that, and many bad Lovecraft imitations don't manage it. But I digress.)

Gaiman said something along the lines of, "I think it's deeply unfair that the coolest story I wrote last year was a Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover story." This stuck with me, because it expressed an artistic truth that's not often recognized: sometimes your creative mojo really engages with something that is actually pretty silly or trivial.

All of this is my way of working up to admitting to having created something really nerdy and trivial yesterday, when I could have been finishing my post about our trip to Italy.

A bit of background: many of you will have seen LOLTrek - a Star Trek episode ("The Trouble with Tribbles") recreated as a set of "cat macros". (The link has a good description of what cat macros are. The one sentence summary: pictures of cats with amusing(?) captions in a distinctively bad grammar. The concept has now been extended to include pictures of things other than cats, amusingly(?) captioned in a distinctively bad grammar. There is, for example, a Doctor Who cat macro community on livejournal, ihasatardis.)

So, I saw LOLTrek, and I laughed. And then I thought, "Somebody must do something similar with Doctor Who." And I went about my business, confident that the magic of the internets would make such a thing happen in no time.

Days passed, and the magic of the internets was not forthcoming. And then I was playing around with a wonderful little program called Comic Life. This program makes it really easy to create comic book pages - you choose from a large selection of preset panel layouts or create your own, and then drag images into the panels. The program automatically handles sizing/clipping the images in a pretty intelligent way, though you can also tweak by hand. Then you can add text balloons or styled text of various kinds with a few clicks. It's easy and fun and addictive.

Then I came across this archive of screencaptures from season 1 of new Doctor Who, my fate was sealed.

And this was the result: Parting of Wai? No Wai!. (Warning: Link contains intentionally hideous grammar and syntax, atrocious spelling, and deploys every 'net cliche of the last decade that I could dredge out of my memory. It's not likely to be funny unless you love both Doctor Who and sites like I Can Has Cheezburger?.)

In other words, I think it is deeply unfair that the coolest thing I posted to the Internet yesterday was a full LOLTrek-style treatment of the Doctor Who season 1 finale, "The Parting of the Ways."

My consolation is that they totally dug it over at ihasatardis.