And what better way to look at our history than to break down some of the things we’re thankful for!

We’re thankful for pop culture – TV and movies (and our media spin on them):

» Harry Potter and the media muggles

» The Twilight saga characters and their media matches

» Gossip Girl cast matched with their media mates

» The Mad Men (and women) of Morning Joe

» Saturday Night Live‘s great news spoofs

» And the Saturday Night Live-inspired “Real Biker Chicks”

We’re thankful for those times when we can be service-y:

» Halloween costumes ripped from the headlines

» Ways to get over (or not get over) a fear of flying

We’re thankful for Oprah:

» Outrageous Sarah Palin stories Oprah will have to address (she went 0 for 10)

» Best Oprah moments

We’re thankful for those we’ve lost:

» “Summer of Death”

And we’re thankful for the future:

» 25 bloggers you need to know

But mainly, we’re thankful for…you our readers. Happy Thanksgiving!

SLIDESHOW: Vampires & Zombies!…including this hormone-and-blood-drenched slideshow featuring bloodsucking studs, nubile young vampiresses and strapping zombie sidekicks in all their hot, flesh-decaying undead glory.

OMG OMG Robert Pattinson Is So Hot: Well, he is — as this poll of “The Best Twilight Magazine Cover E-vah” conclusively proves. BTW if you need more Robert Pattinson and Twilight coverage, our pals at Gossip Cop have that beat pretty thoroughly covered.

Harry Potter and the Media Muggles: This was an early Mediaite multi-post (as you can tell by the fact that we have all this content spread across just three pages — what were we thinking?) — but it remains one of my faves. For anyone who loves Harry Potter (as I ferociously do) and delights in the old “separated at birth” game, this is ridiculous fun (Graydon Carter as Lucius Malfoy! Malcolm Gladwell as Professor Trelawney! It still cracks me up). If you missed it the first time it’s definitely worth a look now. The pictures are uncannily good.

Eyeborg: “The Age of the Post-Human is Coming Soon” Rob Spence is our Cyborg Columnist. I’ll say it again: We have a Cyborg Columnist. For Hallowe’en, if he wants to dress up as a CYBORG, he just wears what he wants. Why? BECAUSE HE’S A CYBORG! Read his adventures in cyborg-dom here, at his EYEBORG tag page. Badass. p.s. We could very well also have a Cylon columnist, because according to SyFy president Dave Howe apparently you can’t tell the difference between them and humans. Oh well THAT should help. Thanks a lot, Dave Howe.

To Bloodcopy and Back: Remember the whole Gawker Bloodcopy hoo-ha? Wow that seems like ages ago.

Dr. Horrible: Here at Mediaite we LOVE Dr. Horrible. With our freeze-rays we would stop the world, if we could, so everyone could be in their Michael Jackson and Billy Mays and Slutty Everything costumes forever and ever. But we can’t, so tomorrow when you’re sad it’s all over and feeling vaguely ill from eating so much candy corn, check out our Dr. Horrible tag page to watch clips (or the whole thing here) and swoon over Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. Also please patronize our “The Hammer Is My Penis” tag. It’s the little things.

Chopper Chicks in Zombietown: Far be it from me to extend the dominance of our REAL BIKER CHICKS post on our “Most Popular” list (it’s the Shamu of Mediaite!), but how could I possibly exclude Chopper Chicks in Zombietown? “They’re bad! They’re beautiful! They’re 8 broads on the rag!” WHAT IS NOT TO LOVE? We should also include She-Devils on Wheels in this round up, too, because they’ll mess you up pretty good.

Glenn Beck’s Powerful Vagina: This is Mediaite’s signature monster: VAGINA GLENNTATA. Honestly, this dress looks like a poster for a horror movie — even without Glenn Beck’s face! But actually, there’s a whole backstory to this, and it actually makes sense if only you read it (don’t worry, it’s all conveniently laid out for you under our “Powerful Vaginas” tag). The upshot is, it IS a scary monster, and as a matter of fact I was going to wear this for Hallowe’en this year until I remembered that the dress was $125. What-ever.

Geraldo vs. Stossel’s “Ultimate Mustache” Battle: Wait, those mustaches aren’t Hallowe’en costumes? Oops, my bad.

The Goth Women of the View, feat. Bill O’Reilly As A Vampire: You can’t make this shizz up. Check out the first few moments of the clip — at first I thought Baba Wawa was Cher…in the “If I Could Turn Back Time” video. Well done, Babs!

The Best of The Shining: What do you do on Hallowe’en when Lester Holt steals your Slutty Susan Boyle costume right out from under you? Do the next best thing: Spend a few hours collecting clips from The Shining and pretending that you’re not at all freaked out. Oh and that helps a lot when you’re alone in the deserted office on Hallowe’en Night. What am I, an idiot? I might as well be the babysitter going to take a shower. Sheesh.

Mediaite Presents: Hallowe’en Costumes Ripped From The Headlines: And now we come full circle, to the Mediaite Suggested Hallowe’en Costumes, which no doubt guided your festive choices, dear reader (we’re betting there will be photos of this eventually). I myself can’t wait to play Hallowe’en Bingo with Balloon Boy costumes (touché on this one).

Mediaite’s Glenn Beck Tag Page: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

That’s it! Have a happy Hallowe’en, everyone! Wait a second, how did that giant Megan Fox picture get in there? Ooops. See below.

But this year it really seems like something has changed.

It’s no longer news that we have moved past geek-chic to something akin to post-geek, but when people who I wouldn’t expect to know a Viper from a Raptor mused aloud about what to expect from the 39th annual Comic-Con International last week, I realized that this year, you are all paying attention.

Last year, an estimated 126,000 people attended Comic-Con’s four day San Diego event, and passes were sold out weeks ahead of time; similar numbers were estimated this year.  Compare that to the approximately 445 die hards that attended related events in 1970.  Somehow something that started as a gathering place for a bunch of like-minded oddball outsiders has become, according to the New York Times, “an event that has acquired major importance on the [entertainment] industry’s calendar; major studios promote their biggest coming projects, and television producers for shows like “Lost” and “24” try to stoke interest in their approaching seasons.”  Last year, Comic-Con was our go-to for content related to such (ex)-obscurities as Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog; this year, Dr. Horrible is not only nominated for an Emmy, but hosting them. It’s no wonder everybody is talking about Comic-Con.

Note the lack of reference to comics.

Here’s a secret: That was built into the DNA from the start.  Comic-Con became the festival of pure geek joy that it is (and one of the, if not the, defining entertainment industry events of the year) because since day one, name notwithstanding, is it has always been pan-geek.  Sci-fi authors and Star Trek personalities have been there since the start.  Luke Skywalker himself even made a movie set there.

But that is also why, with an entertainment industry that is interested in sequels, franchises and the already-proven value of any new investment in an entertainment property, Comic-Con has become the center of both the entertainment-industrial complex as well as the countless fan-universes that each franchise has created. It is no accident that the first modern blockbuster also provided the protoype for the merchandising and cross-promotion models driving franchises like Transformers to blockbuster status despite the barest critical assessment of their quality. Of course it was. It was custom-built for the Con.

Make no mistake ye cool kids, when it comes to how we spend our entertainment dollars, we are all geeks.  Star Trek, Harry Potter, Twilight and the Dark Knight don’t lie; we all want larger-than-life escapism and a little zombie terror here and there.  We want the other, the strange, the fantastic and the far off, and we vote with the dollars we spend on books, DVDs, downloads, movie tickets, toys, collectibles, miniatures and cosplay props (not to mention the clicks we spend on bittorrent trackers and blog posts). The SciFi Channel has even become the kinder, gentler SyFy, in an acknowledgment of how mainstream geek really is. (3.5 million viewers for the debut of their latest, Warehouse 13, is acknolwedgement too; that’s 1.1 million more than the Battlestar finale. Word spreads, eh geeks?)

Like some alien gestating to life in a slimy pod, geek culture ripened over the years in its (our) own obscure cons, from back when the cancellation of the very first Star Trek spawned modern fandom (and fanaticism).  And you know how that alien springs to life and starts spreading its seed all over the place? Right: cue the modern entertainment franchise of comics, books, films, blogs, series, webisodes, collectibles, podcasts and any other format yet to be dreamed up. So, with that in mind: how could the convention at which you most expect to see somebody wearing fangs without the slightest hint of self-consciousness not become ground zero of the entertainment world?

Because, importantly, it’s also establishing itself as a leader within it. Back to Dr. Horrible: An indie labor-of-love project launched on the side during the writer’s strike, launched on the web, became a critical and financial success — entirely outside the traditional models. In its initial limited run, it got over 2 millions streams in five days (and would have had more had demand not crashed the servers); a year later, its Amazon sales rank is #87 for Bestsellers, Movies & TV; with top five rankings across all its sub-categories. Like Comic-Con, Dr. Horrible is pan-geek: comic-book, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, musical theater (two words for you here: Rocky Horror) — with the heroes, villains, inventors, outsiders, romantics and strivers plus the crucial morality play that underlies the best of each genre. The storylines may be fantastical, but the impulses couldn’t be more visceral.

Which is maybe why it’s all finally catching on. It’s a phrase us geeks know well, from bad zombie movies, from Twilight Zone episodes, from the collective subconscious that geekdom has shared since at least the first Comic-Con in 1970, and that should resonate with anyone that has consumed the smallest morsel of popular media in the past half decade or so: “One of us, one of us, one of us…”

Related:

Comic-Con 2009: The Hero Complex collection [LA Times]
The Winners & Losers of Comic-Con 2009 [Seattle PI]
Who Won Comic-Con’s Buzz Wars? Our 10 Picks [i09]

Ash Kalb is the general counsel of a New York-based telecommunications and technology company and an instrument-rated pilot.  He will be writing a weekly column on geek culture for Mediaite. He wishes he went to Comic-Con.