In this increasingly connected world, I’m obviously not the first to discuss this on their puny insignificant blog and I certainly won’t be the last, but Michael Jackson is dead at 50. My eyes welled up when the initial shock washed over me. He went beyond all superlatives. And, despite his troubled life, he will be missed. Though, I suspect, never forgotten.

As I look back on the grand experiment that was my weekly reviews of Dollhouse, I find myself still struggling with the proper format of these reviews. Based on my blog’s tracking stats, I’ve found more people visit the reviews which were more in-depth and detailed, but at the same time that could simply be a side-effect of the sheer volume of words in those reviews. By quoting specific lines and describing most of the scenes to a reasonable level of detail it becomes much more reasonable for someone searching for those things online — something I often do, to gauge if my opinion of certain scenes is reflected by the online audience — to find my site.

But that’s a fairly cold and calculating way to look at writing a review. I don’t want to merely insert enough keywords as to increase my traffic by throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. That said, I have found myself more willing to go back and examine and re-read my more detailed reviews. Looking at the little moments that make a show good is one thing that many other reviewers fail to do, and to write about those details in the hopes of reaching others who, like me, appreciate the little things a show does is a big reason I write about television.

So I’ve decided that if Dollhouse gets renewed for another season, I will write detailed reviews — luxuriating over every shot, every thought, every furtive glance — for every episode of Dollhouse until the series ends. And I mean series the way an American or a Canadian does. If Dollhouse becomes a breakaway hit in its second season and then airs continuously for the next fifty years, I will have a horridly long review for every single episode in the bunch. Of course, the real question is this: is this promise a reason to renew or a reason to not?

Recently, I saw a large chuck of Sin City on television. I hadn’t seen it since its theatrical release, which I really enjoyed, so some of my reactions to the movie surprised me. Specifically, I was incredibly offended by its sexist and misogynist slant.

I did enjoy the movie — I simply accepted the sexism as a part of the universe in which the story’s told — but my reaction to the sexism was visceral. And I most certainly didn’t have that reaction when I saw it in the theatre. If anything, I’ve become more aware of sexism. That said, I’m a little bit sexist.

I’ve noticed as my volume of blog reading has increased, I will often find myself reading a blog post and having an assumption challenged. Very deliberately and scholarly written posts I tend to attribute to men unless I know who the author is or there is a reference to the author’s sex in the content of the post. Similarly, light and airy posts are assumed to come from women. Neither of these prejudices are particularly appealing to me. They’re not harmful, I don’t think; when the evidence tells me that my assumption was wrong I make a note of it and move on reading the content just as I did before. But it’s not something I like about me.

Are these quiet assumptions harmful? I’m not really sure. My intuition is that they’re not, so long as you are aware of them and their flaws. Our brains have evolved in a very specific manner, but that sometimes makes them screw up. When we see something in water we know it’s not in the line of sight because of refraction and we adjust accordingly; I see these ongoing corrections I make as a similar adjustment we all must make to override any prejudices we may have, however they come about.

Phil Plait, an excellent skeptical blogger, blogged about a heartbreaking exposé broadcast in Australia about the troubling decrease in childhood vaccinations. Phil Plait has a highly trafficked blog, much more than mine, so I considered not passing this message along, but no matter how few new people get the information, it’s worth it. The anti-vaccination movement is spreading and it’s hurting people. It’s killing people. Don’t let it win. Don’t let the unscientific ramblings of Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey sway you, or anyone you know, from getting childhood vaccinations. Fight back with the truth.

You may have noticed recently that my site has been atrociously slow. I know I’ve felt it when attempting to write my posts recently. Sadly, it’s not because I’ve had a sudden surge in web traffic, but rather because my web host is not doing a very good job of handling my mediocre traffic. I’ve contacted them and they’ve initiated steps that will hopefully fix this problem in the next few days, though the site may disappear briefly during the upgrade. In the meantime, schedule a block of time to read my undoubtedly unnecessarily long Dollhouse review in the coming days.

I recently saw a commercial about using a supercomputer to analyse traffic flow and direct the traffic lights to reduce gridlock, but I know for a fact that traffic lights want gridlock. Every day when I drive home, I get stopped by nearly every light on the route. The light turns green and shortly after the one just down the road turns red; just in time to bring everyone that just made it through the last light to a halt. This is not an accident. It’s designed to slow people down. Slower drivers means fewer accidents. Which is a good thing, overall.

Of course, it has an unintended side-effect, one which likely increases the danger of accidents. Humans are resilient by nature, we tend not to give up easily. So when we come out of the gate looking to get something done, see the path closing ahead of us, however temporarily, we think “if only I got there a little bit faster.” And so we hit the gas a little harder, we push the pedal down a little farther, and we’re tens of a second away from rationalizing making it through the light. So we push a little harder, and finally we make it through. Human progress.

But as your speed increases, your likelihood of pushing through on a risky yellow also increases and your likelihood of getting in an accident (and a higher speed one at that) increases in kind. These gridlock inducing measures are designed with speed reduction in mind, but it inevitably leads to speed increases, and brakes getting hit a little harder each day, getting worn that much faster, leading to even more accidents. It’s a lose-lose scenario. I wish the people that programmed these lights understood that. Maybe the supercomputer will help with that.

Andrew Sullivan recently pondered the question “Is psychiatry a religion?” In that post, he quoted a retort to the accusation, and the key idea in it that he latched onto was that “the single common feature of all religious is a preoccupation with unseen sentient beings, of which psychiatry says nothing” which Sullivan drying countered with “Two words: Sigmund Freud.”

The only problem with that is that Freud’s stances are outrageously outdated and naive. It is no longer the predominant stance of psychiatrists, nor is it taught as anything more than a historical curiosity in psychiatry classes any longer. Granted, all of this is from my personal experience while working towards a cognitive neuropsychology minor in university (which I sadly abandoned for brevity’s sake), but nearly every aspect of Freud’s work was taught minimally and then a superseding work was introduced that explained all of the things Freud’s work did but better.

Say what you will about the subjectivity of psychiatry and psycho-analysis, but when it comes to Sigmund Freud, neither the man nor his work is sacrosanct.

The Smoking Gun published a new mug shot of Charles Manson earlier and I have trouble looking at it. Not because it reminds me of his barbarous acts, but because it reminds me of the humanity within even the monsters of our world. Even with that swastika permanently etched into his forehead, I have trouble looking at this picture and not feeling sorrow and pity.

The worst part is that I know this is a man completely undeserving of pity or sorrow, yet his cracked skin, his broken expression, his aging face all call to me to have those feelings. Photography has the power to imbue its subject with more than it deserves.

Those natives had the wrong idea. Photography doesn’t steal your soul, it preserves it. It puts it out there for everyone to see, even if they don’t want to.

Unlike pool, with its sterile perfection, Pi is unpredictable, it is irrational. We can attain an understanding of it without ever fully grasping its purpose or its true value. It’s an odd coincidence that my experience with pool would occur on Pi Day, given the contrast they provide me. Pi is baffling yet comforting. To know that Pi, a number inextricably linked to so many of the wonders and beauties of the universe, is as confusing and hard to understand as people certainly offers a small comfort to me.

It’s all mostly meaningless, so why not celebrate the meaningless by giving importance to an arbitrary marker of the passage of time? Which is my weird way of wishing everyone a happy Pi Day. And happy birthday to the remains of Albert Einstein.

Note: I don’t claim to be a porn historian (more of an archivist, really) but I don’t think porn attained any level of mainstream notoreity before Deep Throat and its ilk. If I’m mistaken about the history of porn, I would love any and all corrections.

Porn will never be a truly mainstream form, but it will never be a completely ostracized form again. Pandora’s Box, as it were, has been opened. When porn first lept from the dirty underbelly of America and made its way into mainstream cinema in the late 60′s and 70′s, a part of it was that porn stars were struggling actors who showed up for auditions and found themselves wondering whether or not they should shave their pubes. And so there was a generation of porn stars hoping to make the leap to mainstream cinema. Deep Throat wasn’t made with any particular mainstream success in mind, at least not from what I’ve read, but the tongue-in-cheek plot, the satirical writing, and the general sexual freedom being examined by the public at large at the time made it a mainstream sensation.

For a brief period, porn and regular film even intermingled with cult hits like Deep Throat and big epics like Caligula. But ultimately the stars of Deep Throat accomplished nothing of note in non-pornographic film, and mainstream cinema slowly moved away from the explicitness of the X-rating. Porn would continue on with the cheesy plots and soft focus camera work of the 70′s for many subsequent years, but ultimately the conservatives won: Porno Chic was dead.

But now, in the past four years or so, the porn industry has introduced many a pervert to a new breed of porn star. Women like Sasha Grey, Bobbi Starr, Joanna Angel, and many more. These women don’t have the aspirations of the old-school porn stars. Just a little over a decade ago, with stars like Jenna Jameson, porn was merely a means to and end, which often meant mainstream success. But these women have no such desires.

There has always been a sort of underground fetish for extreme acts in porn, but it has always remained lingering in relative obscurity. But now, this new generation of porn star revels in expressing themselves through the sexual boundaries of both them and their sex partner. Much of their work has gone towards revolutionizing the sterilized sex scenes of the past — moving beyond the decades-old blowjob, missionary, doggie-style, facial pattern seen in most porn of the past — but their dislike for the pointless “Please fix my car, Mr. Mechanic. I’ll do anything” stories of yore is also quite well known. Sasha Grey recently worked on James Gunn’s PG Porn, which satirizes ridiculous porn plots, and her distaste for these old cliches was noted in her interviews regarding the project.

Some might say that this is nothing new. The Gonzo genre of porn — wherein the camera is a character in the scene and the actors don’t act but merely fuck — has been on the rise for quite some time. But this new brood goes beyond that; they bring passion to the job. For quite some time, porn relied on large silicone-filled breasts to distract viewers from the look of complete disinterest on the faces of the stars and the middling moans of mock pleasure. The new generation is much more natural looking, and uses experimentation and enthusiasm to arouse their audience; smiling, which was once essentially verboten, has become a staple of the porn starlets repertoire.

It’s true that some of these porn stars will attain mainstream celebrity by virtue of porn’s relative integration into the mainstream, but none of these women seem to have that as a goal. Sasha Grey has discussed what her future goals are and they consist of eventually starting her own porn company and continuing to push sexual boundaries on film. Obviously, she didn’t turn down Steven Soderbergh when he cast her as the lead in his upcoming film The Girlfriend Experience, but it hasn’t changed her goals by any appreciable amount.

Bobbi Starr, another new starlet whose work is also primarily adventurous extreme scenes, has different goals. From her wikipedia page:

As of 2008, Starr is a student studying pre-med, with the aim of becoming a gynecologist. Her intent is to work within the adult entertainment industry, where she has identified a lack of female gynecologists.

Joanna Angel runs her own studio, BurningAngel, which focuses on so-called Alt-Porn films. She also contributed a chapter to the book Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Pornography and like all the women who inspired this article, they are changing porn. Most of these women are not what you would expect of a porn star. They’re intelligent, highly motivated, and love their job. To me, there’s a perfect storm of change happening in the porn industry. The women who keep the industry alive are taking an active interest in the managing of the industry, and they feel no stigma; they want more than to be successful within the industry, they want to improve the industry.

And that’s ultimately the key here. President Obama said in his address to the joint session of Congress “I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.” People were quick to correct him that American did not invent the automobile, but they did invent the automobile industry. Henry Ford, for all his flaws, saw an industry and wanted more than to succeed within it, he wanted to improve it.

Did I just compare Sasha Grey to Henry Ford? You’re damn right I did.

I admit that I’m going a little overboard with this hagiographical ode to porn, but at the same time, there are many feminists who still cling to the idea that porn is little more than rape and a means of sexually demeaning women. Neither is the truth, but mine’s a little closer to it. The chauvinism of the porn industry is dying if it’s not already dead. The industry is changing. The women are taking it back.

Happy Square Root Day, everybody! Days celebrating arbitrary points on our arbitrarily labeled calendar tend to leave me nonplused but this one has mathematical significance and a level of geekery associated with it, so it’s all good. Yes, it’s days like this that make me proud to live in a world with a date/time system which can be co-opted mathematically for entertainment purposes.

John August wrote about the changes occurring in society and culture and personality that the internet and online life can introduce. He’s generally more enthused about facebook and twitter and the like than I am — though I go through cycles regarding this and am shifting towards usage again, I think — but he raises a couple interesting points which I grazed by in my post about facebook but, naturally, he gets the point across much better:

We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

There is a level of permanence to your persona that wasn’t there forty years ago. Becoming a new man, à la Don Draper, is hardly feasible in this world where your blog’s archive sits there for all to read, where your twitter updates lay in neat chronological order, where the photos on your facebook page sit waiting to be found and reported on. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. But it’s certainly where we’d headed.

I’ve recently taken to reading and posting on the Television Without Pity forums after watching Lost on wednesday nights. For the most part, it’s a vast improvement over the Ain’t It Cool News talkbacks I used to frequent to get my Lost theorizing fix. But they have their flaws.

In an attempt to weed out trolls and flame wars they have strict rules about your demeanor. You have to write grammatically correct and full sentences. You can’t attack personally, you need to stick to the subject of the thread and of the forum. You’re also not allowed to write spoilers in the “episode discussion” threads which is great because you can theorize and question without worrying about someone spoiling the show. But these rules and restrictions come at a price.

Every time I come to the forums, I read post after post which criticizes Kate and Jack. They call Kate a cold-blooded selfish bitch and basically do nothing but wish death upon her. They call Jack an idiot and say that he is the worst and most boring character on the show. But Kate is not a selfish bitch; she has a fucked up history, lots of baggage, a fear of commitment, and lots of other things wrong with her. But she feels every minute of that. And throughout the series thus far, she has been incredibly selfless, and willing to help the entire Island community. Jack is sometimes an idiot, but everyone is sometimes. Jack had to live his entire life under the thumb of a father he was unable to please. A father who would criticize him for attempting to help out a kid being bullied. His entire life is guided by that need to fix things; to impress his father. When he flies to Australia to pick up Christian Shephard’s body, he’s doing more than just mourning a father. He’s realizing that he will never earn his father’s love.

I’m not discussing these crucial aspects of their personality because I think that what they do on the show is what I would do or the best thing to do. It is, however, what I think they would do. These characters are not static. Jack tries to fight these urges, Kate tries to fight these urges. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. That is at the very core of humanity, and to attack these characters because they are consistent and not merely set pieces through which the plot progresses is idiotic.

So, when a forum poster attacks Jack for not questioning Kate further about Aaron’s fate and calls Kate a murderer, I respond forcefully with a logical rebuttal. Jack has never seen Kate as a murderer. He has never cared what she did in her past. He knows her. Whether or not he actually knows her, he thinks he does. He trusts her more than anyone else. That’s why he asks her for her support when trying to convince the Oceanic 6 to lie. He loves her so deeply, that he’d give up his freedom and perform surgery on a man he has come to revile so that she could be happy with another man. To think that Kate having murdered someone, no matter how justified or unjustified it was, would sway Jack’s trust of Kate is downright intellectually dishonest.

So, in my response to this practically trollish comment, I called that poster out for making that statement. I asked them if they were really going to use the “Kate is a murderer” line. I followed this up with a calm and correct rebuttal as to why that was a foolish statement. I then followed that up by telling the poster that they should judge the character’s actions by the character, not by what you want the character to be. I held no ill will to that poster, but I sincerely hoped they read that and realized the error in their analysis.

Instead, my message was deleted and I got a warning from a moderator because you are not allowed to discuss other posters on the thread. Which is a foolish rule, because the forum’s users lose any ability to examine the merit of one anothers’ examinations. I’m not saying that we need to be boorish in our critiques but without the analysis of analysis, any improvement of ideas occurs away from the group which results in the group seeing the improvements but not the improvements to the process which led to that. Perhaps, I was too brusque, but my point was valid and even ignoring the direct communication toward the other poster there was still content apropos to the discussion in that post. Deleting it only hurts the collective intelligence of the group.

I understand the need for some level of moderation on forums. Aint it Cool News’ talkbacks have no moderation save some manual processes enacted when a particularly persistent troll writes hundreds of useless messages and harasses the community indiscriminately. Without moderation, most of the internet would devolve into a slew of attacks and slurs. But to delete valid content because it was deemed slightly snippy according to the whims of a moderator is unacceptably, and unecessarily, Draconian.

Andrew Sullivan, a much more prolific blogger and — let’s be honest here — generally better writer, wrote today about the damaging effects of civil unions.

France created a civil unions law in 1999 for gays but failed to designate gender and now about a third of straight couples getting married in France opt for civil unions because they are easier to get out of. Don George points out the obvious:

…it is terribly humorous and ironic that the French created civil unions to protect the institution of marriage…and now civil unions are undermining marriage because people are opting for them instead of marriage. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. So possibly the lesson for our country is that the best way to protect the institution of marriage is not to deny people marriage by creating a separate but equal system, but to allow gays to marry.

Er: yes. If you read my first ever essay on the topic, in 1989, you will find it was exactly this possibility that led me to back full marriage equality over marriage-lite options such as domestic partnership and civil unions. It was a way to integrate gay people and protect marriage.

What I don’t understand about the conservative viewpoint on marriage is their view that it is an inherent good. That somehow marriage is necessary for society to flourish and freedom to ring through the streets of the world.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Atlantic blogger generally found on the other side of the political spectrum, has a different view of marriage:

As much as I can recall, there were basically three reasons for us to get married. 1.) I might leave. Marriage would force me to do the right thing. 2.) To declare our commitment to each other before a community of people whom we loved. 3.) The business reasons–the legalities of your estate and guardianship. I found–and still find–the first two reasons were utterly unconvincing. The third held some sway, but with the help of a lawyer we’ve managed to take care of that. The first turned marriage into a kind of insurance policy, and I just believed that if you felt you needed insurance for the person you were having kids by to stick out, you needed to reconsider the whole proposition. The commitment and community reason held some appeal. But I believed, and still believe, that long-term romantic partnerships are between the two people entering into it.

I hated the idea of public declarations, because the life blood of the relationship–what bills to pay, how to raise your child, your love life–all of that happened when no one else was around. Kenyatta knows more about me than any human being walking the earth–and this is as it should be. No one knows more about my strengths and my weaknesses, my failings and my successes. I trust her to the end. But that trust was worked for–it was not declared or conjured by the presence of other people.

I’ve had similar views on marriage for a while now, but so rarely has the argument not against marriage, but against the necessity of marriage been so succinctly put. Some people might have a different idea of what a long-term relationship requires. I know that my ex did. But to imply that marriage is an inherent good is misleading.

The world is getting smaller. With the advent of the internet, information that used to be far away and troublesome to obtain is available within a few minutes in your own home. And now, with the advent of social networks any information you need about your friends is available just by checking their blog, or their twitter page, or their facebook page, or any number of online sources for the intimate details of their life once left to their close network of friends.

There’s a bit of a paradox here. I joined facebook primarily because I wanted to catch up with old friends I don’t talk to much anymore. But for the most part, this can be done passively. I add them as friends and when I go to write on their wall, I come across a tidy aggregation of their hobbies, their interests, the music they like, the movies they like, what schools they’ve gone on to, what jobs they’ve held, and much more information. So before I even ask them how things are going, I’ve received the answer.

Beyond this, any answer to a question asked through facebook is automatically tainted with more forethought than that from a private conversation. That response can be read by anyone you’ve deemed a “friend,” a loaded phrase given the hundreds or thousands of “friends” you can amass through social networks. A facebook conversation has a very different dynamic than that of a real conversation.

Because of this, I’ve never found myself enthralled with facebook. Keeping in touch with dozens of former friends is an empty effort to me. I’d much rather cultivate the few good friendships I have in real life. Obviously, you can develop more substantial relationships through facebook, as you would in the real world, but there’s no real incentive to me. In general, friends you’ve lost touch with weren’t lasting friends. Whether it’s because you changed or they changed or you ran out of things to say to each other, friendships die for a reason. Trying to rekindle them through facebook isn’t likely to succeed.

Which I guess is why I barely ever visit facebook anymore. That initial burst of regained connections has faded away. Obviously, this depends on the person. I’m not anti-social per se, but I’m certainly not comfortable in highly social environments which is why I tend to avoid them.

So my intended use of facebook is not what most people use it for, but even excluding that facebook is not a replacement for more direct communication. Whether it’s face to face, or on the phone, or through instant messaging direct communication, that direct connection is needed for friendships to be anything more than acquaintances.