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?

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.

Hilzoy has a post reiterating her support for a ban on primate pets. All her arguments are excellent, and the reasons for not having primate pets are manifold. And yet she ignores — consciously perhaps? — the most obvious reason to never take apes as pets…

I recently listened to a Lenny Bruce album and realized something: Lenny Bruce wasn’t a comedian. I mean, maybe what I listened to was an off night or something, but the guy wasn’t that funny. If anything, he was a political theory lecturer with a good sense of humour.

This doesn’t belittle what he accomplished. He was willing to fight obscenity laws when no one else would. He attacked establishments like the government and the catholic church and wasn’t afraid to call them on their corruption and greed. But at the same time, he said some pretty stupid shit.

While discussing pornography and obscenity laws, he claims that pornography and obscenity laws are there to stop entrapment of wholesome people by prurient interests. His defense of what he does and other so-called obscene and pornographic works of the time is that they are not as a whole prurient in nature and so should not be judged by those laws. I’m OK with that part, but along the way he accepts and endorses the initial claim that pornography is essentially entrapment, that people are unable to resist material which arouses them. Seriously?

Are we expected to believe that someone can come across a magazine rack with a Playboy on it and be unable to maintain his composure and act like a rational human being? This seems like an absurdly backward view for Lenny Bruce, someone I’ve always understood to be a very forward thinking man, to have.

At least with pornography he defends most cases of it by virtue of its artistic merit, or the difficulty of objective analysis of artistic merit. But when it comes to drugs he’s just plain fucking nuts. He made the claim that there really are no drug addicts aside from the dozen or so the various law enforcement agencies have on the take. He describes heroin, in spirit if not in exactly these words, as a drug that no one uses. Maybe its merely that Lenny Bruce has the disadvantage of being dead and therefore unable to update his facts to modern day, but heroin and cocaine and other such hard drugs are a huge problem and their users are many.

Lenny Bruce was vastly influential — and without him we might never have had George Carlin or any of the other idols of modern comedy — but from my limited exposure to his work he doesn’t seem like a particularly great comedian, and his political stances, which are the core of his comedy, fluctuate wildly; maybe his own addictions tainted his responses on drugs, maybe the fact that he liked to swear and the fact that his job required not swearing guided his opinion on censorship. Either way, Lenny Bruce was a deeply flawed man, who managed to incite a revolution. Because of his work, obscenity became less obscene. Because of him, and others of that time, I can say “fuck” or “shit” or even “cunt” whenever I want. And that’s a freedom, like any other for which we’ve fought in the history of civilization, we should never take for granted.

What is /.? Beyond an excuse to sexually abuse your grammar checker, /. (slashdot) is a tech news site. With the recent boom of Web 2.0 many people have seen the future heading away from sites like slashdot where editors determine the content of the site and towards social websites with user generated content.

Of course, the arguments for and against Web 2.0 are numerous and varied. Pretending like I have the definitive answer is absurd, but I do find that historically the solution to most problems is found between the two extremes. Which is why slashdot’s “Fire Hose”  — which allows user generated content to be voted on by anyone but still requires editor’s to officially upgrade it to the front page — is the closest I’ve seen to the best of both worlds.

Of course, people have said for a few years now “go to Digg for the stories, go to slashdot for the comments” which is true for two reasons. Firstly, comments on Digg are frequently stupid, ignorant, racist, prejudiced, or all of these and many more. Their comments are so offensive at times that I no longer go to the site at all because I was simply disgusted by the comments I was seeing on a daily basis. Slashdot, on the other hand, tends to have more comments per story but because of their moderation technique you tend to get really smart or really funny stuff bubbling to the top. Granted, the know-it-alls on slashdot know that they know it all, but if you’re willing to suffer through a bit of conceit you’re almost guaranteed to learn something new or at the very least be given another perspective on something you already know.

Slashdot has an antiquated perception among the younger internet dwellers but I think that slashdot will survive at least as long as Digg and most likely outlive it because of its ability to grow into a new internet experience (social networking, et. al.) while retaining its original goals and experiences. But the real reason slashdot is still relevant is a simple one: quotes like this in random user’s signatures:

“Sisko > Picard > Kirk > Archer > null > Janeway”

Granted, I would have swapped Picard and Sisko but to see another person judge Janeway accurately warms the ventricles of my heart.

After seeing this comic over at Cyanide & Happiness, who I hope to hunt down during comic-con and thank for hours of disturbing humour, I immediately googled “Masturbating Snowman.” Amazingly, there was only one truly relevant result (though it’s a good one).

If this comic doesn’t tickle your funny bone, or at least two other smaller bones in your body or of those in your possession, well clearly it was not meant to be.

I don’t have them. I don’t understand why anyone would. A guilty pleasure is something you supposedly dislike liking. This is some form of public self-loathing that everyone seems to revel in. Liking The Spice Girls isn’t anything to be ashamed of; it’s just another part of who you are.

This is just another example of overspecialization our society encourages. If you like mostly rock music then you are a Rock Fan. Or maybe you’re a Post-Rock Fan. Or a Neo-Post-Punk-Rock Fan. The hyphenates only grow.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of categorization, in fact my recently started project is very much about deep and robust categorization of data. I simply believe that the fundamentalism many people employ when creating these categorizations is unnecessary.

It’s because of this fundamentalism that people simply decide that to enjoy a particular type of media, you must enjoy only that type and anything else is a “guilty pleasure.” It’s another form of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy; no true fan of Punk Rock could unironically enjoy The Backstreet Boys.

There’s a problem with this kind of mentality because it leads to division. As the breadth of information our world can offer is expanded by the Internet and mass media, we become inundated by more and more types of information and we need deeper hierarchies of data to be able to think about it coherently. But this doesn’t mean we need to apply such strict boundaries on what we take in, or prefer to, to simplify ourselves for the rest of the world.

In the end, everything we are is a part of who we are. Liking high-brow humour does not exclude you from enjoying low-brow humour, nor does enjoying scripted dramatic TV shows exclude you from enjoying Reality TV (though hopefully, having intelligence excludes you from the latter).

I can understand the mentality behind telling people that certain things you enjoy are guilty pleasures because it not only tells them that you like something, but it also tells them something about the thing you like; it’s a sort of implied metadata. But this particular snippet of metadata is grossly overused in our culture, exactly because we seem to have devolved into a world exclusive esoteric niches.

As this post has hopefully exemplified, I’m not a man of extremes; having a broad swath of interests, some overlapping, some seemingly contradictory is a good thing. But guilty pleasures sound ugly to me. It degrades you for saying that you should be above this but you aren’t, it degrades your audience by establishing false pretenses with them, and ultimately it degrades the thing you like. Liking something in spite of its origins or your initial perception is not a cardinal sin, nor should it be, so don’t act like it is.

The problem with free will is that it means humans can do shitty stuff. The bigger problem with free will is that when there’s an after-life or there’s reincarnation or something beyond what little time we have here, there isn’t a pressing need to improve the world around you or be a positive member of the community around you; this isn’t universal, many religions teach you to cherish the earth, but with any promise of some form of afterlife there will be people who will just not give a damn.

Enter Religion. Now we’ve got a bunch of guys claiming to know how God wants you to act and most of the time it’s decent but some of the time it’s horrific. Of course, the problem with religion is that most of the big ones are pretty loose about their moral restrictions; Christianity, in particular, allows complete forgiveness and acceptance to heaven for simply asking forgiveness on your death bed. It’s supposed to be sincere, but the priest providing the last rites has no special ability to discern sincerity. So you can do whatever the fuck you want to as long as you feign sincerity long enough to ask forgiveness.

The reason you can do whatever you want is this ephemeral promise of eternity. So what’s a benevolent God to do? Convince people he doesn’t exist! Without the supernatural crutch of God, people would have to get their act together, do unto others and all that good stuff; you’ve only got one life, so you better not fuck it up. So you wanna know my theory? I think that if God existed, he would be working towards an atheist world where they follow his principles because they think it’s best, not because He thinks it’s best.

You want to know the really insidious thing about this? This means, that religion is a creation of the devil. Yeah. I know. It’s fucked. By creating religion, the devil co-opted God’s kick-ass plan. And the best thing about it (that devil is really tricky) is that God can’t interfere. He can’t come down and say “No! There is no God! Do not follow these religions which the devil has created!” because he would then be co-opting his own plan. Some people say that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn’t exist” but that’s wrong; the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that God does.

Don’t wear the shirt if you don’t mean it. Of course it’s not your fault, vapid girls. The real problem is that the shirt should be saying something else, the thing you really mean: “I ♥ Nerds… If They’re Hot.” You’re not actually interested in nerds per se, you’re after what’s called a superficial relationship. Wow, you like hot people? Me too! Of course, my interest in that person is tempered by my interest in their personality but you don’t need to worry about things like that.

You see, what you’re really saying is that you care so much about looks and so little about the personality of your partner that a nerd “will do.” Nerds have a stigma as the guys who take whatever they get; if you’re a girl who can stomach our eccentricities and sit through our nerdly monologues we won’t care. Maybe if you were someone with actual ideas in your head you’d realise that having a cardboard cutout to talk to isn’t really the same as having an actual conversation.

Now I sincerely apologize to any interesting girls out there who happen to wear the shirt. This isn’t aimed at you. (Though if you’re really interested in the eclectic and quixotic characteristics we nerds imbue, you’d be wise to pick up a more subtle shirt like one of the great ones over at xkcd. If there’s anything that gets a nerd interested its obscure references.) I’m here simply to let girls know that wearing a shirt isn’t enough.

Wow, you ♥ nerds? Well I’m a nerd. What are your interests? Getting wasted at frat house keggers? Hmm… well I’m gonna go watch Babylon 5. Have fun.

See what happened there? Once you got my attention, you lost it. Now I’ve got a lot of t-shirts that are ostensibly there to entertain so I’m being a tad hypocritical, but at least my shirts are representative of my personality. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover but we do. The least you can do is be honest about who you are. If you’re an A&F girl who loves guys who pop their collar and drive Honda Civics then don’t pretend that nerds are of any interest to you.

Preface

I feel that I must preface this post with a history. This post originated over eight months ago during a sheep brain dissection lab I had for a psychology course. The original question was “do sheep zombies need to eat sheep brains?” and from there the discourse progressed. After the creating the title (which was a solid twenty minutes of dictionary lookups and googling) I pretty much ran out of steam. But then, just a couple weeks ago my interest was renewed for no known reason and I began writing. And boy howdy did I write. Not only is this on the long-winded side of my typical post, but when I initially created this post I put it in the category of “Humour” which I seem to have been left by the wayside in favour of a more serious discussion of the topic. Though I know there are flaws and forgotten topics along the way, I’m sick of seeing it in my list of drafts and so I release it from the black hole that is my perfectionism.

Zombies

Zombies. The black sheep of the supernatural monster world. They’re the youngest of the group and shrouded in mystery. In their origins zombies were simply reanimated dead controlled by a Voodoo master. In fact, they were often used as mindless slaves for manual labour. Over time, the zombie was twisted into its current, more menacing, state: that of an undead creature with no intelligence of its own and a desire only for survival. Zombies represent a fear most people who live in an individualistic culture share: the loss of identity. A zombie is simply another blob in the horde seeking sustenance. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the zombie horde seems to absorb any and all things in their path and in the process lose any semblance of individualism.

Many zombies survive by the eating of living flesh, though their taste for brains is the one proclivity which resonates with movie goers. It’s obvious why brain eating becomes the most noticeable feature of zombies; as humans, we fear the thing which takes away that which we treasure the most. So, while many zombie films do not treat the brain as the most desired part of human anatomy, for our purposes here we will imagine a prototypical zombie for whom this desire is paramount. In particular, we will discuss why homo-chauvinism perpetuates through zombie culture.

So the question we’re going to ask today is whether or not zombies exist in other creatures and if cross-species feeding can occur. Why is it that zombie films never show a cute little puppy dog being gobbled up? Why do we never see a group of fleeing humans come upon a serene farm only to be attacked by zombie sheep? It’s not because these images wouldn’t have an impact on the viewer; they could be terrifying in one instance and hilarious in another. Is there some secret zombie dogma by which all films are compared? Do the creators of these films lack the imagination to shock the viewer with something original? What is it that zombies really require? If it were truly brains, then animal brains would be a hot commodity when humans became scarce. Similarly, zombies never seem to attack each other for what little brain remains after their conversion.

Perhaps it is not the tissue itself but the contents therein; what if zombies eat intelligence? From a purely philosophical point of view, this could very well be. If we take the zombie horde as an analogy for mob mentality, then we can see they are what becomes of us when we sacrifice our intelligence; when caught up in a situation where mob mentality takes over, intelligence has little to do with your actions. This analogy can be seen by noting the origins of zombies. From a human-made virus infecting people with unending rage, to the literal undead raised by some witches curse, almost every reason used to explain the origin of zombies arises from humanity. Additionally, unlike almost every other supernatural monster, the cause is always recent.

Conclusion

After all this discussion what is the ultimate answer? It is my belief that, given the right circumstances surrounding the origin of the zombies, animals could be zombies and, again given the right circumstances, those animal zombies would be free to engage in cross-species feeding. However, zombies have an allegorical representation which the auteur is beholden to respect. Because of this, most zombie movies are not likely to entertain the notion of inter-species postmortem encephalophagia.

Let’s face it, Hurley is Joe Normal on the island. He reacts the way you would so you relate to him on a normal level. If you have weird Daddy issues, you can connect with Locke/Jack/Sawyer/Kate/Charlie (pretty much anyone on the friggin’ island) and if you have mystical powers that are unexplainable you can connect with Walt or Desmond but what if you’re just a well adjusted normal guy/gal? You’ve still got Hurley. Sure, he’s a massively rich millionaire who is supposedly cursed by a set of numbers (who isn’t these days) but you can still connect with him easily. So what does this have to do with Libby?

Relationships are a tenuous beast. Even more tenuous is the transition from friendship to relationship. With friends, you find yourself with nicknames all the time; sometimes it’s a personality trait personified, other times it’s your last name, it could be anything. Whatever your friends choose for your nickname, it will come back to haunt you if you have any romantic plans for the future. These names are not terms of endearment and if that transition ever occurs you’re stuck. Do you stick with the nickname? Do you switch over to their real name? Or a term of endearment like “honey” or “sweetie?”

That’s the real reason Libby was killed. Not because of the DUI, not because of the CBS sitcom. What would Hurley call her? Libby? Elizabeth? Snookums? Would Libby start calling him Hugo? Or Big Bear? I don’t think any of it would’ve worked out. And what would happen? Viewer division! Who would back who? Madness would ensue! So that’s the real reason that Libby was killed. Don’t believe me? Well, that’s good because this was all a bunch of nonsense and gibbering heavily laced with sarcasm. In fact, I created a Sarcasm category for my blog just for this post.

A while ago, back when I wrote short stories and poetry and the like, I wrote a poem called “Land Now Lost, or an allegory for humanity.” It was a slightly pompous villanelle though I knew it would be pompous the second I decided to write a villanelle. Anyways, somehow it was submitted to a youth poetry site. I have no idea how it got there it just showed up one day when I was googling my name. Even now, searching my name, that site will pop up in the first few pages. I really wish I knew how it got there. Also, I should add that the site never again released a group of poems after the month they published mine; I’m not sure whether that means they couldn’t find anything better or they hit the bottom of the barrel. Probably the latter given the “quality” of the other poems of that month.

I moved back to Brampton after spending eight months in Guelph for school a few days ago and had to reorganize my entire room to allow for the new computer desk and to fit in the couch I have for relaxation. It’s fucking sweet. Anyways, one of the things I had to do was reorganize my bookshelf where I store my books and DVDs as I had purchased a few books and quite a few DVDs in the past eight months. So I took everything out and put it back in. Today I glanced over there for no reason in particular and discovered that one of my books was upside down. This was the only book in the shelf that was upside down so it wasn’t a frequent mistake made in the haste of the process. This book was the Holy Bible. I’m so subconsciously sacrilegious.

Everyone knows that September is the month in which most babies are born. Nine months after the Christmas/New Years holidays naturally, when everyone gets drunk and sleeps with people inappropriately. Of course, there is a moment in between the two which every person loathes: breaking the news. Now women back in the day were probably delighted they were pregnant as it meant they had a strong connection to that man who could then become her husband. I’m talking way back in the day, when all women had was their husband. Because she is so happy that she’s dug her way into a man, she wants to let him know as soon as possible, but it takes a while to figure out you’re pregnant. Considering these olden days had no period regulation via hormone pills their period could vary a fair bit and so it would take about six weeks before they were certain they were pregnant. What’s about six weeks after the year-end holidays? The mid-February’s loom, they do. So off she goes to tell her man and what does he do? He reluctantly celebrates the event and steps into “matrimonial bliss” via a romantic night of love and adoration. And thus Valentine’s Day was born.

A new higher-order comedy about two guys, Will and Derek, who love sitcoms and are given a chance by the WB to produce a sitcom. The show is a mock reality TV show about these best friends’ exploits along with two girls that Will hired. The WB, who originally produced the pilot, passed on the show for reasons of their own machinations and it somehow made it onto YouTube split into three 9 minute parts. It has caused a fervour among the e-leet for being a brilliant show that should be renewed. And in an unprecedented event, the show may possibly get picked up by NBC because of its internet popularity. I don’t crawl YouTube so I found out about this through a slashdot article like (presumably) many others and decided to give it a shot.

The show was actually absurdly funny but at the same time, I found myself thinking about the limitations of the concept. The gist of it is, they have several three wall soundstages that look like classic sitcom stages and there’s a studio audience that watches the "reality" TV show. As a result you get a show that doesn’t need a laugh track (whether by it’s own comedic style or by the fact that it’s pretending to be a reality TV show) with a laugh track, that the two guys revel in by shouting state names and hearing people cheer and guiling the audience into cheering for them to win an argument. Sure it’s funny, but will it stay that way?

Some of its humour comes from the fact that it’s a scripted show about a reality TV show, another chunk comes from making fun of and referencing older sitcoms (including a hilarious scene where Dadless Will is looking for guidance and comes across Tom Bosley, James Avery, and Alan Thicke), and the rest comes from the Wacky™ best friends, Will and Derek. Will is a little spastic, tries a little harder to be funny, and is very emotional while Derek is more relaxed, doesn’t try as hard (relatively speaking), and doesn’t express himself emotionally. Someone commented that the two of them were very much like JD and Turk from Scrubs which is a valid argument given that they’ve had numerous Scrubs episodes about Turk’s inability to show his (Gay) Love of JD and they both act as though they are on a TV show. It’s an even more compelling argument when you realise that the creator of Scrubs co-wrote the Pilot episode of this show and presumably was one of the creators.

I’m excited for the show and I’m sure the writers will have better imagination than I, but I’m wary of the longevity of the show. Especially when you consider that the first part has 400 000 views and the second and third parts both have around 100 000 each. Kinda makes you wonder if the networks only looked at the counter for part 1 without regard to the continued interest the show draws.