My blog has always been multidisciplinary. It once carried the subtitle ‘a place where everything matters.’ Now, I’m shifting away from the rather generic name “blair mitchelmore’s blog” in support of that: welcome to Everything Is Amazing.

Granted, Louis CK’s opinions are slightly less optimistic, but I think that sentiment is worth carrying with you every day. Like David Foster Wallace’s advice to constantly remind yourself that ‘this is water’ it’s something that reminds you of the dangers of succumbing to the status quo.

We’re living in an awesome world, but we’re missing some awe.

I haven’t been blogging as much recently, partly because I’ve been working to read more — I’m a little more than a third of the way through The Stand right now — but another reason is because I’ve been busy tinkering with the back-side of the blog. Specifically, I’ve been writing a new theme.

The purpose is of course to attempt to describe the sentiment of my blog more clearly through its appearance. I’m not a designer, but I think the new look accomplishes that, at least for me. More importantly than that, it was an attempt to take a project from start to finish, something that the string of flights of fancy I’ve abandoned over the years indicates is not something I do very often. Even more importantly than that, it was a chance to see if I could do the whole web-designer thing; I know that I’ll never be a real web-designer — I don’t have the eye for it — but having some sense of aesthetic appeal is useful in my field. And even more importantly than that, it was a chance for me to practice what I preach; I’ve been espousing HTML5 and its semantic goodies for a while, and there are new features of CSS that I think are fantastic that I’ve always wanted to exploit, so this was a chance to work with both of those things.

A consequence of this, is that my new design isn’t supported by IE¹. If you’re viewing this page in IE, it might look like I’m still using the WordPress theme vostok which I’ve been using for quite some time now — if I did my job correctly — and that’s because I special cased you fools so you wouldn’t have to witness the horror that is the new design sans awesomeness. That said, I’ve tested the new design in IE9 and it looks almost perfect so when that one comes out, you’ll be able to appreciate the new design. For the rest of you, I’d like to discuss briefly a few of the features of the new blog I like. Geekery follows.

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Footnotes

1. And all the multitudes rejoiced. [↩]

I’ve been blogging too much about television recently and what’s worse I’ve been holding back in some respects. The problem is my relentless viewing habits. Aside from the dozens of currently active television shows I watch, many of which I fully accept are probably not worth keeping up with, I also have a nasty habit of watching old shows, some because of some cultural importance they hold and others because I watched them in my youth and I want to revisit them.

I’m currently in the process of watching Quantum Leap — a show that desperately needs a modern more serialized remake, which I totally want to write — but once that’s done, I think I’m going to take a break from these sorts of marathon viewings of television shows. I need to invest in some non-televisual thoughts.

Of course, in the meantime, all these episodes of Quantum Leap are still going to have to be watched, and I’ll probably have to write about at least a few of them before everything is said and done.

I can’t fathom why it is so difficult to make a shitty little site like mine, one with pageviews in the range from hilariously low to not terrible, operate with a modicum of responsiveness. I’m hosted with Dreamhost at the moment. I’ve thought about getting one of their private server deals that supposedly make these problems less of a problem, but at that point I might as well go full-bore and go with a shared host somewhere where I’d have real control and real responsiveness.

Is it really necessary to either pay these ridiculous costs for a barely functional website that times out more frequently than it returns a page? Well, no, I can have a blog on any number of the free blogging services and it would suit 99% of my needs. But there’s something to be said for having your own domain, the agency it exerts.

I still haven’t decided what, if anything, I’m going to do about this. I’ll probably end up simply buckling under the monopoly of shitty shared hosting and get something more dedicated. Though, should I do that, I hope I’ll also put some more effort into making this site something that couldn’t be hosted by any random free blogging service. If I’m paying for something, I might as well use it.

I haven’t blogged recently, not for a lack of thoughts worth blogging (though perhaps a doubt in my ability to express said bloggable thoughts adequately is encouraging the drought) but for a panoplic plethora of thoughts and ideas Infinite Jest is bringing to light. Reading this book is something which demands intense thought and concentration, and often leaves you drained, but in the best way possible. I’m still far behind the pack, so I don’t expect to be writing much here for a little while longer — though as Joe Hill noted on his twitter feed, these notes of delay are often shortly followed by frequent bursts of activity so let’s not say it’s impossible that I’ll be writing more before the end of the month.

I’ve always been fond of footnotes and endnotes, but two things have happened recently that have led to me grossly abusing endnotes: first, I installed a wordpress plugin that makes including endnotes much easier, though it unfortunately lacks support for referential endnotes and nested endnotes but I’m working on solving that in my spare time, and second, and almost certainly more importantly, I’ve started reading Infinite Jest.

David Foster Wallace said in an interview with Charlie Rose that footnotes become addicting, a fact to which I can attest. Sometimes, they ease the construction of a sentence, allowing me to include all the information I find pertinent without building a sentence as complex as might otherwise be needed. Other times the information I want to include has no purpose in the context of the post, though it is still worth noting, information that I think is important but would be unacceptably extraneous in the article proper. And then there are other times that endnotes are just fucking fun.

But even I’ve found the inundation of endnotes in my more recent posts a tad tiring. I can’t promise I’ll try to stop or at the very least reduce my endnote output. But I’ll try to try.

Glee is one of those shows that comes along and bites me in the ass. I hadn’t heard of it until the day before the pilot was broadcast, and the idea of a drama/musical centred around a high school glee club seemed terrible. But it wasn’t. It was touching, brave, smart, edgy, and as I’m sure you’ve guessed I liked it a lot.

There are a lot of things to like: the members of the glee club can all carry a tune, and the songs they choose are pretty fun to listen to in and of themselves; the peripheral players of the show all have interesting, but not cloying, quirks; and it’s hard to knock a show for telling an underdog story. But above all that, the message the show shouts from the rafters in its pilot is one that most people should learn: we’re all losers.

Jocks and cheerleaders, to me, are losers; they’re generally unimaginative and their ambitions seem childish and ultimately insubstantial. But I’m a loser to those people because I spend most of the day sitting in front of a computer, watching obscure 70′s sci-fi shows and writing a blog. And I’m a loser to a whole other subset of society for completely different reasons. So yeah, we’re all losers. But our victories are our own. So fuck the naysayers and do what you like.

But even without that theme, which runs through the pilot, the show has so much going for it. Lea Michele, who plays the overly talented self-labeled ingenue Rachel, has an amazing singing voice and she manages to make a character reminiscent of the satirical stereotype Reese Witherspoon played in Election not only genuine but incredibly likable and empathetic. Cory Monteith’s Finn is another stereotype turned on its head: he plays the Jock who secretly loves singing to wonderful effect. Cory’s voice is often overpowered by Lea’s Broadway honed one, but it fits the character and presumably he will improve as the show progresses.

The inevitable romantic storylines have already been set into place, as well. Matthew Morrison’s Mr. Shue has an unlikeable wife and an obvious romantic interest in the school germophobe guidance counselor, played by the always amazing Jayma Mays. And Finn and Rachel have already discussed the likelihood that they will end up together, subverting expectations while hanging a lantern in one fell swoop. I don’t think either of these threads will pay off for some time, but you never know.

I like all the characters. Or more accurately, I like the way all the characters are played. From minor roles like Stephen Tobolowsky’s brief appearance as the glee club director turn drug dealer up to the sundry members of the glee club, each role felt well cast and well written. I can’t wait to see how they all progress as the stories continue.

I’m trying to contain my enthusiasm in this discussion, primarily because otherwise the entire thing would devolve into a series of squees and me dancing around my room while singing along (despite my completely tone deaf singing voice) with the musical numbers, but I really am very excited by this show. I lamented the lack of good teen and high school oriented stories on TV a few months ago when Kyle XY was cancelled, and this show looks to fill that void. (Also, I’m totally in love with Lea Michele already. That girl’s got a voice on her.)

This pilot introduced a lot of awesome, and given the pedigree of the man behind the show — he did create Nip/Tuck after all — I’m confident the show will continue to impress me when it finally gets to air its full season in the fall. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go watch the “Don’t Stop Believing” sequence another 5,000 times.

So I changed the theme on my blog. The old one was a little too busy and I didn’t have a lot of need for all that sidebar content. Granted, this new design lacks the navigation links at the top of the page, which led to my contact me and about me pages, but I can get those back in here later. I’ll find some way to integrate them and maybe a bit of the sidebar content, such as the monthly archives, back into this theme at some point — and if I’m feeling really adventurous, I’ll add a tag cloud since I’ve been using tags on my posts for quite some time with absolutely no visible indication of them — but for now I like the simplicity of this new design. If you hate it, feel free to rant. (Though, really it’s not my design, only my choice of design, so don’t criticise it, criticise my poor sense of aesthetics.)

This now concludes the “I’ve changed the appearance of my blog” post that I swore I’d never write because it will make absolutely no sense to people coming to the site anew.

I know that most of my blog content of late has been almost exclusively focused on television, but I do think about other things from time to time. But generally speaking, I only write about things that others aren’t saying. That is, things I don’t hear others talking about. And I’ve been reading a lot more recently. And the more blogs I read regularly, the fewer things I find myself needing to write about.

That said, most of what I read is still wrong. I just rant about it elsewhere, at the moment. I’ll try to redirect some of said ranting to here. After all, I wouldn’t want my blog to be targeted at a specific audience thus resulting in higher traffic. Cause that’d be foolish.

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.

The Dollhouse review/recaps I’ve been writing thus far have varied wildly. This is because I have two conflicting desires when it comes to reviewing a specific episode of television. Most blogs out there give brief glib reviews of any given episode. They will on occasion focus on the little details that make an episode especially good, but overall they gloss over these details and what they do focus on, they interpret incorrectly. Outside of this world, there’s Television Without Pity. Television Without Pity focuses on detailed recaps of episodes with nearly shot by shot descriptions written with humour in mind. These recaps tend to focus more on the facts of an episode with mythology and character development often being left unexplored.

Both of these techniques work as well as they can, but my desire, when examining an episode, is to explore all of this. I want to examine every scene for deeper meaning while not forgetting to describe the actual factual plot of the story. I don’t want to simply describe a scene, but explore the underlying assumptions the characters exert on the scene. All of this is maddeningly difficult to accomplish without writing 5000 words. (One recapper on Television Without Pity, Jacob, gets close to my ideal. His recaps are a little too abstract and shoegazy most of the time, but at least he’s really trying to understand the show he’s writing about.)

At the end of my 3500 word recap of the fourth episode of Dollhouse I hadn’t really explored the subsurface of the story as much as I would have liked and I’d also been too dry in my depictions of the scenes for my taste. Finding that perfect balance between humour, pathos, analysis, and explanation is something I don’t think any site or any writer has accomplished yet. Which is why I don’t hold out any hope for me achieving such perfection. But I gotta try.

My current url scheme means that every blog post I choose has to be very deliberate and thought out. I have to be sure that it won’t conflict with a previous post or one ruminating in my head. So I chose this title knowing that I’ve already reviewed the final episode of Angel before and most likely I won’t again. That said, it’s never easy to give up such a broad title, but this particular story is pretty freakin’ huge in my world.

Recently, JM Straczynski, (or JMS as he is known to awesome people) creator and primary writer for Babylon 5 — a show that I consider one of the best Sci-fi shows ever made, and arguably one of the best shows ever made — posted to his newsgroup a message that all Babylon 5 fans are reading with some pain in their heart:

So I’ve let everyone up here know that I’m not interested in doing any more low-budget DVDs. I’m not interested in doing any low-budget cable things or small computer games. The only thing I would be interested in doing regarding Babylon 5 from this point on is a full-featured, big-budget feature film.

I Love Babylon 5. I Love it with a capital letter and while this is a bit disappointing, I absolutely understand it, and I’m even more impressed by JMS because of it. He could have pumped out low-budget movie after low-budget movie straight to DVD for another decade and every fan would’ve bought it, but he saw that the low-budget was affecting the quality and he wasn’t willing to further sully the B5 universe with that kind of stuff. I never watched the Legend of the Rangers, but I did watch and own The Lost Tales; it was mildly entertaining but it was nowhere near as good as the show was. And the fact that JMS knows and is willing to admit that just makes me respect him more.