Now, you might be thinking “but wait, you have no respect for the Ford Brothers.” And that is not precisely true. Rob Ford is excellent at constituent service, for example – he genuinely loves it and takes pride in it, it is quite possibly the best thing about a generally awful person. You can at least respect Rob Ford on that basis, and there are clearly other elements of the man that are respectable, which makes him such a tragic figure in so many respects.

But Doug Ford? (Who, for non-Torontonians, is Rob Ford’s older brother and who took over Rob’s seat on city council when Rob ran for Mayor.) Holy crap, fuck Doug Ford. He has, with this scandal, proven himself to be a truly worthless human being, on the basis of one sentence:

“Rob is telling me these stories are untrue, that these accusations are ridiculous and I believe him.”

Not “Rob doesn’t smoke crack.” Not “Rob would never do those things.” Not “there’s no tape, this is just crap.” Not even a “oh, fuck you.” Doug Ford just threw his own brother under the bus, because according to Doug Ford, Doug Ford is just an innocent bystander in all of this. If the Rob Ford crack video eventually does emerge (and it looks at this point fairly likely to do so) and Rob Ford is indeed smoking crack and calling Justin Trudeau a fag and all the rest of it, well, that’s not Doug’s fault, because Rob told him he doesn’t smoke crack and why wouldn’t you believe your brother?

I get that Doug Ford is in a difficult situation: when you are a politician, you can be loyal to the public or to your family in a situation like this. If Doug knows there is no video or doesn’t know if the video exists, his response should have been a simple “Rob doesn’t smoke crack.” If he does know about the video, then he has two choices: either stand with the city and say that Rob needs to stand down, or double down, stand by his brother and say “Rob doesn’t smoke crack.” And frankly, given that last option, I think most people would (eventually) forgive him, because this is the man’s brother. I’ve had judges tell me on numerous occasions that they discount testimony from family members of parties/accuseds because, well, they’re family and it’s to be expected that family sticks together. And they’re not going to go attacking those people for perjury. We’re supposed to be loyal to our families.

But, when the chips were down, Doug Ford made his choice: not to be loyal to the city or to his own brother, but instead to be loyal to Doug Ford. That is the amoral and craven act of a truly worthless human being – and one, frankly, that if Rob and Doug’s roles in this were reversed I think Rob Ford would not have chosen – and I think people need to remember this, because Doug Ford is going to do his damnedest not to go away and continue to be a blight on the political landscape. And conservatives in Ontario need to remember it more than liberals, because it is now quite obvious that Doug Ford does not give a shit about his fellow conservatives. If Doug Ford isn’t willing to go to the mattresses for his brother, then he’s certainly not going to do it for his fellow party members.

So Amazon has announce Kindle Worlds, which is kind of sickly brilliant: it’s basically an online publishing house for fan-fiction, wherein royalties are paid to the owners of the IP and to the author of the fanfic. And the royalty to the author is, frankly, not bad – 20-35% of total revenue of digital sales of the work.

Of course, it’s not all candy and sunshine. If you look at the more detailed explanation, Amazon explains that it will own all rights to the work for the entire term of copyright, including (most importantly) reprint and adaptation rights. If the CW likes your Vampire Diaries story so much they want to convert it into an episode or two, then they will pay Amazon instead of you. If the CW doesn’t like your Vampire Diaries story but does like your moody vampire character named Steve, Amazon will grant them “a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.” This is, to say the least, kind of problematic. The simple explanation doesn’t even say if you’ll be credited as the creator of those elements, which to many fanfic authors I think would be one of the most important things.

And remember, this is for the entire term of copyright, which means for as long as money can be made off it (e.g. until long after you are dead) Amazon will control it entirely. So to call this a “bad contract” is kind of a major understatement, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. We are after all talking about fan-fiction – something that is only quasi-legal at the best of times. Amazon has found a way for fanfic writers to get paid something for their work (and it’s a pretty reasonable something) and to be recognized for their craft, and if the terms are draconian, they are still a major improvement over what previously existed, which is “nothing, or maybe get sued for copyright infringement.” If Amazon includes some more reasonable terms for compensation with respect to profits from reprints and adaptations it will be approaching “good.” Frankly it’s already more than I expected what this would eventually look like when it happened.

Of course, no discussion of payment-for-fanfic is complete without the standard admonishment of “you should just write your own original stuff that you own and control.” But I understand the desire to write works set in an existing universe all too well. And I am forced to admit: if DC Comics suddenly became a “World Licensor” for this thing, and if Amazon extended its digital publishing to include comics… I would be, at the very least, significantly tempted to write certain properties as I saw fit. I am only human, after all.

In email, Michael Paciocco asks:

So, I’m reading this.

From what I’ve read in bits and pieces from blogs and everywhere else, the 5YL is the Legion’s “Grim and Gritty” phase – the UFP is more Dystopic, Cosmic Boy’s lost his powers, the Legion is basically shattered, Richard Kent Shakespeare, Shrinking Violet has a bionic leg or something, etc etc. And then there’s whole thing where they find a bunch of bright and happy clones (who may or may not be the real deal) and Earth is destroyed? How does that not conflict deeply with the whole thing of “LOSH should be bright and happy and heroic”?

The first thing you have to understand about the v4 era Legion is that it was almost certainly one of the most ambitious superhero comics undertakings of all time. The blogpost Michael references rightly describes it as a “post-Watchmen comic book” in the proper sense, which is to say it took away far more in the storytelling toolkit from Watchmen than simply the grim tone. Indeed, calling v4 “grim and gritty” oversimplifies it greatly; after all, this is a run which had some of the greatest comedy issues of all time.

What Keith Giffen took from Watchmen was the concept of whole-world-building and the idea that the greater world beyond one’s protagonists matters, but his use of it was expressly in opposition to the core thesis Alan Moore advanced, which is that, all things considered, superheroes in and of themselves are basically powerless to stop society’s self-destructive urges (Dr. Manhattan is only a stopgap, Nite Owl and Rorshach are meaningless, and Ozymandias only succeeds because he abandons superheroism for conspiratorial means). v4 Legion, in comparison, is set against the backdrop of a full-fledged galactic war between numerous enormous space empires – the United Planets, the Khunds, the Dominion, the Dark Circle, et cetera – but time and again, the Legion mostly succeeds in its goals. Where it does not are usually disasters of immense scope rather than the result of others’ agency.

As comics have grown more cognizant of the belief that superheroes could only “realistically” operate as agents of state authority (see the Marvel Universe, where currently most of the major superhero teams either are explicitly state agents like the Avengers or operate on a wink-nod basis with the state), Giffen’s Legion went entirely the other way: he had the Legion reform under conditions as hostile as possible, with only their own resources keeping them afloat (and although Chameleon was at this point ridiculously wealthy, the series made clear that individual wealth really only goes so far more often than not) and with most of the established power actors either disinclined to cooperate with the Legion or actively hostile towards their re-inception. It’s an overwhelmingly pro-superheroic, deeply idealistic run of comics. To call it “grim and gritty” because a lot of characters die misses the point – after all, the series takes place mostly within a war, and whenever the focus shifts away from those wars, the most striking thing about the story is how much care it takes to show that the Legion is an extended family more than anything else.

And, as a writing accomplishment – getting back to the technical side of things – even though it does not entirely succeed (Giffen tries to juggle an enormous number of balls, and frankly he drops a few here and there) it is staggering in its scope. What Giffen did (along with the Bierbaums, who I think at this point are widely acknowledged as being the weaker writers in the v4 team, particularly when their eventual run without Giffen was so much… less than his) was to apply Watchmen‘s use of wider-world story to the Legion universe – IE to apply it to over thirty years of comics. Giffen had done this before with Paul Levitz, of course (see the Great Darkness Saga and the Legion of Super-Villains story, both of which were massive callbacks to practically the entirety of Legion history) but v4 is so dense at times it practically begs for annotations – not that they are necessary, for the most part, to follow the vast and ambitious swirling plot. And Giffen did all of this while creating a new status quo to explain how the Legion came to be in a universe where Superboy was never a member to boot (a task at which he was mostly successful, creating Laurel Gand in the process – a Supergirl replacement who became quite popular in her own right).

It doesn’t entirely succeed. Some elements were controversial at the time because neckbeards hate change (the Ayla/Vi gay relationship, the Shvaughn/Sean Erin de-transgendering story, Sun Boy’s character arc). Some elements were controversial because they just sucked (Kid Quantum, a bad idea all around). But on the whole it is far more successful than not, and where it fails it is forgivable because of the furious attempt by Giffen and his co-creators to do something new in superhero comics. And that is worth commemorating.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

This summer, over the 4th of July weekend, I will be at CONvergence in the Twin Cities, for the benefit of anyone who wants to attend and geek out with me. (Paul Cornell will also be there. I won’t be upset if you tell him that you came for him and not for me. We’ll both know the truth.)

But whether or not you show up, there is something you can do for me. I’m on a panel about great bad comic book villains, the kind who are so absurd and ineffectual that you just have to love them. (Like the Hypno-Hustler, the Big Wheel, Doctor Demonicus…) And so I’d like you to chime in, in the comments section, on who you feel absolutely needs to make it into this hour-long panel. Who would it be inexcusable to leave out? Who is such a hilariously lame menace that he/she gives Stilt-Man and Toomazooma the Living Totem a run for their money? Your chance to influence an hour of comics-based silliness begins…now!

So over on io9 they’ve posted an article about the central problem with Stephen Moffatt’s Doctor Who, and while I agree with some of their points, I think that the central problem with it — with almost any incarnation of Doctor Who, though particularly with this one — is that it makes absolutely no sense.

I’m not talking about things that are scientifically impossible or implausible, which to my mind are no more legitimate criticisms of Doctor Who are than saying the the monsters look phony and the sets are made of cardboard. What I mean is that the central premise of the show makes no sense from a logical perspective.

It’s particularly obvious in recent years because the show has returned to doing a lot of show set in Earth’s past, but always with some fantastic element (I’m informed, via The AV Club, that “Black Orchid” was the last historical Who story with no SF element other than the Doctor in it, and it was the first one since “The Aztecs” about twenty years earlier.) Often these fantastic elements would have earth-shaking or even earth-destroying consequences (an Ice Warrior triggering a nuclear war in the 1980s, for example) if the Doctor didn’t stop them. But the Doctor has been to our time, which has not shaken or blown up by any of these events, “before” (in his timeline) going to many of these times and places. So how did these events happen “before” the Doctor got involved? Why wasn’t modern-day London a smoking, radioactive ruin until the Doctor went back and stopped that Russian sub’s missiles from launching?

Now maybe this has been answered somewhere — I’ll admit to not having an encyclopedic knowledge of all Whoiana, especially of the Colin Baker-Sylvester McCoy years — but to my mind there are a couple of possible answers. The first is that these things didn’t happen because the Doctor “always” went there — essentially, when he visited our present (or future) he was experiencing the effects of things he would do in our past, his future. This makes the most logical sense but is also the most dramatically unsatisfying, because it basically means that everything he does is already set down by fate.

The only other option, considering that multiple timelines have been declared a no-no in Who canon (and are similarly undramatic, since they undercut the significance of anything you do when you travel in time) is that the times and places the Doctor goes are in some way temporally indeterminate: essentially, if they’re left alone they’ll happen the way they did in our history, but they can be changed by outside intervention. The problem with that interpretation is that it suggests that everything would be fine if the Doctor just stayed home, and that he’s risking all life on Earth to satisfy his wanderlust. Unless, that is, we suppose that each indeterminate point can only be changed once, in which case the Doctor is being brought to them so that he can seal them up before some other time traveler does.

Why are these points in time and space indeterminate? Why are so many on Earth? Why are they crawling with extraterrestrial and interdimensional visitors? Why do they so often seem to create points where history could be changed significantly? And why is it the Doctor’s job to seal — or perhaps we should say stitch them up? I don’t know. But they are pretty interesting questions…

Torontoist asked me to discuss how Canadian libel law would work if Rob Ford wanted to sue the press over the “crack-smoking story” so that is what I did there.

Now here is that GIF of Ford trying to throw a football again!

Thoughts (and spoilers) after the jump.

continue reading "Star Trek: Into Darkness"

Something I have needed to do for some time, so your patience is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: Note that the second question allows for multiple answers.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

(with a tip of the hat to the wonderful ‘Room 237′…)

The key to understanding the Kubrick movie ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ is to understand that Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, one who never left anything to chance. The reshoots that Kubrick undertook, reshoots that scrapped an already-filmed and extremely expensive ending, were explicit in changing the original film as well as the Broadway play. These changes were not undertaken by chance. By examining them on a frame-by-frame basis, backwards as well as forwards, we can see how Kubrick was actually making a movie about …

(…to be continued once I go completely insane…)

Oh, man, this thing.

I would’ve been about 14 at this point and it really does show: the map is mostly a conglomeration of D&D cliches (separate kingdoms for elves and dwarves and orcs and even lizardmen and Snake People), ideas lifted wholly from the low-grade fantasy I was reading (“the Wide” is a direct ripoff of Algaria from David Eddings’ Belgariad books, as is the Moors – man, couldn’t I come up with a name for my fantasy moors than simply capitalizing “Moors”? – and the idea of Snake People was stolen from the Fighting Fantasy books), and names that are either painfully generic (“Riverport,” “Alfheim,” “Coast Town,” “Hell Island”) or just awful (“Dontor,” “Twilldove,” “Fligit,” and personal least favourite “Wiv” – yes, one of the dramatic upstart New Kingdoms is called fucking Wiv, what the hell).

But right smack dab in the middle there is Boka, and my idea for it was pretty much the same as what you’re seeing in Al’Rashad now. Granted, at the time it also had jungle dwarves (as per the Forgotten Realms), but the basic idea of a world-dominating medieval African-ish kingdom was one that I liked – even when I was young and thought any reasonable empire would name a city “Nendle Bar.” The Free Isles – although they haven’t appeared in the comic proper as of yet – are there too and the idea was, as I recall, much the same as it is now.

And “Doomtooth” is just a rocking name, so good on my 14-year-old self.

Also: Consider this an open challenge/dare to all the other nerd bloggers out there. I know all of you did a world map of your D&D campaign world at some point! And I bet most of you can still find them.