“CLARISSA”: Hi! I saw your blog mightgodkingdotcom and we think it’s great! We’d like to open up a dialogue where you would host a sponsored post about HOT AIR BALLONS. Do you think your readers would be interested in HOT AIR BALLONS? We would of course be willing to compensate you for hosting the sponsored post in the amount of twenty-five dollars. Please respond!
MGK: *deletes email*

***

“HARRY”: Hi, I make infographics, and in order to get more exposure I’d like to ask you to post my infographic! It’s about Black Panther! Looking at your blog I bet your readers would like an infographic about Black Panther!
MGK: *huh, this one seems targeted, at least, let’s look at it*
INFOGRAPHIC: Black Panther’ is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was created by writer-editor Stan Lee and writer-artist Jack Kirby, first appearing in Fantastic Four #52 (July 1966) in the Silver Age of Comic Books. Black Panther’s real name is T’Challa, king and protector of the fictional African nation called Wakanda. Along with possessing enhanced abilities achieved through ancient Wakandan rituals of drinking the heart shaped herb, T’Challa also relies on his proficiency in science, rigorous physical training, hand-to-hand combat skills, and access to wealth and advanced technology to combat his enemies. Black Panther is the first superhero of African descent in mainstream American comics, having debuted years before early African American superheroes such as Marvel Comics’ the Falcon (1969) and Luke Cage (1972) or DC Comics’ John Stewart in the role of Green Lantern (1971). The Black Panther storyline which ran through thirteen issues of the Jungle Action series (numbers six through eighteen) is considered to be Marvel Comics’ first graphic novel.
MGK: This is literally just the first two paragraphs of the Black Panther entry from Wikipedia combined with some stolen artwork.
“HARRY”: You don’t even have to post it yourself! Here’s an embedded link that you can copy and paste! We’ll compensate you if you do!
MGK: This is obviously a link to a phishing site.
“HARRY”: But I know what you really want to ask, and yes, we will compensate you!
MGK: *deletes email*

***

“CLARISSA”: Hi, Mighty Go King! I’m following up on my previous email about you hosting our sponsored post about HOT AIR BALLONS. I don’t want you to miss out on this opportunity!
MGK: *deletes email*

***

“GEORGE SCHMIDT”: hello I am an aspiring freelance writer and I would like to post on mightygodking dot com and i would like to send you a sample
MGK: *continues reading out of curiosity*
“GEORGE SCHMIDT”: this sample is about polo shirts, i will pay you ten dollars if you post it for me
MGK: *deletes email*

***

“CLARISSA”: Hello again! I didn’t hear back from you about out HOT AIR BALLONS proposal so –
MGK: *deletes email*

***

“MARK: I came across your blog site while looking for resources for our next blog and I knew I had to reach out immediately, kudos on a fantastic blog. My name is Mark and I do blogs for an online blogging company. Do you accept sponsored blogs? Is this something you would like to blog about? Blog you later!
MGK: *deletes email*

***

“LORI”: Would your readers be interested in entering into a contest where they could win fantastic prizes like quality undergarments! I bet they would, and all you have to do is host one sponsored blog post. Unlike all those other scammers offering sponsored content, we pay up front, and our contest is real. Don’t you owe it to your readers? Wouldn’t they be excited by a chance to win free undergarments, or purchase undergarments at a discount? I’m sure this will excite your readership and drive up your social media metrics!
MGK: *deletes email*

***

“CLARISSA”: Hello once more! I still haven’t heard back from you about our HOT AIR BALLONS blog proposal. I have been authorized to up our sponsorship offer to fifty dollars and I’m letting our network of blog contacts know about this excellent opportunity!
MGK: *furiously typing* You haven’t heard back from me because you are a waste of energy. Nigerian scammers have more fucking style from you. Me ignoring your seven other emails isn’t an invitation to send more, it’s me saying “fuck off” as politely as possible, and you’re not taking the hint. You are literally the embodiment of every commercial sentiment that makes the internet worse with every passing second that you exist. Nobody wants to read your shitty advertorial about ballooning. Nobody will ever read it. You are just creating a sea of endless chaff making it so much harder to get to the wheat that we all want. So, please, just fuck off. Also, “balloons” has two “Os.”

***

“CLARISSA”: Thanks for your feedback on my previous email! Obviously you are not interested in HOT AIR BALLOONS content. However, I note from your email that you appear to be interested in FARMING content. Would this be more to your liking? Let me know! For FARMING content we can offer one hundred dollars per post!

Mastodon has seen one of its periodic growth spurts over the last week as a bunch of left-leaning sorts finally decided they had had enough of Twitter’s awful moderation policies and the not-ignorable possibility that it might be run by people at least a little sympathetic to Nazis. This is the most recent growth spurt Mastodon has had since, well, the last time people decided they had had enough of Twitter’s awful moderation policies, which was when I personally signed up on mastodon dot social (mightygodking, of course, because whatever my other sins may be I resolutely remain on-brand). And I tried it out for a while, and I went back to Twitter. I’m back on Mastodon again now, mostly because people I like are trying to use it again and I want to see what they say.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Partially, of course, there is the issue that social media, for many people – including myself – only really has value once it obtains a certain level of critical mass. Twitter has that; Facebook has it; Instagram has it. Mastodon does not, not yet. The largest Mastodon instances are about 100k-150k strong, except they’re Japanese instances mostly dedicated to sharing lolicon so they’re not really emblematic of how big Mastodon is generally. Dot social, at around 110K users, appears to be the biggest instance whose growth is not primarily driven by Japanese not-quite-technically-child-porn-but-close. This sounds respectably large, except that not all of those users are active by a long shot; plenty of those accounts are people who migrated once, got an account, and then went quiet because they decided not to use the service. I mean, Ello has over 1.5 million registered accounts and it’s not exactly thriving. And then you hit the issue of people who have multiple Mastodon accounts on different Mastodon instances (which is where the service starts to hit headache levels for me).

But there are other reasons than lack of critical mass, I think, that Mastodon does not provide a lot of Twitter exiles with what they want. Let’s be honest; what Twitter users annoyed with Twitter mostly want is Twitter except with better harassment policies and no Nazis, and Mastodon at first gave the illusion of offering this (the fact that the basic Mastodon homepage looks a lot like Tweetdeck and that Mastodon is generally modelled after earlier Twitter builds helped quite a bit in this regard). But, and this is key: Mastodon does not, in fact, offer either of these things. Individual Mastodon instances might offer these things, but the problem with decentralized power structures is that when you need central power to exist in order to stop certain things, decentralized power structures cannot, in fact, do anything to stop those things. Mastodon’s advocates inevitably argue at this point that participating in your chosen instance fixes these problems, because if your local instance bans Nazis, for example, then that solves the Nazi problem. However, this solution only works on the most local of levels.

Here is one fairly obvious abuse vector for Mastodon I have not yet seen a solution for: let us say you have an account on a large, non-controversial instance like dot social. I want to cause you harm, so I steal your avatar and username and replicate it on another instance dedicated to “free speech” (e.g. shitposting) where moderation essentially does not exist, and I know the moderators will not stop me from impersonating you and then penning, say, racist screeds under “your name.” If I am technically adept enough (and the demand of skill here is not impossibly high) I can even go ahead and set up my own instance so now I’m my own moderator and can even use your own moderation requests as an additional vector for abuse.

Twitter’s moderation policies are shit in most regards, but their track record with malicious impersonation is (or at least used to be, although I haven’t seen any complaints about this aspect of it of late) reasonably solid, because it has to be in order to maintain their high-profile corporate clients. But – and if I am wrong about this I would like to be corrected – that seems to me to be a dealbreaker for using Mastodon with any seriousness.

Beyond the abuse issues with decentralization, though, Mastodon’s appeal for me as a social network is limited because it’s more or less intended to be non-expansive by design. That’s really the point of decentralization in the first place: you reduce the amount of abuse by reducing the number of users, so that moderation is not so onerous that it can be handled by a minimum of humanpower. When you consider Mastodon in this light, you realize it’s not really a Twitter replacement so much as it is an update on the private and semi-private forums that dominated internet communication in the early 2000s before Facebook started approaching critical mass. And those were fine then and they’re fine now for what they are, and I take no issue with people who want to retreat to walled gardens or semi-walled gardens for their internet socializing.

But realistically, that’s what Mastodon is. It’s an opportunity to sequester yourself rather than a choice to participate, and I think a lot of people enthusiastically endorsing Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter don’t really appreciate that yet. I’ve been watching the local timelines on several instances and while they’re polite and respectful (because the instances I’ve been visiting are filled with people who are trying to diverge from Twitter because it’s not respectful enough) I do find it definitely less… daring? Seeing people request that other people use the content warning shield for punchlines for their jokes is weird enough on its own – but, more than that, the demand on dot social (and it is, in no uncertain terms, a demand) that people use the content warning shield for discussing politics to any extent is really enough to kill most of my interest in the service; regardless of the expressed sentiment that “it’s all cool, just use the CW,” it still feels unwelcome, and my natural preference is not to transgress and so… yeah. I understand that people can find political discussion unpleasant or even stressful, and I don’t have a problem with them wanting a safe space. But I don’t really want to hang out in that safe space too often even if I am invited. (And I totally understand that this is, in part, because I am a straight white dude and can be comfortable much more easily than average. I mean it when I say I don’t begrudge people wanting a safe space.)

And that isn’t just about my preferences but also muchly about wanting to be exposed to ideas and beliefs other than my own. It was centralization and critical mass which introduced me to Black Twitter, for example, and less frivolously allowed black people to communicate to white people much more directly how they were being abused by police. (The frequently less-than-stellar responses from white people aren’t because of Twitter, at least.) Similarly, it’s good to see and be exposed to, on a regular basis, what people with different belief systems from me think. I might think that they’re stupid, of course, but at least it’s direct knowledge of belief from a primary source and that does matter to me.

In the end, Mastodon’s “federation/instance” jargon is a really terrible way of describing it (one quirk of open source programming is that you inevitably end up using whoever’s terminology sticks first, and this can be either a blessing or a downfall and Mastodon is obviously the latter); one user suggested “galaxy/planet” as a better way of describing it, which is more poetic, but since humanity hasn’t really mastered interstellar travel as of yet I think the appropriate metaphor is “country/cities in, say, the mid-90s.” In 1995, you might live in, oh, Atlanta, and most of the people you know live in Atlanta, but maybe you talk on the phone regularly with your good friend who moved to Philadelphia, and a couple of your college buddies who live in San Francisco, and you get a very incomplete idea of what life is like there as a result. You’re all still Americans, but you’re all inhabiting different subcultures and because of a lack of exposure you don’t get the full picture – and yes, in the “individual forum years” in the early 2000s, the internet still mostly felt like this.

And that’s what Mastodon feels like to me now; it feels like when people move out of the big city to a small town, and explain to you that they love it better in the small town because it’s more relaxing and they don’t have to stress all the time. Which is fine and I’m glad it’s making some people happy – I really am – but it doesn’t appeal to me as it stands. Maybe it’ll change. But right now, I think I’m just gonna check in every so often and see how it’s going.

In comments on the previous post, Disgrunted Manatee suggests:

As others have said, without a picture of the selection from previous ages, it is hard to digest this data. I still recall Blockbuster having an entire aisle to display 100 copies of each of the 3 most popular movies at the time, then 3 aisles holding a random smattering of other stuff. The selection was never all that grand. Anecdotally in my small experience, the selection now just with netflix is way better than in my childhood with blockbuster and two other brick and mortar video store memberships combined.

A few points in response:

1. Blockbusters were, for the most part, terrible video stores, focused as they – and Netflix, for that matter – were on feeding consumer demand for the newest hottest things, rather than being consumer-oriented pay libraries (which are generally profitable enterprises, if not as profitable as stoking consumer demand to hyperactive proportions).

2. Your typical Blockbuster – and I can speak to this as I had multiple siblings work there – worked on stocking principles that dictated that half of the store’s shelf space was devoted to new releases (with the newest and hottest releases taking more prominence, of course), and half to older stock. This contrasted with more traditional video stores, where (and I personally worked at several, so I can also speak to this) generally had a new release/long tail ratio of anywhere from 40-60 (your neighborhood mom and pop store) to 20/80 (the really good video stores that took movies seriously).

3. Compare to Netflix, where we actually have hard statistics to determine how much of their catalogue can be considered recent thanks to sites like New On Netflix. Thanks to that site, I can tell you that Netflix Canada has 5,190 titles right now, and of those 5,190 titles 3,007 are less than three years old. That’s 58 percent! And that’s before you remove TV programs from the equation, because TV series are considered (for search purposes) single titles with their year being the earliest season available on Netflix, so most TV series skew older rather than newer, which means that the percentage of movies on Netflix that could be considered reasonably recent is actually even higher than it looks at first glance.

4. Just as important, though, is the fact that although most video stores and Blockbusters would generally clear out their new releases stock as “previously viewed” sales to increase their revenue, they would keep one or two copies of each new release to be incorporated into their older stock, because although the long tail for rentals is a thing, for movies that are 5-10 years old you’re still in the medium of the long tail where there was an active audience of people who were only getting around to see any given movie which they had intended to see for a while (this happened regularly with prestige pictures/Oscar winners), and after the medium of the long tail passed there was still the long tail of revenue to be generated from movies which had already seen the vast majority of their lifetime rentals but which could earn additional revenue every so often simply by sitting there and being available.

5. The average Blockbuster had a movie library of approximately 7,000 titles at any given time (per Big-Box Swindle by Stacy Mitchell); independent video stores almost always exceeded this, with “good” video stores often exceeding 15,000 titles. Netflix – regardless of country – has at any point a library of in between 5-6,000 titles. That is usually about 20% TV shows (and many of the TV shows are marginal things); it usually also includes about 20% bottom-bin straight-to-DVD releases (and straight-to-video releases were certainly a part of any video store’s inventory, but the ratio was usually about 10% rather than 20%). There really isn’t any numerical question that Netflix’s service is inferior to practically all video stories in terms of variety of catalogue.

So, the basic response to Manatee’s comment is the least satisfying one to all concerned, which is “your memory isn’t really accurate.” Regular video stores were better for catalogue than Blockbuster was, and Blockbuster was better for catalogue than Netflix was.

People who know me know that I continue to be concerned that the transition to streaming services is actually providing less choice to film viewers rather than more. This is not a new hobby horse I’m riding, of course, but my opinion isn’t changing as time goes on, and the reason was recently illustrated to me all over again.

You may or may not be aware that Edgar Wright, he of Cornetto Trilogy fame and other movies that are mostly good also, last year did a list on Mubi of his thousand favorite films. (Here it is on Letterboxd if you want to clone it for your own Letterboxd. Also I’m on Letterboxd and that’s where my movie reviews and thoughts mostly are these days, mostly because I am finding now that sometimes I don’t remember if I’ve seen a movie from twenty to thirty years ago or not, which is a fun thing to recognize when you’re only 41.) It’s an interesting list. Some people are taking it as a list of One Thousand Great Films, which is stupid because Domino is on it and literally the only good thing about that movie is Keira Knightley saying “my name is Dahmino Hahvey and I am a bounty huntah.” Also it has The Artist on it, and the best thing about that movie is that it ended and then conclusively determined once and for all that the Oscars are a sham. But just because it isn’t necessarily full of movies that are actually good doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting list, curated by someone who really loves movies, and when you’re in the mood to take a deep dive into the movie pool, lists like this are extraordinarily helpful.

So yesterday I was in the mood for such a dive, and I went through the list and found Dark of the Sun, a 1968 action movie about mercenaries in the Congo. (The trailer is here.) The online word about the movie was that it was entertaining and that it had a scene where two guys fight each other with goddamn chainsaws, and I thought that sounded just fine to me, so I went hunting for it.

The problem, of course, is obvious: it isn’t on anything. It’s not on any streaming service in Canada. You can’t virtually rent it on iTunes or Google Play or Windows Media rental or Cineplex.com or even on the Playstation Network’s movie library. (I only occasionally do Google Play rentals and don’t use the other services, but if I wanted to sign up, they aren’t helpful.) There’s a couple of “free movie” streaming sites that advertise it, but I’m pretty sure I have enough malware on my computer already so I’m not doing that. Basically, if I want to see Dark of the Sun based on Edgar Wright’s recommendation and a liking of the idea of a chainsaw duel, I have to track down a copy of the DVD, and I’m not so sure I want to see it that I want to spend $20 on a used DVD (the going price on Amazon.ca’s resellers).

After considering this, I wondered at the rest of the list. It’s not your typical best-of movie list, because this is Edgar Wright’s favorite movies instead, which means there are, among other things, three Russ Meyer films on it. And a lot more horror than average, too, along with a fair dollop of Hong Kong action cinema. And because Wright is English the list skews English more than other lists might, and also has a little more European influence on it, and for films you often don’t see on “best of” lists to boot. And there’s some stuff on it which is simply just average, like the 1973 Burt Reynolds action film White Lightning, but every average action movie has people who love it beyond reason. (Mine is Posse.) All of this, combined with the impressive size of the list, means that Edgar Wright’s list is a reasonably random selection of movies. It biases a little towards certain genres and it’s perhaps a little heavier towards the modern day than it is towards the early years of cinema, proportionally speaking, but it’s a big slice of film that isn’t specific, which means it’s a pretty good sample.

So I took this sample, and asked a simple question: how much of it can I watch online? I set some rules for this. First off, I didn’t count movies illegally streaming on Youtube or on malware-bait movie sites as being online; I only want to count films that I can legally watch online with as clear a conscience as I can manage. “I could torrent it” doesn’t count for the same reason. I also didn’t count movies I could either stream or download by using a VPN to proxy myself into another country, both because it again seems like a violation of the rules and because most streaming and rental services are actively blocking a lot of VPN proxy servers anyways. I then distinguished between movies I could watch via a subscription streaming service in Canada, and movies I could only watch via use of an online rental service like Google Play or iTunes.

Here are the takeways:

Firstly: 223 of Wright’s thousand movies cannot be streamed in Canada in any way whatsoever. No streaming service has them and you can’t rent them at any pay-per-rental/buy-into-your-digital-library service. This includes Dark of the Sun, of course, but also a whole bunch of other titles. Some of the highlights (?) include:

And I could add another thirty films you’d recognize to that list whose inclusion would surprise you. The most recent film from Wright’s list which is not available to stream in any capacity in Canada is Michael, from 2011.

After those 223 films, there are another 475 films which can only be streamed via a pay-per-rental/library service such as iTunes or Google Play. None of the major streaming services have all of the titles, of course. Google Play has the most (382 of the 475 pay titles accessible), but every service has a few exclusives. Not all of the titles are rentable; some are purchase-only (iTunes in particular does this more often than the others do). It’s also important to note that the overwhelming majority of stuff available on the streaming services is also available via the pay-per-title services as well, but I didn’t keep a running tally of which providers duplicated which streaming services’ options (although Google and iTunes unsurprisingly had far more at a glance than the others did).

Finally, we come to the streaming services, which is probably what people most wanted to know about – and no, Netflix isn’t the one with the most. That honour – in Canada, at least, where we spell honour with a U – goes to TMN Go, our national equivalent of HBO Go, with 106 titles. TMN Go’s diversity of selection is easily the best among any of the streamers, with a good mix of classics and newer releases (many of which are shared in common with Netflix). Netflix comes in second with 80 titles, the vast majority of which are less than fifteen years old. (Netflix’s oldest entry on the list is The Grapes of Wrath from 1940.) Netflix’s recency bias is so strong that were Wright to repeat this exercise in twenty years with a “my 1500 favorite movies of all time” I think their overall share of titles would likely decrease.

After TMN Go and Netflix, the selection gets smaller fast. Third place with 48 titles goes to Tubi, AKA “that free service on your smart TV you never click on,” and because it’s a free service most of their selections are older movies but that’s a pleasant bonus rather than a chore in this case. Next is Fandor, a service for older films and foreign films which I had literally never heard of before doing this exercise, with 33, then Amazon Prime Video with 31 (the Canadian version of Amazon Prime is much less good than the American version, for those wondering). Rounding out the smallest streaming services we have the horror streaming service Shudder with 20, Sundance Now with 17, the CBC’s ici.tou.TV French-language streaming service with 13, and finally Crackle, Sony’s half-assed free network, with 10.

At this point in the blogpost you’re probably expecting me to walk around holding up the big WHAT IT ALL MEANS neon sign, except I’m not sure what it means. I can say a few things affirmatively, though.

One is that Google Play (in particular) has ramped up their library dramatically over the past three years and that their rights system (from what I know of it) tends to encourage stability, because anybody with film rights can just treat Google Play as an additional revenue generator rather than be concerned that they’re giving away streaming rights to a potential competitor like Netflix is. On the other hand, though, Google Play having ramped up their library still leaves them missing about 30-35% of Wright’s list, so they still have a lot of work to do. And, more importantly, renting movies from Google Play might just be re-opening the video store consumption model for the new age, but the thing about video stores is that they were cheaper than going to the movies but still pretty expensive overall, and purchased movies from Google Play (which are often as expensive or only a little cheaper than physical media!) are really just permanent rentals because they’re nearly impossible to download; by design, you watch them on YouTube.

iTunes is, for whatever reason, much less interested in increasing the size of their back catalogue than Google is, and also iTunes is still shit and I refuse to use it, along with all the other pay-per-use services which are worse. One is enough, and Google Play is the best one for multiple reasons, one of which is “it is the least bad and the others are all awful.” (Default, the two sweetest words in the English language!)

Netflix being more interested in becoming a movie studio than a streaming service is not really news, but you really feel the impact of it with this exercise, where less than one in ten of Wright’s movies are available via Netflix. Netflix’s general policy of appeasing the consumer base and not bothering with the long tail that most consumers rarely care about also means it’s utter shit for watching classics, and it’s only gotten worse and worse over the last few years. Still, Netflix has basic technical competency going for it, which is something. TMN Go’s internet interface is garbage. It uses Flash, for crissake. Flash. Their mobile app is similarly nearly unusable. Just like Shomi before it, TMN Go is a service with a great library which is mostly intended for on-demand viewing through a cable box so they half-ass the front-end everywhere else, and then they sit around wondering why nobody wants to sign up for their service. As for the smaller services which aren’t free, they’re really too expensive for anybody but a serious fanatic to drop the coin. Ten bucks a month for a streaming service is great – until you have more than two or three of them, at which point one starts wondering what the point of cord-cutting even is.

So basically everything is up in the air right now, and I don’t know where it’s gonna land – and I’m still skeptical about streaming services, for reasons I think should be obvious.

Despite my statements last week, I did wind up finishing David Cross’s book ‘I Drink for a Reason’. I finally found a way into it by reading it as an educational study in why “edgy” comedy seems a lot less funny to many people than it used to, and why it’s growing gradually less popular. (I’m sure that comedians like Cross would say that it’s because “society is getting too PC”, but I’m a big believer in the fundamental truth that only assholes use “politically correct” or “politically incorrect” in anything other than an ironic manner.)

The conclusion I’m coming to is that the central joke behind “edgy” comedy is the conflict between the societal expectations for behavior and the way that the comedian treats their open defiance of those societal norms as commonplace and unexceptional. So the humor comes not so much from the fact that they’re being racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, and generally terrible as human beings, but that someone would stand up on a stage and act that way and not expect to be criticized for their horrible behavior.

Example: There’s a photo in the book of two women I don’t recognize, with the caption, “I fucking HATE these two cunts!” The joke is that nobody would simply drop that admission into a random conversation, because nobody is that openly hateful and misogynist.

The problem is, though, the advent of the Internet has given a voice to a number of people who actually would and actually are. You can no longer assume, as an “edgy” comedian, that people can detect the irony in your vicious misogynistic insults, because there’s no difference anymore between what you say as a joke and what Roosh V says every damn day of his life as a serious statement of purpose. You’re essentially trying to argue a form of special pleading, saying, “If you really knew me, you’d understand that this is all deeply ironic,” but you’re saying it to a crowd of strangers who only know you as the fictional persona you present…and who can compare it to any number of real people saying that shit for real.

It’s especially problematic when some…probably a lot, let’s be honest…of these “edgy” comedians are kind of assholes about some things, like, say, women in comedy (they’re generally agin’ it) and who try the Cousin Larry move of giving their honest opinions about some things, their “just kidding” opinions about other things, and waiting to see your reaction before they reveal which is which. ‘I Drink for a Reason’, to once again use the book as my punching bag, has sections where Cross makes fun of anyone who believes in a religion because they’re spending their lives chasing down a delusion about a non-existent god. He also makes fun of Midwesterners for all being crystal meth addicts. And he expects people to just “know” when he’s being ironic, because it’s obvious to him, so why isn’t it obvious to us?

Basically, “edgy” comedy is running into Poe’s Law like it’s a brick wall. How can Daniel Tosh claim that it’s a joke when he says that he hopes someone gets raped when there’s a guy running for city office in New Jersey on the GOP ticket who said the same thing to a reporter writing a story on him? How can David Cross differentiate his smug, alienating anger about “PC liberals” from the smug, alienating anger about “PC liberals” displayed by an actual major-party Presidential candidate? “Edgy” comedians really need to up their game to stand out from the crowd these days.

It’s not to say that it can’t be done–Sarah Silverman manages it by constantly tip-toeing up to the line of admitting that she’s putting on an act, then undercutting her admissions with a fresh round of absurd and callous ignorance. Colbert in his old Comedy Central days used his material to constantly make himself the butt of his joke. Even Cross and Odenkirk, when they worked together on ‘Mr. Show’, signposted the premise by starting their act with an open admission that they were just doing it to get hate mail. But the days when you could just say something racist and give people an “aw shucks” grin are gone. Don’t blame the PC liberals, though. Blame the guys like Vox Day who never understood that it was a joke in the first place.

Q: So what is Axanar, anyway? Is it a prescription drug, or something? Wait, I think I read about this, it’s that “female Viagra” thing that–

A: No, no, no. Axanar was a pivotal battle in the history of the Federation, fought by Garth of Izar before his descent into madness. It was taught to every cadet at Starfleet Academy, and Kirk expressed his personal admiration for Garth’s strategems. Fans have long theorized that the enemy was the Klingons, which is the version that the FASA roleplaying game went with, but other canon scholars have pointed out that the Klingon war has always been described elsewhere as a “cold war”, which doesn’t quite fit. It was referenced in the Classic Series episode, “Whom Gods Destroy”. Doesn’t that help?

Q: No. No, it really does not.

A: Okay. Just take my word for it, it’s a Star Trek reference, and one that’s causing a pretty big scandal right now. See, a group of fans led by producer Alec Peters decided to make a fan film about it, with Richard Hatch and Tony Todd. The fan film would expand on the tiny references in the original episode to show an exciting, untold chapter in the history of the Federation long before Kirk captained his first ship.

Q: This is a scandal?

A: By nerd standards, it is.

Q: Okay, so these guys are making a movie about this Star Trek trivia question. Did they have Paramount’s permission?

A: According to an article published last August in ‘The Wrap’, “Peters said he and his team met with CBS last week but the network didn’t offer any specific guidelines concerning what his crew can and cannot do — the network simply told him that they can’t make money off the project.”

(Edited to add: An article in Wired, in July of 2014, clarified this to: “Paramount, which owns the franchise, has traditionally allowed these fan-made projects to move forward, as long as they agree not to sell anything—including tickets, merchandise, or copies of the finished film or series. With sales prohibited, funding had always been a limitation for movies like Axanar, but Kickstarter offered a new way to raise a sizable budget.”)

Q: Oh, so they’re cool with it.

A: No, they’re suing. They want an injunction and punitive damages for copyright infringement.

Q: Wow, what a dick move! And after Paramount said it was okay back in August, too!

A: Well, keep in mind that there’s a quote from Paramount in that same article that says, “CBS has not authorized, sanctioned or licensed this project in any way, and this has been communicated to those involved. We continue to object to professional commercial ventures trading off our property rights and are considering further options to protect these rights.” So Peters may have been reading some encouragement in that wasn’t there.

Q: Oh. But I mean, it was a fan film, right?

A: According to Axanar Productions it is. Their press release in response to being sued says, “Axanar is a fan film. Fan films – whether related to Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Power Rangers, Batman or any other franchise – are labors of love that keep fans engaged, entertained, and keep favorite characters alive in the hearts of fans. Like other current fan films, AXANAR entered production based on a very long history and relationship between fandom and studios. We’re not doing anything new here.

Like all fan films, AXANAR is a love letter to a beloved franchise. For nearly 50 years, Star Trek’s devotees have been creating new Star Trek stories to share with fellow fans. That’s all we’re trying to do here.”

Q: Then why are they being sued? Paramount allows lots of these things, don’t they?

A: Oh, yeah. “Star Trek Renegades”, “Star Trek: Of Gods and Men”, “Star Trek Continues”…basically, it seems like as long as nobody’s making any money, Paramount turns a blind eye to these fan films.

Q: But this one they wouldn’t? Why?

A: Well, there is the fact that, in an update on Axanar’s Indigogo campaign, they said, “EVERYTHING costs more when you are a professional production and not a fan film. All of this and more is explained, along with our budget of how we spent the money in the Axanar Annual Report.”

And in that latest annual budget report, they said, “First and foremost, it is important to remember that what started out as a glorified fan film is now a fully professional production. That means we do things like a studio would. And of course, that means things cost more. We don’t cut corners. We don’t ask people to work full time for no pay. And the results speak for themselves.”

And:

“Please note that we are a professional production and thus RUN like a professional production. That means our full time employees get paid. Not much honestly, but everyone has bills to pay and if you work full time for Axanar, you get paid.

Also, no other fan film has production insurance like we do. We pay $ 12,000 a year for that. Again, a professional production.”

Also, in their Indiegogo FAQ, they had this little gem:

“Q: What is Axanar Productions?

Axanar is not just an independent Star Trek film; it is the beginning of a whole new way that fans can get the content they want, by funding it themselves. Why dump hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on 400 cable channels, when what you really want is a few good sci-fi shows? Hollywood is changing. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and other providers are redefining content delivery, and Axanar Productions/Ares Studios hopes to be part of that movement.”

Which kind of contradicts the “fan film” statement.

And in their Kickstarter campaign, they said, “We have two potential locations we are negotiating for to serve as our sound stage in Valencia, CA, just north of LA. This will be the permanent home of Axanar Productions and allow us to do more than just Axanar, from other adventures in the Star Trek universe and beyond.”

So they were, in fact, securing a long-range lease on a studio space that they planned to use to make for-profit productions, using money donated to them for their “labor of love”. And also money that was ‘donated’ by fans who got, in exchange for their ‘donations’, Starfleet patches and model kits of Klingon warships (which are apparently still available for purchase). None of which was licensed from Paramount, and the boundary between “selling merchandise” and “accepting donations and providing ‘perks’ to people who donate” is mostly semantics.

(Edited to add: It’s so slap-you-in-the-face obvious that I didn’t see the forest for the trees, but Kickstarter backers are also getting copies of the film on DVD in exchange for their donations. Which is pretty much just selling copies of the DVD under another name, something absolutely verboten by Paramount.)

That might be why they’re being sued and other people aren’t. Or it may be that they have money (they raised a million bucks with their Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns) and other fan productions don’t.

Q: Wait, fans gave them a million bucks? Wow, that’s a gutsy move, knowing the huge risks involved.

Well, they kind of downplayed the risks in the Kickstarter campaign. Here’s what they said:

“Risks and challenges

There are always risks and challenges when making a film – actors dropping out, locations and/or sets not available, unforeseen costs, equipment trouble, etc. In addition, “Star Trek” is a licensed property of CBS and so they have the final say in any Star Trek venture. However, the Axanar team has dealt with CBS and knows the landscape that must be navigated. Every member of the Axanar team is a professional who has proven their skills on other projects and films.”

Q: Well, maybe they were optimistic. I mean, even if they had some technical violations, surely they’d built up some goodwill with Paramount that would allow them to work all this out, right?

Um, yeah, about that…the producer is on record as saying, “The new ‘Star Trek’ movies by J.J. Abrams left fans feeling cold. There was little ‘Star Trek’ about them. They were basically modern action movies with characters that we didn’t recognize. And while good movies … ‘Star Trek’ fans just felt they weren’t the ‘Star Trek’ they had grown up with.”

And the director said, “We’ve seen orbital dry-docks since 1979’s THE MOTION PICTURE, so, one should absolutely honor that. Seeing imagery which runs contrary to established TREK lore shatters the verisimilitude of the universe for the longtime fan base,” and “The very last thing I’m interested in is making a pew, pew, pew STAR TREK movie.” The goodwill well might be a little dry. Especially because in the ‘Wrap’ article from August, Peters said they weren’t worried about being sued because Paramount would be afraid to face fan backlash.

Q: Oh. Well, what happens now? I mean, how do they keep actors like Tony Todd in the face of this setback?

A: Tony Todd left the project back in September, citing creative differences.

Q: Then why his his face still up on the Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and company page as being attached to the product, on pages where they’re actively soliciting donations?

A: You’d have to ask Alec Peters about that. We’re a FAQ, not a mind-reader.

Q: So basically, Axanar was doing things that Paramount specifically forbade, raising money by selling bootleg merch to fund their own production company, flaunting their professional credentials until such time as they became inconvenient, and using an actor’s likeness to promote a project he wasn’t attached to? Wow, the fans must really be upset at Axanar Productions.

A: Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh, you sweet summer child, you. They’re threatening a boycott of the Trek movie and upcoming TV series if Paramount doesn’t back down, and saying that Paramount is only doing this because they’re afraid they’ll be embarrassed by how good Axanar is compared to the J.J. Abrams movies. Some of them are claiming that Paramount would lose a lawsuit anyway because it was fan enthusiasm that kept Trek going in the 70s so the property really belongs to them anyway. Oh, and at least one fan has suggested “doing a Kickstarter” to buy the rights to Star Trek completely.

Q: I’m not entirely sure how to respond to that.

A: Maybe heavy drinking?

Q: Good idea. So where does all this go from here? What happens next?

A: Eh, y’know. Everyone lawyers up, other fan productions clench their collective sphincters for a while, people sign petitions, then the next Trek movie comes out and makes $500 million. Ares Studios settles out of court, cashes in their completion bond, tells everyone, “Caveat Emptor, read the Risks and Challenges section, no refunds,” and makes a low-budget sci-fi movie with the rest of the Kickstarter money.

Q: Wow, that’s cynical.

A: Sci-fi utopias are still a few hundred years away.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back!

Right now, they’ve got the funding to make three new episodes, which will probably feature Jonah Ray from the Nerdist as “Jonah Heston”, the guy who gets shot up into space and forced to watch cheesy movies by Felicia Day’s Kinga Forrester, daughter of Clayton Forrester and grand-daughter of Pearl. (People have asked who the mother was; in my headcanon, she’s the Resusci-Annie from ‘Teenagers From Outer Space’.) Baron Vaughn and Hampton Yount will be Tom and Crow, respectively, and there’s still at least one casting announcement to come (for the henchperson role). They’re about $125K from funding episodes 4-6, and with twelve days to go that’s pretty much guaranteed, and we may see as many as six more beyond that although I would be surprised if they fund the full $5.5 million.

But I don’t care. The point is, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back!

I have immensely fond memories of this show. I remember channel surfing one Sunday afternoon in junior high and coming across a science-fiction movie on one of the UHF stations. I stopped, because in those pre-Netflix years living in a household where cable simply wasn’t an option (my father remains philosophically opposed to it to this day) you took any sci-fi you could get. And I remember thinking, “What’s that across the bottom of the screen? Are those supposed to be theater seats? Who are those people in the corner of the screen? What’s going on here?”

And then they made a joke. And I instantly thought to myself, “This is the most brilliant idea ever.”

Because we all make fun of bad movies. It’s a natural human instinct, like breathing or sleeping or finding Donald Trump repugnant. So to see it done by actual comedians, really funny guys who also did sketches with these weird and goofy puppets, well…it was instantly charming. I’ve gone back and watched those early episodes, and they are definitely rough drafts for the concept, but I can’t tell you how impressive they were at the time. I was instantly hooked.

Then they went to cable, and I couldn’t watch them. Luckily, a few years later my dad came home with some videotapes that one of his students gave him, saying he thought they would be right up my dad’s alley. It was an off-air copy of one of the Turkey Day marathons, with ‘Viking Women vs the Sea Serpent’ and ‘Teenagers From Outer Space’, and I fell in love all over again. For several years afterward, I would beg my way into the home of a friend or family member for Thanksgiving with a stack of blank tapes, recording as much as I could stay awake for and watching those episodes over and over again in between Thanksgivings. (I practically have ‘Manos’ memorized.) I eventually moved out and got my own cable subscription, in time for the Sci-Fi Channel years, and I never missed recording an episode until the show’s eventual cancellation. (I was also finally able to settle a long-running debate between my mom and my aunt over which was worse: ‘The Day the Earth Froze’ or ‘Plan Nine From Outer Space’. The obvious answer was, of course, ‘Manos’.)

Ever since, I’ve greeted every spin-off effort with the greatest of joy, from ‘The Film Crew’ to ‘Rifftrax’ to ‘Cinematic Titanic’. There’s just a simple, uncomplicated happiness to this kind of comedy; they take a movie that you probably wouldn’t watch on your own, and walk you through it with entertaining comedic comments. You get a chance to see something that’s not always a classic, but frequently has its own unique charms–and where the movie fails, the riffing is entertaining. It’s fun at the expense of those old movies, but there’s also a little bit of love to it; I sometimes describe it as a celebrity roast for people who would otherwise be forgotten.

And it’s coming back. It’s a different cast, but ‘Diabolik’ featured absolutely none of the same people in front of the camera as ‘The Crawling Eye’. It’s a new writing crowd, but that’s only to be expected; one of the great things about the old show is that the people who worked on it went on to have long comedy careers of their own. It may not last beyond this run of 3-12 episodes, but that’s how the future works. You can never tell what it’s going to be like until it happens. The only thing we know right now is this: Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back. I have no snark, no reservations, nothing but uncomplicated happiness for this effort, and I don’t care who knows it.

UPDATE: OMG THEY ANNOUNCED THE HENCHMAN AND IT’S PATTON OSWALT HOW COULD THIS BE ANY BETTER?!?!?!

I was reading this morning about Tom Selleck (for those of you unfamiliar with any reasons why anyone would still care about Tom Selleck some seventeen years after ‘Magnum, P.I.’ went off the air, he’s been in the news for water theft in California) and I found myself thinking that if you were a writer of fiction, you could not have created a more unintentional metaphor for the global warming crisis than California.

It’s the perfect recipe for an allegory. You have a marginal environment that is slowly sliding into catastrophic uninhabitability (and of course, unspoken in your novel is the idea that it’s doing so primarily because of the macrocosmic problem that you’re replicating in microcosm here, which is always nice thematically) and a cast of characters who are so wealthy, so powerful, so utterly solipsistic that they’re simply unable to adapt to the changes because it involves them being told “no” and they don’t understand what it means anymore. And so droughts and wildfires gradually become endemic, turning into the new status quo, but the movie stars and big-name agents and Hollywood producers don’t understand why they have to ration their water just like the little people. Surely all that money counts for something, doesn’t it? Surely they’re just purchasing a commodity, and as long as they can afford the premium that results from high demand and limited supply, they should be allowed to use as much as they want however they see fit?

Of course, we haven’t gotten to the third act yet. As much as it’s entertaining to watch Tom Selleck publicly humiliated and forced to cough up undisclosed sums of money, I don’t think we can really call that a “climax” in a narrative sense. Maybe we’ll get a scene where L.A. goes up in flames, all the Hollywood mansions consumed by wildfire as Ariana Grande asks her PA to “do something about this”. Or maybe we’ll get a proper trial scene, not with Tom Selleck but with a big-name, bankable movie star in the role of water thief like…oh, gosh. We could go with the “poetic justice” angle and put Schwarzenegger in there, as a member of the Republican party whose stance on global warming is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “LA-LA-LA, I’M NOT LISTENING!” (As well as the former governor of California, and not a proponent of environmentalism or water rationing at the time.) Or you could go the “dramatic irony” route, and stick in someone like Sean Penn to show that sometimes people talk the talk but aren’t willing to walk the walk. Or hey, you could go all “meta” and cast Kevin Costner. Either way, it’d have to end with jail time.

But ideally, our “California” story should make you think. Watching people casually ignore the slow death of their home state, simply because they can’t imagine anything really bad that money won’t make go away, should maybe make people think about what’s happening in our wider world. Because the only difference between Tom Selleck and the Koch brothers is one of scale.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.