Torontoist thought it would be a good idea to go nutpicking in the wake of the Rob Ford ouster, so I did.

My weekly TV review is up at Torontoist.

Also, Torontoist asked me to do a legal review of the decision which got Rob Ford kicked out of office, so you can read that too.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

You know, it may be hard to believe, but I don’t always want to talk about feminism in the geek community. I don’t seek out fights with angry misogynists. I’d be perfectly happy to talk about Episode VII, and why I’m looking forward to it even though I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to suck.

But then shit like this happens.

For those of you not clicking through on that link, it’s a post on John Scalzi’s blog about Tony Harris, former artist on (among other things) ‘Starman’, and his misogynist, semi-literate, possibly (hell, hopefully) drunken Facebook rant about girls “preying” on male geeks by showing up at conventions in costume while being attractive, and not always knowing that much about the character they’re portraying. Because somehow, this is predatory behavior. (Presumably, he bases this off of the African veldt, where lionesses are known to dress up as Wonder Woman to attract the attention of antelopes even though spotty distribution and poor literacy rates in the region mean that they’ve never even read a single issue.)

Naturally, Scalzi eviscerates this stupidity with ease, because even though he is wrong wrong wrong on which Star Wars movie is the best (hint: it’s the original) he is almost never wrong on matters of real consequence and is excellent at expressing himself. And because he is confident in the rightness of his opinions and is willing to defend them, he has a comments section. Said comments section, for those of you not willing to read several hundred comments, is filled with women saying, “Hell yes. I am sick and fucking tired of having to prove my geek cred to every fucking man at the convention, one by one, simply because I’m a woman who is moderately attractive. I’ve been active in fandom my whole life and legitimately enjoy geeky things, and the sexist disbelief I experience is obnoxious almost past the point of endurance.”

This is promptly followed by someone clueless saying, “Oh, we weren’t talking about you! I totally believe that you’re a real geek girl. We were talking about all those other girls out there, the real poseurs who are just impersonating geeks in order to gain that all-important cachet of social acceptance from the now-dominant geek sub-culture. Those are the real enemies out there, as I’m sure you’ll agree. They’re the ones who are just trying to ‘belong’, and don’t really ‘get it’. They’re mainstream people who think they’re geeky even though they’ve never seen an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica!” Usually, this is where they bring up ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and use the phrase “nerdface” unironically.

Here’s the thing, everyone who insists that while each individual incident of rampant misogyny and asshatted stupidity is obviously terrible and should be condemned, there’s still a principle that’s worth defending here and you’re going to defend it…it is not your principle that everyone is arguing. It is your facts. Because there are no women out there who do this. Women do not treat science fiction conventions as some sort of four-day singles bar, where they can pick up a guy for only the price of having to dress up in a random skimpy outfit that they found on the Internet and pretend to be interested in boring shit about elves. It does not happen. When you think it is happening, you are either a) imposing your own frame of geekery onto the woman in question, or b) confused and imagining that your lack of social skills, your sexism, and your unfortunate history with women in high school is somehow the fault of the person you are talking to.

Being a geek does not automatically mean “being into everything you are into and having an encyclopedic memory for trivia.” Many cosplayers are costume geeks. They have as much interest and obsession with the details and minutiae of costume-making as you do for Star Trek, or (slightly more accurately) as rocketry geeks do for rockets. They may very well be choosing that costume based on its aesthetic appeal and challenge, not because of an attachment to the character. Does that mean they’re not real geeks? No, it means they’re geeks about something you don’t care about and instead of taking the time and effort to get involved in their fandom, you’re berating them for not getting involved in yours. This is not defending a principle. This is being a jackass.

Which is the other important thing. A lot of the time you’re just being a jackass. The woman who’s dressed as Death, but doesn’t respond when you say to her, “Chim-Chim-Cheree!” It’s not that she’s a fake geek girl who didn’t even read the character’s first appearance; it’s that she’s at the convention to have fun, not to participate in a fucking trivia contest…especially not one where the prize is you looking down her shirt for the next six hours. When she nods politely at your comments about ‘American Gods’ and walks away, it’s because she has someplace to be, not because she’s secretly one of the cheerleaders who turned you down for a date in high school and she doesn’t really love Neil and she’s laughing at you when you’re not looking.

If your response to this incident, or any of the other incidents like it, is to say, “Yes, but the principle of keeping out the poseurs because they’re really just bullying real geeks with their condescension, that needs to be defended,” then remember this: It is not the principle that the other side is arguing. It is the data. If you claim that squirrels are secretly stealing your underwear, the question involved is not whether or not theft is wrong. That question is moot, because there are no underwear-stealing squirrels in your home. And even if you find a YouTube video out there of someone sitting at a park bench with their gym bag partially unzipped, and a squirrel runs up to the bag and pulls out an item of clothing and runs off with it to use it to line their nest, that does not make you right. The plural of anecdote is not data. The existence of this video does not make pointing at random squirrels and shouting, “Stop stealing my boxer shorts, you bitch!” any less insane. Please, just let this ‘fake girl geek’ bullshit go. Because you’re not doing yourself any favors when you defend it.

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.

I’d be the first to admit that the title of this week’s post is a bit of a loaded question; clearly, letters columns aren’t “necessary” because they’ve been phased out of most of the comic books in the industry for about a decade now, and DC and Marvel haven’t stopped publishing comics. (Although, as always, I feel compelled to add the word “yet” onto the end of the phrase, “DC and Marvel haven’t stopped publishing comics”.) But I do think that letter columns served a distinct and vital purpose in the comic book industry, and it’s worth asking whether or not that purpose is still be served by other means in the wake of the decision to stop devoting page count to the words of the reading public.

To answer that question, it’s worth first asking what purpose the letters page once served. The answer is simple: Letters built a sense of community among the readers of a particular series, and of readers of comics in general. When you got to the end of every issue, and saw a full page (sometimes two) of people who read the same issue that you did and that cared enough about it to tell the company, it gave you the feeling that you weren’t alone in your enjoyment of comics. In a pre-Internet world, where local fan populations could vary wildly from city to city (or from city to small town, or from small town to rural area where you got your subscription delivered to) it was important to fans to know that their fandom didn’t make them freaks. Especially since (hey, it was a more innocent time) they published the addresses of their contributors. A lot of fan clubs that later grew into major fan organizations got their start from people who became “pen pals” after reading each other’s letters in the back of a comic book. Some of those readers, like Kurt Busiek and Mark Gruenwald, went on to be professionals.

Which was another important thing to note: The letters page didn’t just build a sense of community, it built a sense of participation. Breaking into comics was (and is) hard, but just about anyone over the age of five could break into the letter column. All it took was a goodly amount of persistence, some paper and a parent who indulged your need for stamps and envelopes. Seeing your name in print in your favorite comic was a huge thrill for a fan, one that created a strong sense of loyalty to the comic that in some small way, you felt like you’d helped create. Sure, other people did the drawing and the writing and the coloring and the inking, but there would be a blank white space there if not for you!

And as a counterpart, showing that the company cared about the thoughts of its readers helped to deflect frustration or anger with a book. Dan DiDio is known for being relentlessly positive about DC’s books in interviews (the man waxed rhapsodic about ‘Countdown’, at least while it was still going on…that has to take a PhD in bullshitting to pull off) but back in the old days, Marvel and DC weren’t afraid to print the occasional negative letter, just to show that they could admit their own flaws. The tone of the letter columns was generally upbeat, of course, but the occasional crank made them seem magnanimous in allowing fans their fair say.

And sometimes, the letter column could be a place to tell an entirely different story. Claremont had a few years where he answered the letters “in character” as one X-Man or another, while James Robinson’s ‘Starman’ turned into a wonderful series of fan essays on the love of antiques. Mark Evanier’s letter columns in ‘Groo’ were just as funny as the stories, and Alan Moore’s letter column in ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ were drop-dead hilarious satires of the letters pages in the Victorian pulps. (Which should come as no surprise; Moore always had an eye for details like period-authentic letters pages. I still have a soft spot for ‘1963’…which may have something to do with my own 60s-style fan letter that was published in the final issue.) Some titles showed that the letter column could be more than a pre-Internet fan forum.

But of course, we now live in an Internet age, which is where we come back to the question, “Are letter columns necessary?” DC and Marvel each run their own forum boards now online, and there are countless independent boards that people can use to link up and talk comics to their hearts’ content. In a world with blogs and vlogs and LiveJournal and ScansDaily…well, blogs and vlogs and LiveJournal, at least…is there really a need for an additional place for comic book fans to share their opinions?

I would say “yes”. Perhaps not as much as there once was; I don’t think anyone is still having trouble finding other comics fans out there, and I don’t think that people are having difficulty finding outlets for their opinions about comic books. But I do think there’s never going to be a substitute for that cachet that comes from having your name published in an official capacity by the company whose material you love; having a space for the readers within the publication helps to make it feel less like the interaction between fans and professionals is entirely one-way. I won’t go so far as to say that a lot of the fan outrage over the last decade comes from not having an official voice in the comic, but I do think that everyone who says “fan entitlement” is driving angry fans misses a chunk of the point. It’s powerlessness that causes fans to get upset about the latest development in their favorite book, and having a place where the company officially says, “We will listen to you. This may not change, but we hear your voice and here is the proof,” can make some difference. Those two needs can’t be served as well by forums, or by conventions or blogs, and they’re something that I think is worth bringing back. Even if it’s not, strictly speaking, necessary.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Fair warning: next week’s column will probably just be “Nothing is on TV that is better than playing XCOM. You should probably play XCOM.”

All right, so.  Problems:

1. I cannot tell if this is ironically suggesting fake nerd girls are a menace to nerd culture or if it is meta-sublimina-ironically mocking nerd culture for believing same.  It should not be so hard for me to figure this out and that makes me very sad.

2. Are the bow and arrows just part of the supervillain motif, or is it meant to indicate that newly minted Hunger Games and/or Avengers fangirls are to be incorporated in this stereotype?  I’m just saying, these are things I should not have to dwell upon when the intended response is “HO HO HO OH GOD IT’S FUNNY ‘CUZ IT’S TRUE!”

3. I am pretty sure that spending all day on Facebook and bragging about it in a self-deprecating way does indeed make you a huge nerd.1  The barrier to entry in this field is not particularly high.  Just knowing what a LOLcat is may qualify.

3a. Not gonna lie, the Star Wars ringer T-shirt is really really nerdy.  Not “I guest-blog for a guy I met on Usenet who reviews board games” nerdy, but like I said barrier to entry yadda yadda.

3b. Geez, that Nintendo 64 controller is probably almost as old as she is!  Why not give her a MP-05 Megatron pistol and a Tom Baker scarf while you try to convince me she isn’t legit?

4. She seems nice.  I mean, I can think of worse problems to have than running into her at the comics shop and being asked to explain the difference between Justice League Dark and Dark Avengers.2  She only seems to be a villain if we redefine the term to mean “person who is generally not difficult to coexist with and may choose not to have sex with you.”

5. I am not certain what her sinister plan is.  That is to say, I went and looked at the other characters3 and I get why they would be a pain in the ass, but The Imposter seems to just want to hang out if that’s okay.  Even if we accept that she’s not really a nerd, what is the problem? 4  The only downside I see is that she actually is a giant nerd, and therefore might annoy me by blathering about extremely esoteric subjects, like all other nerds do.

1. Or dork or geek or poindexter.  I prefer not to wade into such semantics. [↩]
2. Answer: Dark at the end of the title means “except spookier” and at the beginning of the title means “evil version of.” [↩]
3. SPOILERS: none of them were funny. [↩]
4. “All my Douglas Adams references are useless!” is not a problem. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up for Torontoist.

(And yes, nerds: Arrow sucks. At least the pilot sucked, and hard. They are promising Deadshot for later in the season so I might watch that episode, but the acting is not very good and without that I’m just not gonna waste my time.)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Torontoist asked me to weigh in on the Margaret Wente plagiarism scandal, so I did, although they cut out many of my more imaginative swears.