My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Dear Mayor Rob Ford:

Recently, Sue Edworthy wrote a thoughtful and friendly letter to you. It was a thoroughly positive letter, given that it was written in response to you skipping out on an executive meeting of city council so that you could go coach football. Ms. Edworthy has, very nicely I might add, suggested that perhaps you would be happier if you made your foundation which helps underprivileged kids play football your life’s work, which dovetails neatly with the conflict of interest charges you face for using city resources to solicit donations to said foundation.

She’s right. But her letter to you is a classic “mom letter.” And this is the thing: you do not deserve positive reinforcement for its own sake at this stage in your life. You are a grown-ass man, in years if nothing else. God knows that, as the privileged son of a wealthy family, growing up and acting like an adult has always been something you treated as sort of an optional extra. And I’m certain that the useless son of a rich and connected family will find no shortage of donors for his nonprofit, because you were lucky enough to be born into a class that can almost always find something for its less talented children to do, and at least you’re good at coaching football (by all accounts).

But you aren’t a football coach first and foremost, no matter how much you might like coaching football (and I’m sure it is rewarding). You are the fucking Mayor of fucking Toronto. You ran a long and dirty campaign to become Mayor. You spent an extremely large amount of money to become Mayor – most of which, needless to say, was other people’s money. Every one of those people should take it as a personal insult when you blow off work – and that is exactly what you were doing.

I’m sure you don’t like being Mayor of Toronto any more. I’m quite sure you didn’t realize what you were getting into when you decided to run for Mayor; I’m sure you didn’t understand what the position entails and in fact am still sure you don’t (I strongly suspect you think the entire job consists of taking constituent phonecalls, like you’re some really, really well-paid customer service representative). Tough. I don’t care. You’re the Mayor. Do your fucking job. Don’t like it? Well, then, maybe you should quit. Ms. Edworthy was quite right about that: if you don’t want to do the job, you could at least have the courtesy to hand it over to someone who won’t half-ass it the way you’re half-assing it. That’s the choice most everybody else has every day: do your job or quit. Most of us just do our jobs even when it’s on a day we don’t want to be doing them, and for those of us where it becomes unbearable, we quit (and generally we don’t have the assurance that you do that someone will come along to make sure there’s something for you to do).

But if you’re going to remain Mayor (assuming you don’t get booted for that conflict of interest violation – and I note that 55 percent of Torontonians have said they would be happy to see you get the boot on a technicality, so please understand you would not win an emergency election), and it certainly seems like you want to keep being Mayor even if you don’t like doing the actual job – then you have to do the work. This might seem like a dreadfully obvious thing to say, but apparently you need it said to you, because you are an enormous bawling child of a man. Do the job or go home. You’re already quite probably the least effective Mayor in the city’s history (and given that we had Mel Lastman in charge less than a decade ago that really says a lot); leaving early won’t tarnish your reputation further because there is simply nothing left to tarnish.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I was at DragonCon last weekend when I found out that City of Heroes is being closed down. (I was also at DragonCon last weekend when I was supposed to be making last week’s post, which is why, along with some boring work-related stuff, you haven’t heard from me in a while. But I digress.) It’s hard to really describe how I feel about this news; I don’t really have a whole lot to analogize it to. I was too young to be in organized fandom when ‘Doctor Who’ was canceled, and I had already lost a lot of my emotional investment in ‘Buffy’ by the time it went away. Even situations like the sunsetting of the WotC Star Wars TCG, or the various times that I’ve seen Shadowfist look like it was going to go the way of all flesh don’t apply, because I still had the cards I’d already bought. I can’t get new Netrunner expansions anymore, but WotC didn’t come to my house and burn my collection. This feels more like finding out that a new highway is coming through my neighborhood. My house isn’t being wrecked, but a lot of the places where I spent time with my friends over the last seven or eight years aren’t going to be there anymore.

Even if the game does go down, though (and I know of and approve of the various efforts to save the game in one form or another) I think that the people who worked on it can take a lot of pride in what they did over the last eight years. City of Heroes might not have been one of the biggest MMOs out there, but its influence was out of proportion to its subscriber base. It was the first MMO to really push the idea that you shouldn’t punish people for playing your game; lenient death penalties, casual-friendly loot systems, and a grouping design that pretty much everyone in the industry scrambled to emulate made it clear that MMOs could, if done right, appeal to a large audience. It might be an exaggeration to say that MMOs might be a much smaller genre without City of Heroes, but I don’t think it’s wrong.

I’m trying not to be angry at NCSoft over this. I’m certainly not a satisfied customer, and I don’t think they see it from the same perspective as I do, but I think it’s about as useful to get mad at a company for making a business decision as it is for getting mad at a shark for biting you. NCSoft is a business, their goal is to make the most money they can. They think something else will be more profitable than CoH is for them currently, and they have the numbers to back that up. I can get upset over that, but I can’t really argue with it. In some ways, I think the saddest thing about all this is the way that it’s revealed an ugly vein of racism in the fan community, as some people are muttering darkly about how the Korean-based NCSoft is somehow doing this because they don’t like their American playerbase. I know these people are upset, and I can sympathize with that anger, but that doesn’t make what they’re saying right or appropriate. They’re doing what any company does, trying to find the most profitable investment of their funds. City of Heroes is profitable, but it’s not a cash cow and it’s never going to be. Do I wish NCSoft cared more about its fans and the wonderful development team that have put years of effort into this game? Of course. But companies don’t work that way.

I know that if the various efforts to save the game fail, I’m going to spend a lot of time missing Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. But I think what I’m dwelling on most right now, though, is the lost potential. I was still creating characters up through about three weeks ago, taking advantage of the new powersets and looking forward to the next issue (I already had an idea for a Chow Yun-Fat inspired Dual Pistols/Martial Combat blaster.) So many things that were teased and hinted at now may never be revealed. (Although I have to confess, I’m amused by the speculation that the “Coming Storm” and the mysterious enemy referenced over the last several issues was, in fact, the end of the game world at the hands of the developers.) Playing City of Heroes was always fun, but more than that, it seemed like a world of limitless possibilities that stretched out into the future. That’s gone, now, even though the memories are always going to be great ones.

What will I do with the time I spent playing City of Heroes? I don’t know. I probably won’t pick up another MMO. The setting was always a big part of the draw for me, and Champions Online never caught my interest in the same way. (As for DC Universe Online…I think I played it for five minutes, but that was only because it took me four minutes and thirty seconds to figure out how to quit.) I’ve already backed up my characters (thank you, mad genius who invented the character export tool!) and I’ll probably move on to other interests, and wait for the day when someone’s fond memories of this are strong enough that they make the game live again. Because to me, this game is worth waiting for.

So this admittedly funny post is circulating around the internets, and while people are arguing whether or not Jimmy Carter is underrated (dude was Navy) or betting on whether Teddy Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson is the biggest ringer, the one thing they all mostly agree on is that Obama would get killed early on because he’s too nice.

People are underrating Obama because Obama wants to get along, and here is why:

There’s a great Star Trek novel – bear with me, people – by Julia Ecklar called The Kobayashi Maru, which is theoretically about how Kirk, Scotty, Chekov and Sulu all took that famous “built to fail” test, and it’s some of the best Trek writing I’ve ever read, up there with the Zar books by A.C. Crispin or Final Frontier by Diane Carey or How Much For Just The Planet? by the late, great John M. Ford. I know this sounds like total nerdbait, but I am genuinely serious when I say that the top tier of 80s Trek books are simply some of the greatest genre fiction ever written – there’s real genius there, writers who wanted to write Big Sci-Fi Adventure and realized that Trek books were their best option for doing so. If you haven’t read these books, you’re missing out.

So anyway, The Kobayashi Maru is basically four short stories written into a binding narrative. They’re all very good: Kirk recounts how he cheated on the test (and it’s even funnier than it was in the 2009 film, and that was pretty damn funny), Sulu’s story is a melancholy and beautiful meditation on loss and the harsh realities of becoming an adult, and Scotty more or less blows up the universe in his test, which is kind of classic.

But Chekov’s story is brilliant because it skips the Maru test completely and instead proceeds to a second test Starfleet cadets are made to fail, which is basically a giant version of Mafia/Werewolf where everybody is armed with stun lasers: there’s a “spy” whose instruction is to kill everybody else and they have to survive. Chekov and his fellow cadets basically all blow the shit out of one another with their stun lasers and in the process torpedo many a friendship, and at the end, when everybody is “dead,” along comes the instructor. Everybody assumes Chekov is going to win because he “killed” the most other people, and then the instructor drops the bombshell:

They all failed. Like everybody always fails this test, because everybody does what Chekov and his classmates did, because everybody always decides to kill everybody else and survive to “win.” Except, of course, for one person, who realized that the point of the exercise wasn’t “kill everybody else,” because Starfleet doesn’t work that way. What that student did was refuse to play the game: he created a “safe zone” where people could come and show that they could be trusted (by surrendering their weapons) and once you can trust some people, you can extend that trust to more people because you’ve got people to watch your back. The whole “only one survivor” thing is a con, plain and simple. And of course, that student who figured that out was James T. Kirk.

And that is why Obama would win. It’s not about getting along for the sake of getting along. It’s about being smart enough to know what game you’re playing in the first place. And when you’re dealing with “every President fights to the death with knives,” you’ve got to realize most of them are smart enough to know that doing so would probably get them killed, and most of them wouldn’t want to fight anyway. (Jackson and Nixon, yes, but not most of them.)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Torontoist, as they do every year, had me go to Fan Expo and be amongst the nerds, and so I wrote stuff about that.

Not mentioned: the sweet dedicated sketchbooks I started this con, one of Brainiac Five and one of Doctor Strange. (I may in future start a third dedicated sketchbook titled “Deadpool Plus A Giant Fish.”)

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.

And I strongly advise you watch that Honey Boo Boo trailer. If only to know the future. The horrible, horrible future.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Things have been a little light here this week because Torontoist asked me to review the latest report into the events at the G20 Summit here in Toronto back in 2010, and it took me a while to plow through it. But if you want my take on this one, it is here.

My weely TV column is up at Torontoist.