I hate it when I get an idea, look around on the Internet, and find out that somebody else beat me to it and only very recently at that.

As usual, my weekly TV column is up at Torontoist, which you should read because I am clever and funny and, let us be honest, devastatingly handsome.

Excerpted from the current review of Battlestar Galactica: Razor on Television Without Pity:

Now, Commander Lee Adama is flying the Pegasus. And it will change him, too. “The Bucket and the Beast,” they called them. Pegasus was a gift, too. Between the Bucket and the Beast, between Galactica and Pegasus, between Cain and Abel, or Adama, there’s a razor line of difference. Luke 11:49-51, and it’s once in a blue moon that I go near the New Testament, but check it: “Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute: That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation.” Between the altar and the temple, well, that’s where everything happens. It’s where we live, in space; in time, it’s our generation that pays. No matter what year you were born in, you’re in the generation that pays, because this has all happened before and will happen again, and we slay our prophets as quickly as they come. Between the temple and the altar, there’s a razor line of difference.

What the fuck?

No, seriously, what the fuck?

I like Galactica too, but come on, isn’t it a given that one wants to avoid the Wank Train like this?

An interesting photoessay: one week’s worth of food, around the planet.

…and another edition of my weekly TV column over at Torontoist.

If you want to read one of the most startlingly bullshit interviews I have seen in ages, go here and read Marvel publisher Dan Buckley’s comments on their new online initiative and illegal downloading.

It’s almost infuriating. The level at which Buckley flatly refuses to engage perfectly valid questions and concerns about Marvel’s digital model is just insane. A perfectly fair comparison to Rhapsody is mentioned, and Buckley says “no, it’s not like that” without even bothering to explain why. (The answer, incidentally, as to why Marvel’s online comic movement isn’t quite like Rhapsody is that culturally we’re used to paying to listen to music we don’t own, but we’re not used to paying for books we don’t own and want to read. Of course, that particular difference is one that actually makes Marvel’s digital position worse rather than better.)

And, of course, Marvel’s strategy towards illegal downloading is kept deliberately vague. Questions as to how the torrent model that exists – which is blatantly superior to Marvel’s in a large variety of ways for the consumer – will be dealt with are left unanswered, except to say that Marvel is going to be taking its cues from how the music industry has handled illegal downloading, which is like taking tips from a caveman on how to beat Gary Kasparov in a game of chess.

But it gets worse! Explaining the choice of initial selection and how new comics will be added each week, Buckley says: “This will include providing marketing support for our publishing and entertainment initiatives…”

No shit. Here is the list of comics currently available via Marvel’s digital delivery system. The majority of these comics can be summed up as follows:

1.) Failed miniseries and ongoings which didn’t particularly impact the market and which have no serious sales value (Gambit, District X, Jubilee, Doc Samson, et cetera), including whole runs of series that you can now get at remaindered bookstores (Spider-Man’s Tangled Web).

2.) One-shots not easily collected in trade format or elsewhere (Civil War: Choosing Sides, for example).

3.) …and first issues of things Marvel wants you to buy in trade or single issues (Moon Knight, Civil War, Runaways, Captain America, Immortal Iron Fist, Annihilation, et cetera). For longer-running titles, Marvel’s pretty blatant about this, giving you the chance to read the first issue in each trade.

There is a name for small teaser portions. It is called advertising. This is what Marvel’s entire digital initiative amounts to: you are encouraged to pay money to buy the real comics. They’re not even particularly shy about it, because when you read the first issue of any given comic that you’ve paid to read, they remind you to buy the collection.

Granted, Marvel’s strategy is to use the digital model to encourage new readers. That’s fine. I am down with encouraging new readers. But last I checked, not many people were horribly encouraged by the prospect of paying to read the same fucking comic twice.

And of course there’s a model they could have used. Amazon’s putting it out there right now with their Kindle reader: “you buy the book for a very low price, and anytime you need to download it from us, we let you.” It’s a fantastic model for a publisher to adopt, because it essentially lends control of a person’s library to the publisher. (I’m of two minds about it, personally, but there’s no question that it would be good for Marvel.) Use some proprietary software to keep illegal trading of the comics to a minimum and Marvel could be raking in bucketloads.

Sweet Jesus, how is it possible for a company to fuck up this badly?

Very quietly, just before Thanksgiving so nobody would notice, Marvel and DC sent cease-and-desist letters to zcultfm.com. For those of you who do not know, zcultfm is – or, rather, was – the comic book torrents site, with an immense library of torrents, many of which even worked.

It is also how I have first read most of the new comics published over the last three years. Every single comic parody I’ve done had its origins in DCP scans. (I have a scanner, but it’s not a very good one.) For those wondering, I generally delete most of my downloaded comics after a single read. With the exception of Legion of Super-Heroes, I have not purchased a single issue of a comic book since about 2002 or so.

So I must be a downloading leech, only costing DC and Marvel money. Right?

Well, let me put it this way. This is most of my collection of trade paperbacks and comic hardcovers.

Now, the top right shelf actually doesn’t really have any comics on it, it’s just books that mostly fit in that space nicely, so ignore that shelf, but the rest, pretty much all trade collections of comics and the occasional original hardcover.Now here is my collection again, except that this time, everything I’ve bought as a result of reading the issues first after downloading them (almost always from zcult) and giving them a try? Is highlighted.

My, that’s a lot of highlighting. And since the resolution is a little low, let me just point out that the vast, vast majority of the highlighted content gets published by – wait for it – DC and Marvel.zcultfm – along with scans_daily, which more or less exists as a fan community for the downloads propogated mainly by zcult and Demonoid (also recently shut down) is responsible for me buying the hardcover of The Immortal Iron Fist. It’s responsible for me buying NextWave and the Garth Ennis Punisher and the JMS/JRJr Amazing Spider-Man and the Milligan/Allred X-Force (and then X-Statix) and Runaways and the Brubaker Captain America and getting me finally turned on to the Fantastic Four.

DC? It’s responsible for me buying All Star Superman and Seven Soldiers of Victory and Fables (all of it) and Y The Last Man (all of it) and The Losers (all of it) and Pride of Baghdad and War Stories (which I never would have even known existed were it not for a Garth Ennis megatorrent I downloaded mostly to reread the issues of Hitman I sold in anticipation of collecting the trade paperbacks which were halted mid-run – and incidentally, DC, fuck you very much for that) and Light Brigade and Formerly Known As The Justice League and Gotham Central.

Oh, and if any smaller/indie publisher feels like getting in a snit, I’ll tack on Queen and Country and .303 and the Busiek Conan and The Five Fists Of Science and… well, I could go on.

Comic downloads transformed me from being a guy who bought one comic book per month and the very occasional graphic novel or trade collection, and into a guy who buys two to four trades a month (and sometimes more). I wasn’t going to go back to investing in single issues, because single issues are a terrible value for money and a horrible pain in the ass to store and I can’t lend them out easily when I tell somebody “hey, you should totally read this.” And if you go to zcult and read the postings from the fanboys there, it’s quite obvious that I represent the norm for comic downloaders, despite the fact that our doing so irritates Dan Slott terribly. (PS: Dan Slott, She-Hulk is on my trade to-buy list, although right now I’m steadily working my way through the Bendis/Maleev Daredevil books.)

And the important thing to note here is that DC and Marvel, unlike the incredibly backward music companies they’re trying to imitate here with their painfully stupid legal action, do not have a realistic competing model to offer. Marvel’s pay-for-comic service, despite my kind words previously, has a clunky interface, is slow, doesn’t display the comic work as well as a basic .cbr or .cbz file, doesn’t have a good selection… with a lot of improvements it could be a realistic model, but since I wrote my approving post, everything I’ve heard indicates that Marvel considers their currently mediocre-at-best offering to be a finished, final-stage product, which only earns them a “what the fuck?”

I mean, at least the record companies, when they shut down Oink, could point to iTunes and say “look, we offer mp3s for sale for money, please use that.” And despite the fact that iTunes is kind of a ripoff, at least it’s an option. DC and Marvel don’t even have that. If I want to read the old Roy Thomas Infinity, Inc. run, or the original Speedball ongoing, I have three options: 1.) Wait around for them to collect it in trade, 2.) Spend a small fortune on back issues I don’t want to store in the first place, or 3.) Download the comics torrents. Quick, which one do you think I’m going to pick?

How sad is this?

What’s worse is that they’re just antagonizing people to no good end, because everybody knows how torrent filesharing works now. Here’s the short version:

MAJOR MEDIA COMPANY: Hey, you! You’re downloading the product I made without paying money! Stop that at once!
INDIVIDUAL DOWNLOADERS: Uh, no.
COMPANY: Oh, that’s how it is, is it? Well, I’m going to shut down your torrent-sharing website!
DOWNLOADERS: Fine. We’ll just go over to a different site which will take you three to six months to find out about and shut down.
(Repeat until heat-death of universe or The Rapture, whichever comes first.)

I simply can’t stress enough how shortsighted, how ignorant, how goddamned lunkheaded DC and Marvel are being right now. They aren’t just shooting themselves in the foot like other media companies; they’re shooting themselves in the head. Internet downloading and the word-of-mouth generated by it has been quietly driving their business for the last couple of years now and they want to kill it. It’s just staggering.

Ben Goldacre writes a long, long and extremely pointed post on homeopathy and its practitioners.

Short version: he does not like it greatly!

Patrick Metzger, my fellow Torontoista, posted this recently on Facebook (presumably because Patrick is the very model of irony personified), and I thought it deserved wider distribution than his circle of Facebook friends.

Facebook, the bloom is off the rose. A few months back I gushed like a schoolgirl about the Internet phenom that’s turned millions into social trivia junkies, but the blinders are starting to come off.

Facebook doesn’t really do anything useful. No news, weather, not even sports updates, and certainly no learning. It’s not a gathering place for discussion, but narcissism central, a place for people to show off the person they want others to think they are. Here are my books, my music, my beliefs. Look at me, my attractive friends, my kids, my pets, my hip-hop group, my sports car, the places I’ve traveled, the movies I’ve watched. Here’s how I’m feeling right now. And now. And now. Do you like me? Want to be like me? It’s a conversation between 40 million drunks, each one shouting over the others to tell their story.

Facebook groups illustrate this self-congratulatory ethos. They rarely have a real-world function, but serve as popularity contests for ego-thespians to promote their latest low-budget film project or idiot political agenda, or joinable bumper sticker philosophies intended to demonstrate wit, wealth, non-conformity or some other personal attribute that members want to be seen as possessing. There are more than 500 groups with the word “crazy” in them, ditto for “sexy”, “drunk”, “boobs”, “bling”, and “Porsche”, not to mention “faith”, “hope”, and “charity”. Even more than individual profiles, groups are brand building gone wild – this is me, my mottos, my logos, my ideas! Love me! The addition of new advertising functionality to link people to genuine dollars and cents brands is a logical consequence of this mad rush to label ourselves online. Everyone knows Nike; by attaching myself to it I get an instant identity that millions of people can see instantly.

Still, in the meat world we all wear brands. We all project an image that we hope others will buy. What makes Facebook more harmful than the day-to-day self-promotion in which we all engage? Because for all its interactivity, it’s really a one-way conversation, where disinterest is easily mistaken for approval. On Facebook, there’s no one to tell you to shut up.

I like the piece, although Patrick fails to also include all those goddamned zombie/werewolf/vampire “games” that are little more than desperate cries for attention – here’s a hint, people who create those games, tag works as a game because you get to run around a lot, not because the tagging dynamic is that interesting.

That having been said, I think Patrick undervalues the importance of the personal representation that Facebook can generate. Being able to say “this is who I am and this is what I believe,” and then being able to aggregate those beliefs simply to show critical mass of opinion – what this amounts to is opinion polling not generated by the media elite, and I think that’s potentially invaluable. Would the push to save the Sam The Record Man storefront have been successful without people spontaneously using Facebook to demonstrate that a whole lot of Torontonians really wanted to keep the giant records on Yonge Street? Heck, a copycat campaign to save the truck coming out of the CityTV building was referred to by CP24 when they decided to keep the truck (which is the most wonderful kind of eyesore) exactly where it was.

This sort of independent issue-campaigning works because it makes clear to those in power – even when the power they’re in isn’t that massive or significant – where the interests and priorities of ordinary folks really lie. I think that’s worth a lot of annoying zombie games.

Robots are not very good at stand-up comedy.

An open letter to Subway.

My weekly television column is, as it is every Monday, up at Torontoist. Go forth, and read.

Specifically, Canada is totally getting the shaft when it comes to mobile phone costs. Check out those graphs. We’re worse than Rwanda, for crissake.

This is just another example of how Canadian politicians’ rhetoric about wanting to make Canadian industry competitive are all too often just empty rhetoric. See also: Canada’s continuing paucity of funding for scientific research, especially at the university level. It really annoys the shit out of me no end.

New Zealand to rest of world: “no fatties, please.”

Just say no to Uncle Joey.