This week’s edition of Televisualist, written by me don’t you know, is available for all and sundry to peruse, so peruse away.

Yes, I will be doing this every week, now that you ask.

Another week, another edition of my weekly TV column at Torontoist. If you like TV, then give it a go, why doncha.

This week sees the debut of my new TV column at Torontoist, so go read it and recommend it, willya? Not that it changes my pay grade any either way, but.

Today, it seems, is Blog Day, wherein if you have a blog you are supposed to recommend five blogs that you think people should read. Of course, this is kind of the point of a blogroll in the first place, and I heartily endorse every blog on that right-side toolbar as being an entertaining and/or informative read (and usually both).

But here are five more blogs I recommend anyway.

The Impulsive Buy – a website devoted mostly to product reviews of the stuff you see every day around you (new junk food, novelty products in supermarkets and Wal-Mart and the like, et cetera). Very funny, frequently insightful, and the digressions are choice.

Cherryflava – a South African blog devoted to, well, all things South African re: culture and the like. Clever, witty, and regularly updated.

From The Archives – a blog by a career science bureaucrat that varies from entertaining personal trivia to even-more entertaining spitfights with libertarians from someone who actually understands the purpose and actual (as opposed to imagined) pitfalls of large government, as well as the benefits and justification thereof.

[daily dose of imagery] – my favorite photoblog. The only photoblog from wherein I have created wallpaper for my desktop. (And I love the site design.)

Angry Bear – because you know what I like? Graphs. Lots of graphs. With commentary explaining the graphs. And why the graphs are important. If you love graphs, you will love Angry Bear.

…there is simply not enough yes.

Chocolate rain
No verse, no bridge, always the refrain
Chocolate rain
Musical hooks bring you net dot fame
Chocolate rain
Irritating like a mustard stain
Chocolate rain
Repetition seals it in your brain
Chocolate rain
Every line, it has to rhyme with “rain”
Chocolate rain
Narrative build? That’s just kind of lame
Chocolate rain
Kimmel airs him, that makes me profane
Chocolate rain
Fifteen minutes is his public reign
Chocolate rain
14:59 – oh what a shame
Chocolate rain
Hyperlinking is his chosen game
Chocolate rain
Western civ’lization’s newest bane

(In all seriousness, why Tay Zonday isn’t looking into voice acting is beyond me. Phil LaMarr has to force his voice downwards to do what Tay Zonday can do naturally.)

No, seriously. I’m horribly impressed that Offended Fandom ™ has managed to get some attention in their newly adopted crusade against a pro-anorexia community (which apparently only managed to start offending them in the last two weeks – funny, how that goes).

But stop. I’m serious.

This is not me particularly giving a damn about a pro-anorexia community, because they are creepy as hell. But.

continue reading "Oh God Just Stop Already"

I keep getting email about my banning and the subsequent fandom issues on Livejournal, so I figured I should probably address it all in one fell swoop.

continue reading "On Livejournal and SixApart And All That, For Once And For All"

Not in general, mind you, but he’s pretty obviously running with one of the great incorrect assumptions about the Internet – “you can find anything on the net!” (And come on, the implicit dismissal of public libraries means exactly that.)

You hear this all the time, usually from people who think Google and/or Wikipedia are the fonts of all knowledge. Don’t get me wrong – Google and Wikipedia are awesome sauce, fundamentally changing how we can learn. But they don’t and never have had everything. Wikipedia doesn’t have a whole lot on the specifics of Byzantine armour, for example. Google cannot point you to theprinciplesofrotaryaircraftdesign.com, because it doesn’t exist and neither does anything else like it. Obviously we could go on at length about stuff that’s hard to find on the blogotubes, but that’s not the point; the point is that the internet is, by and large, fantastic for general and introductory information, and then very hit and miss when it comes to specifics. (Google Scholar was created for a reason.)

One of the most valuable points I heard Gail Simone make when she was doing her “introduction to comics writing” seminar at a recent con I attended (and if she ever reads this – Gail, you did fine, and it’s not your fault a lot of your audience was kind of dumb) was that one of the most valuable elements any comics writer or artist (and I would extend her point to “any creative individual working in descriptive narrative form”) can have is a personal reference library, filled with those giant picture/photo-books, the ones with titles like “So You Want To Know What 50,000 Different Guns Look Like” or “The Total Completist’s Guide To The Trains Of Eastern Europe” – to say nothing of history books, science manuals, compilations of “Ripley’s Believe It… or Not!”, et cetera. This is because Wikipedia, for any writer, is a mixed blessing – sure, it lets you become instantly grounded in the basics of any setting or factoid you require, but on the other hand, all you’re getting is the basics, and there’s always so much depth that Wikipedia cannot hope to plumb.

And this is just basic reference material we’re talking about here – stuff you can actually use to learn professionally is generally not going to pop up for free on the blogotubes because there’s no real incentive for anybody to put it out there for free. This is why libraries exist in the first place, you understand – to make available to the general public what otherwise would not be available, to democratize information. That need isn’t going away anytime in the near future. And that’s why libraries are still relevant in the digital age.