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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Welcome to the results of the 2013 Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

We saw a marked increase in voting this year, thanks to large numbers of voters sent our way from Scott Keith, Wreddit, The Mandible Claw, Botchamania, Old School Wrestling Review and lots of other wrestling fan sites. As a result, this year’s total votes came out to a whopping 767 – well over a 50% increase over last year. We also saw this year a trend I personally welcome, which was some wrestlers actively campaigning on Twitter – at least a little bit – for victory in the Awards. Granted, none of those campaigns worked, but at least one major fan campaign did, as you shall see.

You can find the results for the “Best of” Awards here.

You can find the results for the “Worst of” Awards here.

Finally, you can find the master list of all vote tallies here.

See you next year!

I’ve been running an ad campaign for Al’Rashad for the past couple of weeks on Project: Wonderful and it has been an interesting experience to see what has proven to be a worthwhile investment. A lot of my initial predictions about which comics would prove the best advertising space have been correct; a lot have not been correct. Meandering thoughts follow:

1. Ad size and placement matter. This is probably so obvious that it does not need to be said, but: leaderboard ads at the bottom of a page are less effective than leaderboard ads at the top of a page. Skyscraper sideboard ads get less effective the further down the page they are. Half-banner ads with less visual real estate are less effective than leaderboard ads that are twice the size. And so forth. This was most dramatic on Girls With Slingshots, where I had a half-banner ad running and which received over two million page-views of the ad itself, but a clickthrough rate that was abysmal. On top of which, while my banner and halfbanner ads were, I think, quite elegantly designed, the leaderboard and skyscraper ads were just better: more art illustrating the fantasy world concept more dramatically, the opportunity to use a cool slogan (“Welcome To The Next Grand Adventure” – I went full Stan Lee on it), etc.1

2. Site selection is harder than it looks. I had a shortlist of sites I wanted to consider advertising on, either because I admired their work or because I thought they’d have a reader base more inclined to click through or both. Many of these ideas did not work on the metric I was using, which is “cost per clickthrough.”2 Girls Without Slingshots, for example, was a relative failure, even if I do love Danielle Corsetto’s work and felt her audience might be receptive to an LGBT/minority-friendly fantasy adventure (the ad campaign started the week of the Alric reveal). Axe Cop was an outright failure: expensive, very few clicks. Hark! a Vagrant and Dinosaur Comics (both of which I wanted to advertise on because, hey, fellow Canadians) were both mediocre advertising opportunities. The Jinxworld forums underperformed sharply and I kept those ads up for “visibility” longer than I should have done. The Giant in the Playground forums were, on the other hand, solid performers throughout, and my MVP turned out to be Gunnerkrigg Court, which sent me engaged comic readers at excellent price points.

3. Avoid overpriced traffic. Early on I decided that I wanted to concentrate on getting clickthroughs as efficiently as possible, and gave myself a certain level of expense per clickthrough in order to make that happen: I wanted the largest number of potential readers as opposed to the more nebulous “let’s raise our public profile” objective some people want out of an advertising campaign. The problem with this is that a lot of PW traffic is so overpriced that getting efficient clickthroughs becomes nearly impossible. H!AV and Dinosaur Comics are both good examples of this: the problem was not that they didn’t send me a reasonable number of clicks as compared to total unique readers visiting their sites, but that because they are Stars of the Webcomic World, the price for those clicks was too expensive; I mean, if I get an engaged reader for my comic, I don’t care if they came from Dinosaur Comics or a furry porn website.3 And those two comics weren’t nearly as bad as Questionable Content (insanely expensive, never justified the cost) or Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (high-priced, reader base didn’t really transfer) or, and this surprised me a lot, Oglaf. I thought Oglaf readers would be a lock to enjoy Al’Rashad but, although they sent a reasonable number of readers my way, not nearly in the numbers I expected given their readership nor did those readers come at an affordable price point.

All of this said: the advertising campaign was quite a success and readership of the comic has clearly spiked in a sustainable way, because – and I say this with a bit of ego at least – there’s a lot of good comic for people to read, and that’s the most important thing.

1. A caveat: all of my ads were static because I didn’t want to try using GIFs on the initial ad buy. I might reconsider this simply because GIFs can cram in more content, but not without sacrificing design. [↩]
2. Something Project: Wonderful will measure for you, incidentally. [↩]
3. So long as they don’t start harassing me for “more sexy badger porn.” Which they don’t, because come on. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

I made an appearance on The Mandible Claw podcast to talk the RSPW awards and, surprisingly, become the defender of both Jeff Jarrett and The Great Khali.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

OK, so this is possibly premature. It’s only the first issue, after all; this isn’t even like watching the pilot episode so much as watching the first ten minutes of the pilot episode. But the first issue of the new Ms. Marvel is definitely something to love. And not just because it’s a genuinely different perspective on the superhero story, created by people who have a genuinely different and interesting take on the “teenage hero” subgenre; this is a great comic because it’s awesome.

Pretty much every page has a laugh-out-loud line, from Kamala’s unseemly interest in bacon on page one (“delicious, delicious infidel meat”) through to her Avengers/My Little Pony fanfic (which has almost 1000 upvotes on freakingcool.com) to her explanation that she wants to be just like Carol Danvers, “except I would wear the classic, politically incorrect costume and kick butt in giant wedge heels.” G. Willow Wilson makes Kamala instantly charming, funny, relatable and sympathetic, while giving the reader a look at a cultural experience that doesn’t share a whole lot with Peter Parker or Richard Ryder or Christopher Powell or…wow, there’ve been a lot of whitebread teen heroes out there over the years.

But again, I don’t want to say that this is a “worthy” book, even though it is, because what strikes you about it isn’t that it’s saying something important about race and religion and cultural relations and the very real prejudice that second-generation immigrants from Muslim countries face, and the difficulties they have in fitting in with their native culture while keeping true to the cultural heritage of their families. I want to say that this is a good book, because it’s well-written and amazingly drawn by Adrian Alphona and Ian Herring and it really made me want to see what happens in the next issue. And ultimately, that’s what you should want out of your comics on a monthly basis. That’s what I love about comics. And I’m happy I took a flyer on this one.

A while ago, I asked commenters to list five songs they thought I should listen to / that they would recommend to me, and that I would listen to them and write about my reactions. There were a huge lot of them, so we’re going to do this in stages.

Caetano Veloso, “Tropicália“: This was actually interesting because I have heard of Veloso previously but only in his context as an activist – I’ve never sought out any of his music. And it’s nice: Latin-style folk with some rock influences, but that sentence doesn’t really do it justice – it’s very much its own thing. (At least I didn’t call it “worldbeat,” give me points for that, right?) Not my thing exactly but it was a nice experience. pass with affection

Caladan Brood, “A Voice Born of Stone and Dust“: Man, this is stereotypical modern metal: a ten-minute long song about a set of fantasy novels (which exist only because somebody decided to write about the gameworld from his GURPS campaign, I shit you not), with someone singing through their esophagus about undeads. And then it just keeps going. And… yeah. pass

continue reading "The Five Songs Project, Results Post #2: C"

So James The Tech Guy tweeted this link at me and probably wasn’t expecting that it would piss me off. Which it did. James, to his credit, was of course thinking: “MGK likes wrestling, MGK lives in Toronto, this is wrestling in Toronto, QED.” (I mean, I assume that’s what he was thinking. James can tell us if I’m wrong.)

But my problem with this outfit is not that they are unserious or quite clearly trying to have a laugh with professional wrestling. I mean, just this past weekend was National Pro Wrestling Day, a live-streamed free event put on by the various wrestling promotions that sprung up when CHIKARA Pro “ended”, and which featured, among other things, an Estonian frog-man with the power of Thor knocking an entire ringful of wrestlers off his feet with his mighty hammer, a formerly evil man pretending to be a giant ant turning his back on his corporate masters to remain alongside his new friends who are also men pretending to be giant ants, a pair of evil ice cream cones being hypnotized by a funky dancing Pharaoh, three men time-traveling to the present in a DeLorean to heroically attack the aforementioned evil corporate masters, and two lifelong enemies hugging it out, who are an evil football jock and a heroic marching band leader. And National Pro Wrestling Day was fine and good, wonderful in so many different ways that you just have to stare at how good it was, both in spite of its inherent silliness and because of its inherent silliness -just like so much of pro wrestling. (See also Dragon Dragon or the Chikara baseball game or, in the “majors,” anything involving Santino Marella – such as the snake charming bit.)

This Indiegogo campaign for a crappy hipster pro wrestling event in Toronto is not that thing – it has in it a lot of the amateurism that made 90s backyard wrestling so dangerous (and occasionally so cynical), although it doesn’t appear to be as dangerous because from what they show of the matches they’ve taken out everything exciting about pro wrestling, which is probably for the best considering if you don’t know how to take a bump, even a simple bodyslam is very dangerous. But generally speaking, the lack of a damn given is pretty evident, and the one thing that makes indie wrestling so wonderful is that everybody present, fans and wrestlers and referees and staff all alike, give very much of a damn indeed. Even when indie wrestling isn’t particularly good as wrestling per se, it’s still people who care about a shared community and craft, and this thing doesn’t have any of that. It’s like somebody standing next to a cellist playing Bach’s “Six Suites” and making armpit fart noises and saying it’s the same thing because A) they’re being “creative,” B) they’ve managed to find fans who like it, C) technically they’re both making sounds so come on. But it’s not the same thing.

And I think it’s great that they want to promote queer and feminist identities. But, if you ask me what would be best to promote feminism in a wrestling context, I’m gonna go with SHIMMER or Team Sendai Girls fearlessly taking on the Young Bucks and Mike Bennett or anything Manami Toyota. Because those are all awesome because of passion and dedication – and yes, passion and dedication matters. It matters more than anything, and that’s not just me being a humourless fanboy because when I say that I’m not just talking about wrestling but about everything. Because pro wrestling might, at heart, be a big joke – but it’s our joke, and these people haven’t learned how to tell it yet. And that’s kind of a problem.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

What can I say, it wouldn’t have been much of a marathon if it was short. That’s right, I’m still talking about the movies I caught on Nextflix a couple of months ago, in one long epic movie-watching binge while my family was out of town and I had undisputed control of the remote. And this time, it’s indie sci-fi movie ‘Primer’.

What everyone usually talks about when they talk about ‘Primer’ is the epic head-fuck twist in the third act that suddenly makes you re-evaluate everything you thought was going on in the entire movie, and that makes you realize that everything you imagined you understood is in fact something completely different. I won’t spoil that twist, because it’s something that everyone should decide for themselves whether they want to know beforehand, but I did have it spoiled for me. And I don’t mind, because it means I was able to concentrate on what the movie was about instead of what was happening in it.

Because ‘Primer’ isn’t a movie about time travel in the way that most time travel movies are about time travel. ‘Primer’ is a movie about the way that big technological advances aren’t made by people who are necessarily well-equipped to consider the ethical and moral consequences of the discoveries, and the way that the people who wind up in a position to control those discoveries are the ones who exploit them most ruthlessly and not the people who created them or the people who could make the best use of them. It’s about the way that people who think that their friendship will survive business endeavours generally get exploited by the people who don’t much care one way or the other, and it’s also about the way that the pioneers in any new science are taking risks that they aren’t even aware of. (The scene where the main characters realize that they’re developing hand tremors and they don’t even know why…or how much worse they’ll get…is tremendously affecting.)

And it’s also a movie about time travel. But it’s a peculiarly practical one. The main characters spend a lot of time theorizing about how the time travel they’ve invented might work, but a lot of their knowledge comes from painful trial and error. At one point, a character shows up that they assume must be from the future, then collapses into a coma. Do they show him the time machine in the future, and send him back? Does he collapse because they never show him the time machine, creating a fatal paradox? The main characters don’t know, and they never find out. Unlike most time travel movies, and very much like in the real world, ignorance of the laws of physics is no defence against them.

There’s a lot that’s challenging about ‘Primer’–it’s a movie that makes very few concessions to watchability, and it can be very dry and perversely technical. This isn’t a popcorn movie by any stretch. But if you’re patient and willing to let the film unfold, it’s probably the most interesting documentary about imaginary technology you’ll ever see.

Andrew Jeanes pointed this out to me:

The twerking gets all the play because white people think it’s a funny word, but it’s that unison at 1:13 that just kills me: until that moment I didn’t realize that there was an ideal to which “group hip-hop choreo for people in Stormtrooper outfits” could aspire, but yeah, that unison is: the use of unison animation-style to reflect machinelike fascism, that’s it right there.