Hi, everybody! Sorry it’s been a while since I posted, but I was traveling through a number of parallel universes and checking out all sorts of movies that never got made in our reality, and Internet access was spotty. I can’t say the trip was worth every penny (the universe where every single movie since 1966 was a sequel to ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’ was a particular lowlight) but I did really enjoy seeing all of the James Bond movies in the universe where Batman and James Bond had each other’s Rogue’s Galleries. Still, as always with these things, some were better than others…and since this is the Internet, naturally I am compelled to rank them all for you!

continue reading "Ranking the James Bond/Batman Mash-Ups"

If you watch professional sports of any sort, you know that good players have a productivity curve. They come out young and limber but not really knowing what they’re doing, and then they learn their craft and how to exploit their natural talents to the fullest, and they hit their peak. And then Father Time steps in and they start aging, and they can’t run as fast or push as hard or go as long or heal as quickly, because now they’re in their thirties trying to hang with kids in their early twenties, and their skill may be even greater but their bodies betray them. This is a fact of sports.

However, great players, the ones with hall of fame careers – these are the ones who adapt. They recognize that their old style of play no longer allows them to flourish, and they work like hell to find a new game, refining the parts they can still do to a godlike level while discarding those areas where they are now substandard. Every athlete tries to do this; many fail. The great ones succeed – Michael Jordan revamped his game at least twice, for example (and some claim three times) to accomodate his diminishing physicality.

The reason I am discussing this is because writing, when you get down to it, is a lot like sports. Nobody talks about how, as writers (or most artists, really) get older, they tend to produce less great work. The good stuff in most writers’ careers comes in the middle section, and the stuff at the end is usually the province of the tolerable. The stuff fans enjoy but new readers don’t seek out.

And, to make all of this relevant to the post title, this is why Raising Steam is so wonderful. Over his last few books we’ve seen Terry Pratchett trying to be the Terry Pratchett of old, but since about Wintersmith we’ve seen the slow and deleterious effects of his early-onset Alzheimer’s creeping into the work. Still enjoyable books, for the most part, but not since Thud! has there been a Pratchett book that feels like height-of-his-powers Pterry and we all recognized that, and marked it as Mother Nature being a bitch, and sighed.

But in Raising Steam Pratchett has written a book that simply does not feel like his earlier works. It’s still identifiably a Discworld book and still identifiably Pratchett, but the entire style of the book is completely different. Where most Pratchett previously was driven by the power of his core narrative, this book is more a collection of diverse scenes. Still scenes all connected to a central narrative, of course, but the format feels far more epistolary than we are used to from him (and he has always been a writer who has enjoyed his fun little asides).

But the thing of it is: this is great writing. It is great writing unlike what we are used to from Pratchett, to be sure, but it is great writing nonetheless. Call it Pratchett 2.0 if you like, because it takes the meandering sensibility of his most recent books and puts it to use; a writer challenged by time turning his new problems into positives. It’s a deeply inspiring book on that level, and it’s not right to call it “one of his best” because it really does feel like a whole different writer while still being the same man – Terry Pratchett of Earth-2, or similar.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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And thus concludes our brief prequel story. As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site. We’ll return to the main story with Davinder next week.

The rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards are the oldest public-vote wrestling awards on the internet. Dating back to 1990 (when Curt Hennig won Best Wrestler, Scott Steiner’s Frankensteiner won Best Move, and Hulk Hogan versus Earthquake won Worst Feud), the RSPW Awards now span over two decades and are far and away the most comprehensive wrestling awards in wrestling fandom. They are the oldest awards and the best awards. You can see the results of the 2012 Awards (which also contain the entire history of winners in all categories) for the “best of year” awards here and the “worst of year” awards here.

This is the Call to Nominations for the 2013 RSPW Awards. The Nominations phase is not a strict rule of eventual award nominees – if nobody nominates CM Punk for Best Wrestler, for example (let’s say that an apocalypse happens and we’re all too busy for the next month, because that is the only way that will happen on the internet), come time for voting, people can still vote for CM Punk as Best Wrestler. The Nominations are intended, instead, to present voters with a list of suggested candidates to consider when assigning their votes (as voters will vote for a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in each category).

Maybe when voting for Best Tag Team, you will forget about how great Christopher Daniels and Kazarian have been this year (or maybe you don’t watch TNA often enough to know). Maybe you weren’t aware of how much fun Wrestling is Fun! is as a promotion (despite it being in their name – maybe you are illiterate or something? If so, how are you reading this?), and seeing them nominated causes you to check them out. That’s the point of the nominations: to expose wrestling fans to the wider wrestling universe. Just like the Awards themselves, when you think about it. You can nominate candidates for awards here.

Nominees are due by December 28, 2012; we will update this post with a list of all current nominations on December 21. Awards voting proper will begin on January 1, 2013. A list of current nominees can be found here.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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

I was talking with Ty Templeton earlier in the week and he explained to me that (while we were talking about gender roles in fiction) he had had real trouble coming up with a list of female protagonists who when introduced were not defined by an element of suffering or hardship. Every female romantic comedy protagonist ever, for example, is defined by their lack of a partner; that’s the entire point of romantic comedy. But this extends beyond just romcoms; female protagonists are almost always given a background of suffering or hardship which they must then overcome (as opposed to suffering or hardship within the story; that’s just dramatic conflict).

Ty explained that in previous conversations about this, he was able to identify only two female protagonists who didn’t enter the story defined by a hardship they would have to overcome as part of their narrative: Julia Child in Julie and Julia (her story is straightforward; she has a goal – to become a great cook – and she achieves it, and her past traumas suffered during the war and her inability to have a child are not relevant to her achievement) and Erin Brockovich (where Erin Brockovich may be poor/lower-class, but her narrative does not present that as something to overcome; her goal is achieve success in a class-action lawsuit and does so).

I gave it some thought afterwards and added two more: Baby in Dirty Dancing and Marge Gunderson in Fargo. But after that, I’m stuck. So what others are there? Surely there must be others!

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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

…looks like this: nearly seven thousand words dedicated to the principle that MENS IS MENS AND WOMENS IS WOMENS AND NE’ER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.

Oh wait, did I say seven thousand words? Because I actually meant ten thousand – no, wait, thirteen – oh my god we’re at eighteen now and apparently it turns out that the civil rights movement in the United States was a “Republican movement” and that the NRA helped arm blacks and the Nazis were in fact leftists and so forth.

Really, it’s a stream of utter drivel from a whiny fedora-wearing jackass who hasn’t gotten over the fact that he was publicly and rightly mocked for his homophobic bullshittery and who wears his persecution complex like a badge of honour – a longwinded, bloated, eighteen-thousand-words-and-counting badge of honour, remarkable only in its immensity.

Still, if nothing else, this serves as a valuable object lesson: when you read this (well, if you can get through the entirety of it; it’s a joyless slog, all self-congratulation and abuse of no doubt multiple thesauri), you can take solace in the fact that this is a man who is, in fact, a professional writer, and who is living proof that a writing career has much more to do with work ethic than it does innate talent.