The WWE, for all its flaws, is generally a company I think of as having a good visual sense when it comes to their product. They aren’t selling iMacs. They’re selling wrestling, and typically their sense of design works in conjunction with that to produce media that is designed to sell their product, which means: make it exciting, make it thrilling, make it epic. This is not a brand that necessarily needs cool, iconic, classy design to sell their product. (One of the things about the “minimalist” trend of design that is so popular on the interwoobs now is that so much of it is so pointless – why do you need a minimalist poster of Wolverine? He is fucking Wolverine. He is a midget with claws who kills people, usually ninjas. Why do you not want a poster of him killing ninjas with his claws instead? But I digress.)

Anyway, my point is this: the new WWE “signature” that starts off their shows now as of the thousandth episode of Raw is just god-awful. (It is all the more awful when you consider that, at about the same time, they replaced the horrible, cheesy Nickelback-sung opening for RAW that they have had for a few years with something much better.)

It is boring. Some non-confrontational minor key piano that could be the intro jingle for any late-night infomercial, a bunch of still photos, a lens flare. Worse than boring, it is incredibly non-specific – I mean, after John Cena and Andre the Giant the photos rapidly become less and less easy to distinguish, because they are being obscured by the WWE logo which is also hard to distinguish, so I’m not sure what the point of that was. Please recall that this is trying to sell an organization whose raison d’etre is “let’s put two guys in a ring and have them try to beat each other unconscious.” (Yes, yes, it’s fake, but that’s not the point. Wolverine is fake too, you know.) How does this signature sell that? It does not sell that. Not at all. Rather than being the visceral image the WWE needs to push its product, it is instead sterile.

But worst of all, it replaced the awesome signature the WWE has been using for the better part of a decade:

That conveys the same sense of history that the new signature seeks to provide (and more comprehensively), but it’s exciting, possibly because it’s not just a stupid series of still images set to elevator music but instead shows actual fighting and wrestlers saying cool things and doing cool things and is set to a simple expanding crescendo that is nonetheless intense. It is a good signature – one of the best they’ve ever done if not the best. Replacing it is not necessarily stupid so long as something better comes along, but the new thing – it is not that thing!

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.)

In email zzzThunk says

First off, let me start by saying I like Al’Rashad. I enjoy it every week. But here’s what I don’t get: I know you’re capable of writing more sizzling dialogue than what makes it onto those pages. (It’s not bad dialogue at all, but…) You’ve shown us all that before, so I know it has to be a conscious choice. But why make that choice, exactly?

Because I’m trying to write something approaching more naturalistic dialogue rather than go with my usual hyper-stylized joke-spew? This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy writing like that. It’s fun to write like that, obviously. But putting it in the mouths of my characters rings false to me most of the time, so I don’t go that route. It just doesn’t seem right to me that these fantasy-epic characters should be talking like extras from a Joss Whedon script, you know? To say nothing of the fact that nobody would get their equivalent of pop-culture references.

Of course, there are character/world reasons for it as well. The astute will have noticed that everybody in this fantasy world, thus far, appears to mostly be speaking the same language, which is a bit odd given that the two dominant cultures (in terms of narrative thus far) are pretty wildly different from one another, and there are in-story reasons for that – involving a Roman Empire analogue that left behind their language as the lingua franca a couple of centuries ago. But if you look at some of the speeches, it’s clear that those individual cultures are reasserting themselves and their interpretations of that common tongue are starting to become individual dialects, and given another couple hundred years of cultural isolation from one another there would be enough language drift that they would be barely recognizable as kin. (It would actually happen much faster than that, actually, and I’m cheating a bit by having a lingua franca last as long as it has, but this is a creative choice because language barriers are mostly not fun.)

On top of that some of the characters aren’t particularly good choices for lengthy, witty interludes. Kahal is a very formal person for a number of reasons (after all, someone romancing a lady several miles above him on the social ladder should watch his words carefully). Rayana is an actual princess and also someone who has to watch her words carefully thanks to numerous political enemies. I mostly use Fezay and Joro for snark purposes because they’re both lower-class and proud (as is Tanquir, who also loves to hear himself talk, so there’s that – and yes, Tanquir is not finished yet in this story, rest assured).

But at the same time, I don’t want the dialogue in Al’Rashad to be too formal, or even, say, Conan-formal (and I have told myself repeatedly that if any page sounds like a page out of Conan, it needs a rewrite, unless it is too awesome to rewrite). I’m trying to hit that middle ground in a triangle where Conan is at one point, Whedon at a second and, say, David Mamet or even John Cassavetes at a third.

Anyway, the point of this post is basically “yes, the dialogue is supposed to be like that,” so you’re welcome, and I guess I’ll open the floor to other questions about the comic if people want.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

And if you like, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Most entertaining film Joseph-Gordon Levitt has been in all year so far.

Because you get stuff like this:

Yes, that is a bowtie-shaped Doctor Who cookie. Which I got and you did not.

Okay, granted, my editor ate it, but she did send me a picture of it and it was addressed to me, so it still counts.

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.”)

In the wake of Neil Armstrong’s death I’ve been seeing a lot of “we failed Neil” handwringing because no country has yet built a moonbase or sent men to Mars or, well, whatever space-related thingy the writer particularly wants us to do that we have not yet done (granted, that is most everything, since we have done so little and there is so much space out there). It’s certainly understandable to want more space exploration. But that doesn’t make the sentiment not wrong.

Most of the handwringing crowd is complaining that we aren’t doing more manned missions into space, but this is a perfect example of the Green Lantern Theory as applied to science. We aren’t doing lengthy manned missions into space for numerous reasons. Human beings, for one, are meant to live in Earth gravity, and spending too much time in zero-gee does bad things to the human body (including, it appears, the degradation of eyesight), and the missions people are proposing would involve spending way more time than anybody has yet spent weightless. We also haven’t come up with a good way to protect astronauts from the effects of cosmic radiation on a long-term basis, which is kind of important if we don’t want them to get cancer (or just die, in the case of gamma rays). Maybe we could make our spaceships be giant lead spheres, but that seems somewhat impractical. So that’s another problem on the list that we haven’t solved yet.

And then, of course, there’s all the dinky logistical stuff – the problems which aren’t sexy to solve, like cosmic ray protection or artificial gravity, but the basic stuff like “how do we put enough food on the spaceship so that the Marstronauts don’t starve to death? How do we put enough fuel on the spaceship so they can get back?” A Mars mission is two years’ worth of food and fuel. That is a lot of stuff. Simply getting it into orbit is going to be difficult.

So my point is this: these problems exist, and science people are indeed trying to work on them. The fact that we have not yet surmounted them is not a failure to the spirit of Neil Armstrong (who, as an engineer with a reputation for hardheaded practicality, knew damn well that there at least had to be a solid chance of success for a thing to be worth doing). As we go further out and advance further along, things get more complex. That’s just how science is.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

Of course, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Most people think of magic instruction as being your basic master/student relationship (not least because so many people just think of it as being like how the Jedi do things in Star Wars), and sometimes this is, in fact, the case. Certainly it was the case for Stephen Strange’s introduction to magic, but what many people overlook is that the Ancient One was a fairly gregarious man as mages go in the first place (and quite possibly it is that ability to simply connect with and understand other people that makes for a good Sorcerer Supreme). Indeed, the one master/one student rule exists because most practitioners of magic simply don’t care for other people much, and if the system is to maintain itself then it shall maintain itself with the minimum stress to its users, and that is how it works.

This is not terribly surprising; after all, pursuing magic is in many ways a rejection of society as a whole. In the modern era it is a rejection of science; in the past it was a rejection of religion. Working magic almost always means defying not only societal norms but the things you have been raised and conditioned all your life to believe as true, to reject your own experience as true. Or, to put it more glibly: it is very hard to fire a magical zappy bolt when you have never fired a magical zappy bolt before, and it becomes harder when you have never seen anybody else fire a magical zappy bolt, and when they have never have never seen anybody fire a magical zappy bolt… it adds up. Which meant that many practitioners of magic had (and even today still have) to abandon society just to get anything done, and not coincidentally why the profession tends to be somewhat misanthropic at the best of times.

Still, magicians need to learn somewhere, and for years the only option was master/student in person, typically with the master demanding the student pay him a stipend or be a servant or what have you. This started changing in the mid-18th century as correspondence among the upper classes (who of course had most of the magic, as not having to work fourteen hours a day to avoid starving definitely gives one a leg up in studying magic) became more prevalent. Sir Humphrey Zzaxx-Clarkson, like many other mages of the era, began his career by sending a polite and very carefully worded letter to someone he (correctly) thought knew a few things. The polite response contained answers, and other names a promising young tyro could correspond with. And so the second age of magic instruction began – decentralized and somewhat impersonal, oftentimes limiting the students to basic tricks, and generally lending itself to any number of devastating flameouts (one thing at which master/student relationship excels is “keep student from blowing self up”), but on the whole was vastly more efficient at generating mages in greater quantities than previous years.

And this would have been fine, except for one thing: the extension of mass correspondence to the lower classes. This is not to say that the upper classes were deserving of magic, of course, but it is a simple human tendency that, when you generally have a good life, you’re more wary about risks – say, the inherent risk of binding a minor cacodemon to a candle so you have a permanent source of light, or something similar. Many of the minor aristocrats pursuing magic in the 18th and 19th centuries through correspondence would barely cast more than two or three spells a year. But when you’re the first person in your family to ever be able to read – you’ve usually got need for more than two or three spells a year.

Still, even though poor people now had the opportunity (mostly in America, of course) to learn magic through correspondence, it didn’t really explode until the late 1920s and the dawn of the pulp magazines. Magic enthusiasts followed Weird Tales and all the other fantasy, horror and weird pulps, and if there was only one truly enthusiastic student for every hundred people sending around their homemade fan magazines dedicated to Robert Howard or Lord Dunsany – that was enough, because those homemade magazines were like The Anarchist’s Cookbook on steroids and LSD all at once. The floodgates opened, and they never really closed from then on out, and it is not for nothing that in the Marvel Universe, this was when superpowers started emerging around this time in quantity. (Of course science was involved as well – but not all of the new powers emerging were scientific in their origin.)

This isn’t to say that all of the new superhumans emerging in 616 at this time were magic users; this isn’t even to say all those powers were caused by magic. But magic is fueled by belief and will, and when you suddenly have a lot more of all three sloshing around, there are knock-on effects. (Chupacacabras did not, in fact, exist until 1922, at which point they always had.) Magic is not predictable; loose, wild magic being powered by extraneous belief can do almost anything, and usually will.

Why does this matter to Dr. Strange in the present day? Well, it matters for three reasons. Firstly, it matters because quite frequently the answer to a magical dilemma can be found in correspondence between two sorcerers who have both been dead for over a century, which means negotiating with the people who now hold those letters. (Dr. Doom, unsurprisingly, has a large library of it.) Secondly, it matters because it’s still happening today via email and secured forum posting – and, yes, snailmail for the traditionalists – which means at any given point there are literally dozens of would-be wizards casting spells and unintentionally (one hopes) causing chaos that can be a tremendous bother when you are Sorcerer Supreme.

And thirdly, it means that someone clever enough and reckless enough will eventually realize that if he can make magical communication hit critical mass – by popularizing it, getting people to challenge themselves, ideally without them even knowing that they’re doing so – he can change the world itself forever, even if he’s not sure what result he’ll get. And preventing that is definitely part of the Sorcerer Supreme’s job, because one of the things you have to realize about magic is that by its very nature it can’t be for everybody, no matter how antidemocratic that may sound.