FLAPJACKS: How do we stop Trump? Oh god how do we stop Trump?
MGK: First off, how would “we” do anything like that?
FLAPJACKS: Don’t laugh. If we don’t stop Trump, we’ll have to move to Canada!
MGK: We already live in Canada.
FLAPJACKS: That makes it even worse because we know what it’s like here!
MGK: But that – oh, never mind.
FLAPJACKS: Thank god you’re finally on board with this. I have plans. Anti-Trump plans.
MGK: Okay, so let’s hear these plans.
FLAPJACKS: Okay. First plan: we tell all the people who like him that he is bad.
MGK: Probably won’t work.
FLAPJACKS: Why won’t it work? People don’t want to vote for bad people. Even other bad people generally want to vote for good people.
MGK: Yes, but –
FLAPJACKS: And there is a mountain of evidence that Trump is a bad person. I mean, the multiple bankruptcies, the multiple divorces, the fraud lawsuit he’s probably going to lose this year.
MGK: But the problem is is that saying Trump is “bad” is a value judgement. We’re talking about a political landscape where each side automatically takes the other side’s badness as a given, and distrusts the other side’s assertions implicitly. It’s quite possible that pro-Trump voters who might not themselves be actively racist are working themselves into a position where they believe accusations towards Trump of being racist are lies concocted by evil liberals.
FLAPJACKS: …so we think there are pro-Trump voters who aren’t racist, then?
MGK: I think it’s fair to say so, yes. Everybody likes pulling out those shocker polls like “twenty percent of Trump voters want to see slavery brought back” but it doesn’t follow that the remaining eighty percent are all thinking “yeah, slavery’s great but I can’t say it in public.” Trump is a white nationalist candidate by any reasonable yardstick, but it’s worth remembering that there are two clauses in that and “white” is only one of them.
FLAPJACKS: So you think there are some Trump voters who are racist, some who are racist AND nationalist, and some who are just nationalist?
MGK: I think that’s broadly accurate. You can quibble about the percentages, but let’s say for argument’s sake that one-third of Trump’s support is the non-racist nationalists – that’s where all his (small amount of) minority support comes from, for example.
FLAPJACKS: Plus white people who are generally well-meaning but are willing to give the racism a pass or are mentally minimizing its damage.
MGK: Exactly.
FLAPJACKS: But don’t you think Trump’s promises are effectively promises of a return to white supremacy?
MGK: Well, here’s the thing. Many of them are dogwhistles, and the point of a dogwhistle phrase in politics is to signal to people who know the context while not alarming the people who don’t know the context.
FLAPJACKS: But the dude said he would ban Muslims from entering the United States. That’s not a dogwhistle.
MGK: But the Mexican border wall thing is. If you’re prejudiced against Latinos, then it’s saying “we’re gonna show those Mexicans who’s boss.” But if you aren’t – at least not particularly – then it’s just a dramatic show of economic protectionism. And economic protectionism is the important thing, because that’s Trump’s real selling point.
FLAPJACKS: So you think “Make America Great Again” isn’t racist?
MGK: I think his use of it has been and is racist, but it can be interpreted in a non-racist light, which is enough for that chunk of his supporters who aren’t actively malicious towards non-whites. Because you can say “make American great again” in a non-racist way as well. You can make it mean “restrict free trade agreements which have seen offshoring of the majority of American manufacturing,” for example, pretty easily. Hell, if you want to go liberal with it, you can make it mean “restore union power and the social safety net.”
FLAPJACKS: I don’t think Trump’s going to come out as pro-union, though.
MGK: But he has been very clear that he wants to restrict free trade, and for a lot of lower-class voters that is a huge deal, because they think free trade has bitten them in the ass. Not unfairly, either, because many of the benefits of free trade are either relatively abstract. “Free trade incentivizes nations not to go to war” is broadly true, but if your job goes to a third-world country where labour costs are cheaper, the war you’re not involved in is not exactly great financial compensation on a personal level.
FLAPJACKS: So you’re saying support for Trump doesn’t necessarily indicate support for tacit racism, then?
MGK: It can and I would say the majority of it does. But you can’t concern yourself with the two-thirds of Trump’s vote (so far) who are racist. They are not votes you can reasonably affect or divert, except possibly to Ted Cruz, and that is possibly the only way you could get them to vote which would be worse, so concentrate on the Trump voters who might be reachable yet and the ones who might be tempted to flip to him despite the racist dogwhistling.
FLAPJACKS: Okay. I accept that pointing out that Trump is a bad racist person is not going to work. How about we go with plan two, which is “he is a silly person who says silly things”?
MGK: The racism wasn’t silly enough?
FLAPJACKS: I’m talking about going after his sense of gravitas now.
MGK: He’s kind of doughy. That’s true.
FLAPJACKS: Well, yeah, but I mean this meme that he’s a successful businessman and thus is good at everything. Because he’s not good at everything! He has tons of failed business ventures and he went bankrupt multiple times and –
MGK: – and he’s worth, even after you discount for his bullshitting about his personal worth, more than a billion dollars.
FLAPJACKS: But he’s being sued right now for Trump University!
MGK: And he’s worth more than a billion dollars.
FLAPJACKS: He started out with hundreds of millions of dollars! If he’d just invested it in bond index funds he’d be worth more money now!
MGK: But regardless, he’s worth more than a billion dollars.
FLAPJACKS: You keep saying that.
MGK: Because your argument is terrible. “Donald Trump should be even richer” is not going to make any Trump supporter blink, because Donald Trump is already worth an unimaginable amount of money. Does it make a gigantic difference if he should be worth ten billion dollars instead of two, or whatever the numbers work out to be? He’s still stupidly rich, and he’s worth more money than he started out with, and the “more money” is a stupidly large amount of money as well.
FLAPJACKS: Come to think: if he invested it all in bond index funds and made more money but didn’t have The Apprentice and own the Miss USA pageant and show up on pro wrestling and all of that, would anybody care?
MGK: Of course not. Is there anybody outside of a bunch of pundits hoping that Michael Bloomberg runs for President? No, and he was actually the mayor of New York City, but it doesn’t matter because he’s a boring rich man. He’s not who people fantasize about being when they are rich, because Bloomberg is still essentially a sober and responsible person. Trump does not give a fuck, and for a lot of his voters that’s a huge part of his appeal.
FLAPJACKS: Both because people wish they did not have to give a fuck and because his not giving a fuck suggests that he is politically independent of power brokers.
MGK: Yes.
FLAPJACKS: But that second one is stupid.
MGK: Yes to that too.
FLAPJACKS: Okay. So, given that you have no actual political campaign experience, how would you solve this conundrum?
MGK: Well, if you’re going to be pissy about it –
FLAPJACKS: No, no. I withdraw my snark. Please enlighten me.
MGK: Well, it’s a two-stage process. You need to both peel away those voters who can be peeled away from him and diminish his credibility with the rest to depress their enthusiasm.
FLAPJACKS: Didn’t Marco Rubio try that already, though? Actually, wait, I withdraw the question, because Marco Rubio is a half dozen small babies in a suit.
MGK: Exactly so! Marco Rubio is a wisp of gas just solid enough to create the illusion of a human being, much in the way that swamp gas makes people think UFOs are present.
FLAPJACKS: Marco Rubio is what happens when you try to give a loaf of whole wheat Wonder Bread sentience with a mad science experiment.
MGK: Marco Rubio is the sum of all of the prepositions in a Sweet Valley High novel.
FLAPJACKS: Marco Rubio is an extra from a scene in an unreleased David Mamet film whose only scene was cut out of the film anyway.
MGK: Marco Rubio is an anagram for “I, a broom cur” and I’m not sure if that’s insulting but it certainly deserves to be.
FLAPJACKS: Marco Rubio is a guy who screams “I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ” into his home-karaoke-machine mic.
MGK: Marco Rubio buys Brooks Brothers clothes to fit in, but in his heart, he always wants to wear a suit made of Jack Chick tracts and guns.
FLAPJACKS: …where were we again?
MGK: Right. So anyway, Rubio tried his best to attack Trump and came a little closer to managing it than people expected, not because his attacks were particularly top-notch but because it’s really actually very easy to attack Donald Trump, because he’s a hateful asshole who really isn’t anywhere near as competent as he constantly suggests. The “con artist” line Rubio kept using wasn’t quite ideal, but it was closer to the mark than most people have gotten.
FLAPJACKS: I hate to point this out, but Rubio got his ass kicked and Trump won most of the Super Tuesday states.
MGK: Well, yes, but that was as much because they only started attacking him a few days beforehand. Trump underperformed as compared to his polls in the majority of Super Tuesday states – mostly only by a few points, but the start of a decline could have meant something if they had started attacking him sooner. He likely lost Oklahoma and Alaska to Ted Cruz as a result of those poll drops and came close to losing Virginia to Rubio.
FLAPJACKS: Which is really kind of amazing when you think about it, considering we’re talking about Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
MGK: Plus there was John Kasich eating up about ten percent of the anti-Trump vote, and Trump’s second-choice numbers with Kasich voters are lousy – they aren’t game-changingly terrible with anybody else in the race, but they’re bad with Kasich voters.
FLAPJACKS: So “con artist” is the way to go?
MGK: Kind of? I think it’s more important to emphasize Trump’s general lack of competence outside of his comfort zone. Say “yeah, he can really work the refs in his favour. What happens when he’s the ref?” Which is kind of a lousy analogy but I think you get the general idea. The reason Trump is not destitute right now is because of the technicalities of U.S. bankruptcy law saving his ass.
FLAPJACKS: Do you mention Trump Steaks and Trump Air and all of those?
MGK: Yeah, but as sidelines. You really hit him on the casinos, you say “this guy couldn’t even successfully manage a casino, where the business model is just sitting there and watching people bring you money.”
FLAPJACKS: Well it seems like beating Trump is relatively easy!
MGK: Except that it isn’t. Attacking him in the right way is only part of the equation, and the other part is the reason why the GOP hasn’t been able to truly dent him.
FLAPJACKS: We’re going back to the economic populism, aren’t we.
MGK: Oh, yes. That’s Trump’s greatest strength. The only other person talking about Trump’s economic issues, even vaguely so, is Bernie Sanders – which explains a lot about those annoying subspecies of Berniebros who say things like “if Hillary gets the nomination I’m voting Trump.” Yes, that’s mostly them being douchebags, but there’s a serious undercurrent there that really shouldn’t be ignored.
FLAPJACKS: But I really want to ignore them.
MGK: I get that.
FLAPJACKS: I mean I really, really want to ignore them.
MGK: Understood. But that undercurrent is still there and it matters, and Hillary Clinton is particularly ill-equipped to fight it. That doesn’t mean she can’t, but it requires taking some policy positions that she might not like.
FLAPJACKS: I don’t think Hillary Clinton’s going to say “let’s end our free trade agreements and build a wall against Mexico.” She might be politically cynical but she’s not that cynical.
MGK: I agree.
FLAPJACKS: Besides, would anybody believe her if she said she was gonna do that?
MGK: No, but she doesn’t have to. The trick is to take populist positions that work with a centre-left view. Like, if the problem is “American companies moved/are moving manufacturing overseas because of cheaper labour costs,” you don’t have to argue for ending free trade agreements, because free trade agreements aren’t the only way to deal with that. You could say “we’re going to regulate and inspect companies who move overseas and make sure they provide safe and humane working conditions, and don’t hire child labour, and suddenly it won’t be so cheap for them to leave America.” You could say “we’re going to tax any company which offshores itself to a friendlier tax regime so hard there won’t be anything left when they leave.” You can say “we’re going to enforce immigrant labour laws so businesses can’t hire illegal labour on the side and force them to pay fair wages.” Those are all left-wing responses to actual bread-and-butter economic issues that affect working-class people.
FLAPJACKS: I get it. You peel off the Trump voters with left-wing nationalism that isn’t racist. You could say “we’re going to build that wall, but with union labour and we’ll put lots of big hearts on it so people know they’re still loved even as they’re walled out.”
MGK: Not really.

And we’re back! Phil reminds us that Darius and Cameron made a huge, disastrous mistake, but another team made an even bigger mistake so they’re still around this week. (Not that this is going to turn into a pattern or anything…) Oh, and apparently people were planning to feed fish offal to stray dogs, which feels like a mistake on so many levels.

continue reading "Amazing Race 28, Episode 3 Recap: “Bros Being Jocks”"

Welcome to the results of the 2015 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we had 753 voters participating – less than last year, but that was largely because last year we had a large flood of voters from With Spandex and this year WS felt that they didn’t want to campaign overly for the Awards so they limited their linkage to one post. Which meant less voters from them – but more voters coming in from other sites. As always, for next year we encourage all of you wrestling media people to nominate yourselves and your favorites, and try to get your fans out to vote for you. Fair is fair!

As always, thank yous to Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

The “Best” Awards can be found here.

The “Worst” Awards can be found here.

And finally, full ballot counts for all Awards can be found here.

Thanks for playing, and we’ll see you next year!

And we’re back! Last time, as Phil reminds us, everyone was just hanging out at home with their bags packed when they got an unexpected call reminding them that it was time to start the Race! Ashley nearly got killed by rogue fireworks, but Scott and Blair came in last. But it was a non-elimination leg, so they’re safe…and Blair volunteers to ditch her hair dryer and curling iron to help them travel light. Leading Phil to say, “You brought a hair dryer on the Amazing Race?” You speak for a generation, Phil.

continue reading "Amazing Race 28, Episode 2 Recap: “You Look Like Gollum”"

So since I last wrote about the 2016 race for the Republican nomination, eleven candidates have dropped out (plus probably a few too obscure to even mention), leaving the field with Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump. Basically, the field has been pared of all the no-hopers and never-weres…and Walker, whose exit was the biggest surprise of the election season to me. And even though there are a lot of primaries between now and the convention (most of them, in fact), it’s clear that there’s a certain dynamic that is favoring Trump. I don’t know that it will get him the nomination, but it certainly puts him closer than I would ever have pegged him back in August.

Basically, what we have here is a multiplayer game, where everyone is strategizing to control the greatest percentage of the voter base. Of the six players, everyone is adopting one of two strategies–Act Presidential, or Play to the Xenophobic Nutjobs Who Think That Obama Is Conspiring With the United Nations to Destroy America Through Chemtrails and Operation Jade Helm and Can Only Be Stopped by a Giant Wall Across Mexico. (Henceforth known as “the Party’s Base”.) It’s pretty much the same thing that happened back in 2008 and 2012.

But in 2008 and 2012, there was essentially one viable Presidential candidate (McCain and Romney), and lots of Base candidates splitting apart the die-hard Republican vote. So even though right now, the Base is in ascendancy in the Republican Party and is slavering to nominate someone who represents them instead of the establishment, no single Base candidate could marshal enough support to overcome the lead that the Presidential candidate had simply through a lack of opposition. All the Base candidates knew that the Presidential candidate was vulnerable to a united base of support from the Base…um, as it were…but paradoxically, game theory meant that worked in the Presidential candidate’s favor, as none of the Base candidates would drop out if they knew that the last one standing had a chance of winning the whole game, so the split support continued until they all lost.

(The “game” in this case is just the nomination. The election is purely two-player, and is a whole different ballgame.)

(Although there are no balls involved.)

This year, though, we have Donald Trump sucking up all the oxygen on the Base side of the room. He’s essentially not playing by the same rules as everyone else; Donald Trump wins when people pay attention to him, because he’s a narcissistic blowhard who can’t stand the thought of anyone not knowing what he’s saying and doing at any given moment. And since that turns out to be indistinguishable to the Base from “speaking his mind without fear or favor”, he’s pretty much eating up a really huge chunk of the Base vote, and about 35% of the total vote. (That goes up and down weekly based on his competition with Ted Cruz, who is the other major Base candidate in the race. Carson is a Base candidate, but his support has mostly withered, either because he’s a loon even by the standards of the current GOP or because push is now coming to shove and the Base tends towards being horribly racist.)

So we have the 2008/2012 scenario inverted. Kasich, Rubio, and Jeb (our Presidential candidates) have the votes combined to take out either of the two strongest Base candidates. Trump’s not dropping out because again, narcissistic blowhard (in fact, he may run as a third-party candidate if someone else wins it, which pretty much guarantees a Democratic victory in the general because then that becomes a multiplayer game with Trump and the Republican candidate splitting the support) and Cruz isn’t dropping out because…well, because he’s also a narcissistic blowhard, but also because he has a legitimate chance to overtake Trump if Carson’s people break for him instead of for Trump once Carson finally gives up and goes off to stab some more people in the belt buckle. So both of the Base candidates are pretty much at their ceiling of support. A Presidential candidate can win this.

But which one? All three Presidential candidates know that if they can only outlast the other two, they can suck up all the loose support once there’s only one Presidential candidate left in the race. (The people voting for Kasich aren’t going to break to Trump, in other words.) So even though they will all lose if none of them drop out, there’s a perverse incentive to keep playing and hope their rivals give up first.

Which is all a very fancy way of saying that unless we see a couple more people drop out in a hurry, this could actually be the year of Candidate Trump after all. Which should scare the fuck out of the Republican Party, because the polls from the last six months seem to bear out the idea that Trump’s national ceiling is probably near that 35%, and that the people who don’t love him absolutely despise him. If he’s the Republican candidate, Republican turn-out will be depressed and Democratic turn-out (which has shown a trend to be higher in presidential election years anyway) will be increased, and there’s a very real chance that they could lose a lot of down-ticket races as a result. A Trump candidacy won’t destroy America, but it could do a lot of damage to the Republicans.

And we are back with a brand-new season! This time out, Phil is not at the Starting Line…because there is no Starting Line. Instead, he’s waiting for the Racers in Mexico, and in keeping with this season’s theme of “everyone is a social media celebrity”, everyone is at home surfing the Internet. (With their bags already packed, which makes it a little suspicious that they’re “surprised” by Phil’s video message, but maybe they were expecting a call telling them to assemble in LA or somewhere.)

Everyone certainly acts surprised when Phil tells them to make their way on their own to Mexico City, and at at least one team says they have trouble finding their way home at night. (Maybe they don’t know what the Race…is?) They get the legendary eyebrow pop from Phil, and everyone sprints out to taxis that are…again, slightly suspiciously…waiting for them. (But again, it’s not that hard to co-ordinate pulling up outside people’s houses.) Everyone heads out to the airport, with Erin and Joslyn doing their own impromptu version of the Amazing Race theme song as the credits begin to roll. Which neatly sets the theme for this week’s episode, “Adorable People Having So Much Fun!”

continue reading "Amazing Race 28, Episode 1 Recap: “I Should’ve Been a Boy Scout”"

(NOTE: This post was originally a lengthy philosophical consideration commemorating my fortieth birthday (which was on Tuesday). However, I deleted that post yesterday because really, who needs another bit of pseudo-midlife-crisis wankery from a forty-year-old white guy? The answer is “nobody,” and if you are feeling the need to write such a piece and cannot get that need out of your system, perhaps you should consider buying a dirt bike or something like that. In any event, here is an entirely different post. You are welcome. People wishing to celebrate my birthday can always send me money. I like money.)

I have, of late, been hard at work on a new personal project, which is “ripping all of my physical film and TV media into digital copies and installing my own Plex server.” (If I’m being honest, some of the “rips” are actually various downloads – a few torrents here and there, some iTunes downloads which I then strip of the DRM, et cetera – but I own all of the movies and TV in any event. If anybody wants to come after me for downloading a copy of a movie I own and am fully entitled to copy, I’m cheerfully willing to go to court to try to set a precedent that you have a right to download a copy of media you own. Which is why they will never come after me, incidentally.)

It’s actually a really satisfying project for a number of reasons. Firstly, you get the satisfaction of creating a “Netflix but better” home service – selection that is literally my exact personal preference, of course, but the various Plex features (option to watch special features, trailers, it has better subtitle support, etc.) are also all extremely welcome. I can also use it for cloud streaming (so it’s effectively a mobile service as well), I have my music organized into it as well so I can stream music through it as needed (I don’t do a lot of mobile music streaming but it’s good to have the option), and while I don’t use the photo storage service it’s a nice-to-have.

Doing this has also let me feel comfortable doing something I should have done a long time ago, which is start bindering my DVDs. My Blu-Rays, for the time being, are remaining on the shelf (it helps that they are smaller and look nicer than DVD cases do), but the DVDs are going into the binder – the DVD label sheets go into shoebox storage should I ever need them, but the result is more shelf-space. Which, honestly, will probably end up getting used by more Blu-Rays in the long run. Plex makes my movies easier to watch and I really like that.

Also, I’ll be honest: every time I copy a new DVD/Blu-Ray rip to my Plex server, I get that little endorphin rush that you get when you buy a new thing, except I haven’t actually bought a new thing, and that’s pretty great too. (Well, okay, I am buying new things – but more on this in a bit.)

But the important thing is that this project allows me some control with regard to the media I think are important to own/have access to, and that matters too, because we’re in the middle of a changing media landscape. If you’re reading this in 2016, that most likely means you grew up in a world where there was a basic assumption that any movie or TV you wanted to watch would be reasonably available to you, thanks to the dual waves of VHS and then DVD meaning massive releases of decades’ worth of film and TV. This wasn’t entirely one hundred percent true, there were always a few things that were stuck in rights hell (WKRP In Cincinnati) or were being purposely withheld from the public (The Day The Clown Cried) and there were of course all sorts of very old films that had, prior to the VHS/DVD revolutions, degraded into unwatchability simply by fact of their age. But, as a general rule, you could with a reasonable amount of effort from 1990-2010 get your hands on almost any movie ever made and most of the TV as well.

Those revolutions are, at this point, effectively over.

Consider, for example, Ian McKellen’s Richard III. This movie is, in large part, the reason why Ian McKellen is famous now – certainly he was an acclaimed stage actor before it, but Richard III catapulted him into “name” actor status – he’s stated bluntly that Richard was responsible for him getting his Oscar-nominated role in Gods and Monsters, which in turn led to him becoming Magneto and Gandalf. And on top of that, Richard III is a really great, visually daring and creatively inspired Shakespeare adaptation. It has a score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Richard III has been out of print for years. It – like so many movies – has not migrated to Blu-Ray (which increasingly as a format is being primarily used for new releases rather than “archive films”). You cannot stream it on any streaming service. Your only chance of paying even a reasonable price for it is to find a used copy at a decent price, and there are not that many copies floating around.

And Richard III is not an outlier. Consider Big Night, one of the best-reviewed films of 1996 – it’s only twenty years old – and which is now not reasonably affordable. Also from 1996 is Shine, which is far more expensive than it has any right to be considering Geoffrey Rush won his Best Actor award for it. (You can find region-locked DVDs and even Blu-Rays of it for a more reasonable price – if you happen to have an all-region player. But region-locking only contributes to the problem.) There are plenty more of these if you care to look, and I’m only talking right now about relatively high-profile high-regarded films. (If you want a copy of Millionaire Express, Sammo Hung’s classic 1986 kung fu western, you will pay through the nose for it.)

This is the long tail of movie and TV ownership, and it’s coming faster than anybody realizes as movies start going out of print faster than they are introduced to print and the existing stockpile continues to diminish. People in the modern context often question why movies on television were such a thing before the home-theatre revolution, but they were a thing because, for the most part, outside of repertory theatre chains (which have mostly died out at this point), occasional TV screenings were the only way most people could watch many films.

And streaming simply is not catching up. I’m not bashing Netflix particularly here. It’s a good service that offers a good variety of content both original and classic. But you can’t rely on Netflix. Non-exclusive content floats in and out of Netflix on a basis that is nearly whimsical in nature, and Netflix’ profit model means it is not reasonably ever going to have All The Movies or even anything beyond a small fraction of that, and more to the point a lot of Netflix’ catalogue is bottom-dwelling crap that exists primarily to boost its overall catalogue numbers, and Netflix’s catalogue numbers are smaller than most people realize because they are boosted by counting individual TV episodes as individual viewable items. And it skews very, very heavily – for reasons which are quite understandable from a business perspective – towards the recent. Netflix’s “classic” sections are typically very thinly populated. And other streaming services have the same problems. Sure, Hulu has (most of) the Criterion Collection, but get outside of it and pickings get slim for older fare. (I don’t have Amazon streaming, so I don’t know how good that is in this regard.)

The problem – as always – is copyright. Richard III and the like not being easily available on DVD is the result of copyright; its owners have determined that it is not profitable for them to produce copies of the movie for public consumption. (Or, in some cases, have determined that it is more profitable to only allow the movies to be in print/available for streaming on a limited basis – this is the Disney Vault strategy, and Netflix has occasionally advertised films “returning” to Netflix in a way that makes one think that they consider this to be a viable marketing strategy in the streaming era.)

What has happened here is somewhat akin what happens to orphan works. Orphan works exist because their owners die or disappear and cannot exercise their copyrights. In the case of Richard III, what has happened is that an owner is choosing to not produce copies. And this is despite the fact that we live in an era where it is simpler than ever to produce individual copies – digital copies if nothing else. (At my birthday party, Mike Hoye made the point that it is effectively impossible to purchase many books which were bestsellers in the 1940s and 1950s at this point because of copyright, even though we live in a print-on-demand era where purchase of such works should be simpler rather than more complex; I note that this trend is accelerating rather than decelerating.)

All of this is to say that my adoption of Plex is a stopgap solution at best to this problem – because I’m combining it with the purchase of more used DVDs at the same time. Buy the DVD, rip it, put it in the binder, and I have the extra media for minimal expense (both fiscal and storage-wise). But individual ownership of media isn’t an answer to the problem that copyright is causing curation of our culture to be more and more difficult with each passing year, and I’m not sure what the solution is.

This Friday brings us yet another season of ‘The Amazing Race’. Which means yes, more TAR recaps incoming! I would like to make a tiny request, though, as we prepare for the season. Consider this a polite attempt to pre-empt a certain type of comment.

Can we not call these people any variant of “fame-addicted Internet whores” simply because these people are all on social media? I mean, I freely admit to being a woefully out-of-touch person when it comes to these things. I don’t know what to put on a Tumblr or how to put it on there if I did, I tweet infrequently at best, I couldn’t tell you what an Instagram was at gunpoint, and I managed to miss MySpace completely and skip directly to Facebook (which I primarily read because it’s the only way to know what the hell is going on with my extended family).

(Actually, I’m going to pause there with a brief anecdote that explains why I use Facebook to keep up with my family news. I was visiting my parents, and they said, “So guess who we saw yesterday? Your grandma and grandpa!” I was like, “Wait, wait. Grandma and Grandpa came up here to visit all the way from Oklahoma and you didn’t tell me?” “Oh, well, you can come with us to see them tomorrow. They’re up here to visit your cousin Laura’s new baby.” “I didn’t even know Laura was married!” “Oh, yes. She’s married and she just had her first kid.” At this point, I was beginning to wonder what else I didn’t know, so I asked about Laura’s brother. “What about Brian? Is he married too?” “No, he and Brandy broke up. He moved to Thailand to coach MMA fighters.” “Oh, now you’re just making things up!”)

(They were not, in fact, making things up.)

The point is, I acknowledge freely that I neither know nor have a particular desire to care about the YouTubers and the Instagrammers and the Tumblrs and the Grindrs and…wait. I don’t think there are any “Grindr celebrities” on this season of the Race. But even if there were, I don’t understand why people are getting so mad that other people a) use a relatively new form of communication to discuss things of importance to them, and b) are apparently good enough at it that large numbers of other people are paying attention to them. It does not make them bad people, it does not make them deserving of scorn and hatred, and let’s all try to take them for who they are as the new season commences.

Only then will we start developing irrational hatred of them.

Sorry for the delay in this post–I got hit with a bad cold over the weekend, and I’m just now to the point where I can think about saying anything coherent. (I don’t know if I can actually say anything coherent, but I can at least pretend now.) And I figured I’d talk about ‘Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’, since I bought issue #3 the day before I got sick.

It’s…it’s good enough to earn an issue #4, I’ll put it that way. There are definitely things to like about the comic; Lunella is an adorable kid who manages to avoid a lot of the traditional “kid genius” tropes floating around in science fiction. She’s not adorkable the way most of them are; she’s spiky, tense, irritable and anti-social. Which sounds like she’s also unsympathetic and unlikable, but the book does a good job of explaining why she feels so alienated from everyone around her and why she’s so driven. Honestly, it feels like this could be the origin story for a super hero or a super villain, which is kind of cool. (Oh, and it goes almost without saying that a comic about an African-American girl who’s a super-techno-genius on a par with Iron Man is a genuinely good thing and a great stride for representation at Marvel. Almost, but not quite.)

And yes, it’s got Devil Dinosaur. If there’s ever a bad time to put a red pseudo-T. Rex who kicks butt into your comic, I cannot think of it. Would ‘The Kindly Ones’ have been a better comic with Devil Dinosaur? I have to say that on balance, the answer is “yes”. ‘Age of Bronze’? Oh heck yeah. I’m even willing to entertain the notion that ‘Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’ would be better if they put in a second Devil Dinosaur, perhaps through time-travel shenanigans. The point is, he’s not what’s wrong with the comic.

And the art is charming. It’s cartoony enough to be vivid and larger than life, while really evocative and filled with a solid design sense. Every page is pretty enough to frame.

No, I think the problem with the series to date is the pacing. This may just be my hobby-horse; Lord knows I’ve complained about “decompression” enough times that some people probably have my rants memorized. But really, very little has happened in three issues. Devil Dinosaur has come to the present, so have some evil ape-people, and…yeah, that’s pretty much it apart from capture-escape rigmarole. The central premise has been restated two or three times an issue (Lunella needs the thingie that the ape-people worship and that popped them to the present because she thinks it’s a cure for her incipient Inhumanism) which is bad whether it’s being written for the trade or not. And Lunella has only started to bond with Devil Dinosaur, which is frustratingly bad pacing because we all know it’s the premise of the series so dragging it out is really pointless.

So I’m giving it an issue #4, because there’s a lot to like about it and I want to support the things that are good about it. But it would be nice if it didn’t feel quite so much like it was treading water.

First, it’s important to note that I’ve seen none of ‘Arrow’ or ‘Flash’. That’s not because I dislike them or think the CW should stay out of the superhero business after ‘Smallville’ or any number of other Cranky Internet Person reasons; it’s just because there are only so many hours in the day and I’m still eight episodes behind on ‘Agents of SHIELD’ and two episodes behind on ‘Agent Carter’ and a full season each behind on ‘Daredevil’ and ‘Jessica Jones’ and something like four episodes behind on ‘Doctor Who’ and it is fully possible to think that a series sounds cool these days without having even a chance in Hell at seeing it any time soon. I wouldn’t even have seen this, except my roommate was watching it while I was in the room. So I’m coming in cold at the CWDCU.

(I also haven’t seen ‘Breaking Bad’ or ‘The Sopranos’. Just to give you a full idea of how behind I am on shit.)

With that said, the premiere episode does a pretty good job of expositing everything in an entertaining and straightforward way. 150 years from now, Vandal Savage is going to take over the world, the Time LorrrerrrrrMasters don’t want to interfere, and so the DocterrrrrRip Hunter steals a timeship and goes to stop him with the help of a crew of superheroes with easily identifiable character hooks. It’s a decent set up for the series, executed with a nice turn of speed (let’s face it, would any of this have seemed less contrived if they’d spent longer setting it up?) and some good work from Arthur Darvill, who’s saddled with a lot of the load-bearing dialogue.

That said, there are problems here. I’m already not loving Hawkman (yes I know “because fuck Hawkman”, but I actually liked his Silver Age incarnation where he was a happily married space cop who just used medieval weaponry to avoid letting advanced tech fall into the hands of criminals) and his habit of literally convincing Shayera to resolve all their difficulties by letting him beat her up until she stops disagreeing with him. No, seriously. That’s what happened.

Also beyond fucking creepy is Professor Stein’s decision to roofie Jefferson Jackson so that he can take him along on the time journey. It’s creepy primarily because the implications of it are brushed off–Stein denies that he roofied Jackson when called on it (and also where did he get the knockout drugs he put in Jackson’s drink? He certainly seemed to have them close to the liquor cabinet, which ew ew EW!) and his apology later boils down to, “I’m sorry I drugged and kidnapped you, but in my defense, I wanted to do this and you said no.” To which Jackson responds with, “That’s okay, now that I’m trapped on the timeship with a murderous temporal bounty hunter after my head and no less than two hardened criminals and one murderer around, I feel great about this!” It’s highly unconvincing.

That said, Heat Wave and Captain Cold are a lot of fun (although the director seems to be letting Wentworth Miller play his part in a totally different tone than anyone else, which is jarring and sloppy) and White Canary seems to have hidden depths that might get explored later. Not thrilled with Casper Crump as Vandal Savage–that’s a part I feel needs a lot of gravitas, and he seems a little bit weaselly–but I will forgive him everything if there’s a bit later on where you find out he gave JMS the idea for the Shadows in B5. Oh, and Brandon Routh is a total non-entity as the Atom, but I’m not sure how much of that is him and how much of it is just smart screenwriting.

The plot covers a lot of useful ground while still leaving plenty for the full season, and I gotta say, I kind of liked this. I may watch more episodes, assuming I have the time after catching up on ‘Agents of SHIELD’ and ‘Agent Carter’.

…and ‘Daredevil’. And ‘Jessica Jones’. And ‘Arrow’. And ‘Flash’. And ‘Breaking Bad’, and ‘Lost’, and…

Final tally: you guys got most of questions five, six and seven, and identified the categories, and were nosing around question one pretty closely. There were correct guesses in every other question but nobody got close as to those categories (the fact that nobody figured out the Star Wars question surprised me, to be honest).

QUESTION ONE (Fictional farms and ranches)

a. What was spared from destruction because it was useful to the enemy?
Tara in Gone With The Wind

b. What was reshingled with breakfast food?
Green Acres in Green Acres (running joke re: Lisa’s flapjacks)

c. What failed to convert into a pie business?
Tweedy Farm in Chicken Run

d. What produced wonders of cooking that made grown men weep?
Faldor’s Farm in The Belgariad

e. What was mortgaged without the knowledge of its owners?
Southfork in Dallas

f. Where were cattle without point or aim?
Cold Comfort Farm in Cold Comfort Farm (the cows’ names were Pointless and Aimless)

g. What was renamed once after violence and once after peace?
Manor Farm / Animal Farm in Animal Farm

h. Where was a child spared because he might prove useful in future?
Hoggett Farm in Babe

i. What was priced with the blood of Jesus Christ?
Bandy Farm in There Will Be Blood

QUESTION TWO (Alien characters from Star Wars)

a. Who owned a chain of successful restaurants?
Max Rebo

b. Whose total was sixty-five?
Ki-Adi-Mundi (directly quoted from Clone Wars)

c. Who was a seasoned yacht operator?
Nien Numb

d. Who equipped his vehicle with illegal weapons to win a race?
Sebulba

e. Who was a selfless servant?
Admiral Ackbar (direct translation of his name)

f. Who revealed murders committed by a public servant?
Bossk (in Rebels)

g. Who gave away his lucky stone?
Wicket W. Warrick (in Ewoks)

h. Whose friendship could not be bought with a drink?
Ponda Baba

i. Who was enslaved for her mother’s debts?
Juhani (in Knights of the Old Republic)

QUESTION THREE (Anachronisms in film)

a. Who was kept in a padlocked cell?
Maximus in Gladiator (padlocks of the type in the film not invented until 1800s)

b. Who freshened their breath with a popular mint?
Countess Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence (movie poster infamously shows a pack of Certs peeking out of her purse)

c. Who was electrocuted ahead of schedule?
John Coffey in The Green Mile (movie takes place in 1935 Louisiana; electric chair not used in Louisiana until 1940)

d. Who wore a nonexistent kilt?
William Wallace and every other Scot in Braveheart (kilts not worn in Scotland before the 1600s)

e. Who was offended by another person’s lack of opera knowledge?
Duke Leopold Mountbatten in Kate and Leopold (discusses La Boheme in 1876; the opera was written in 1896)

f. Who once went ice fishing in Wisconsin?
Jack in Titanic (discusses icefishing on Lake Wissota five years before that man-made lake was created)

g. Who did not outlive the most wanted man in America?
Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd in Public Enemies (both men actually outlived John Dillinger in real life)

h. Who made three impossible trips?
Indiana Jones (travels through Thailand and Jordan in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which were Siam and Transjordan at the time; travels through Belize in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, which was British Honduras at the time)

i. Who purchased privately owned technology stock?
Forrest Gump (or, if you prefer, Lieutenant Dan) (Apple stock was not publicly traded in 1975 when Forrest supposedly bought it; it wasn’t even incorporated at that time)

QUESTION FOUR (Characters with elements in their names)

a. Who taught a robot the language of the streets?
Natasha Irons

b. Who was saved from an angry buffalo?
Silver, the Lone Ranger’s horse

c. Who died under the stars?
Argon, son of Fingolfin, in The Simarillion at the Dagor-nuin-Giliath, “Battle Under The Stars”

d. Who was captured by men with swelled heads?
Tara of Helium in The Chessmen of Mars

e. Who survived a desert thanks to an oasis?
Neon the Unknown

f. Who could not defeat a bear single-handedly?
Copper in The Fox and the Hound

g. Who sold a movie for a dollar?
Ari Gold in Entourage (specifically Medellin)

h. Who permanently lost some of her body mass?
Mercury of the X-Men

i. Who was more popular and successful than her parents?
Little Iodine (spun off from They’ll Do It Every Time)

QUESTION FIVE (Superman analogues)

a. Who destroyed the Vatican?
Supershock in Powers

b. Who met the Wandering Jew at the end of time?
Mr. Majestic

c. Who smiled, and ate the chicken?
Samaritan in Astro City

d. Who was like a bug upon a windshield?
The High in Stormwatch

e. Who never did anything remotely interesting or original?
Homelander in The Boys

f. Who was blinded by himself?
Hyperion

g. Who became a force of death in two different ways at two different times?
The Sentry

h. Whose friend was an jinn in disguise?
Captain Marvel in Jeff Smith’s Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil

i. Whose marriage was unhappy?
Ultraman

QUESTION SIX (Foods mentioned in A Song of Ice and Fire)

a. When a queen was poor, what did she buy herself to eat?
Tyroshi honeyfingers (A Game of Thrones, Danaerys)

b. What was best with a drop of venom?
Grilled snake with snake sauce (A Feast for Crows, Ser Arys Oakheart)

c. What did a blind girl have in the morning?
Fried sardines and morning loaf (A Dance with Dragons, Arya)

d. What was made in a helm and not as good as deer?
Froggy stew (A Storm of Swords, Bran)

e. What had to be made particularly to satisfy a commander?
Hot spiced wine (A Clash of Kings, Jon)

f. What helped cause a princess to weaken her resolve?
Roasted kid with lemon and honey (A Feast for Crows, Ariane)

g. What made a man so happy he was almost dancing?
Lord Manderly’s “pork” pie (A Dance of Dragons, Theon)

h. What was an accompaniment to living flame?
Blandissory (A Storm of Swords, Tyrion)

i. What was a pirate’s cure for a sore throat?
Hot wine with cloves and lime (A Storm of Swords, Davos)

QUESTION SEVEN (“thieves”)

a. Whose duty was it to kill a mad god?
The Thief of Fate in The Bard’s Tale III

b. Who was sentenced to execution via primate?
Ahmed in The Thief of Baghdad

c. Who did not deserve to die in a Turkish dungeon?
Azeem in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

d. Who tortured a child to find his wife’s paramour?
Albert Spica in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

e. Who began a revolution to usurp the gods from power?
Luke Castellan in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

f. Who unknowingly carried power within his eye?
Garrett in Thief

g. Who decided that an asteroid crash was too merciful?
Star-Thief in Warlock

h. Who bought his home in an estate sale?
Conrad Paulson in Thief of Thieves

i. Who went on a sea cruise just before an election?
Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen in The Republic of Thieves

There are probably two target audiences for ‘Welcome to Night Vale – A Novel’. Neither of them will be entirely satisfied.

The first is the actual fanbase of “Welcome to Night Vale”, the podcast that began in 2012 and has been spreading through the collective consciousness of geekdom to the point where Stephen Colbert brought the creators (and Cecil Baldwin, the main performer in the series) onto his talk show to discuss it. These people are all intimately aware of the strange and fantastic details that make the series such a wonderful blend of the macabre and the deadpan and know all that can be known about the small desert down where inexplicable things happen all the time. (Which isn’t much, because, well, go look up “inexplicable” and get back to me.)

The second is the people who saw the Colbert appearance (or something like it) and came to the book with only the vaguest notion of what “Welcome to Night Vale” is, and thought that the book might function as an introduction to the strange and mysterious world that Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor have created.

For the first audience, this is a book that takes a while to get going. It focuses on two fairly obscure characters from the Night Vale mythos, pawnshop owner Jackie Fierro and PTA volunteer Diane Crayton, and much of the first half of the book is simply spent establishing them as more than simply background characters whose names are mentioned in passing from time to time. There’s a lot of overlap to their respective story arcs, as well, which means that you’ll frequently feel like you’re reading the same passage twice until the mid-point of the novel when they finally decide to work together to solve their interrelated mysteries.

At that point, the book picks up steam in a big way, and fans of the podcast will be happy to know that the book finally gives out some answers to one of the big questions–who is the Man in the Tan Jacket and why does he keep coming to Night Vale to pursue a vague yet sinister agenda? (The answer is not wholly satisfying, either, to be honest; it requires a lot of squinting and backfilling in every previous story with, “Ah, well, that was all part of my master plan all along!” That said, one of the things about the Man in the Tan Jacket is that he takes “vague” to new heights, so it could very well be that everything was part of a master plan and we just didn’t know it.)

For the second audience, this is undoubtedly going to feel like wandering into a bizarre tangent of a conversation that they weren’t present for–Cecil, the Voice of Night Vale, only appears in a few cutaway sequences and doesn’t interact with the main plot very much at all, and there are a lot of inside jokes that will no doubt just seem like random weirdness to someone not familiar with the podcast. Then again, that’s probably a pretty good introduction to the podcast, because all of the inside jokes got their start as bits of random weirdness until they were promoted. And the revelations about the Man in the Tan Jacket probably won’t mean as much if you haven’t been spending the past three years saying, “Who _is_ this guy?”

Both audiences may be slightly frustrated by the supremely deadpan narrative voice, which takes great pains to smother any surprise or emotional heft beneath a crushing weight of fatalism and existentialism, and which can get almost hypnotically same-y at times. Those people might want the audiobook version, which is read by Cecil Baldwin and has a little bit more verve as a result.

However, all of the audiences will find a lot to like here–there are quite a few read-out-loud funny bits, some genuinely suspenseful sequences (the library looms large in the book), and you will feel surprisingly moved by what happens to the tarantula. Oh, and the plot does hang together quite well even if you feel like the first two hundred pages are mostly about the main characters hoping they can find a way to avoid the narrative altogether and get back to their normal lives.

In short, there are probably two target audiences for ‘Welcome to Night Vale – A Novel’. Neither of them will walk away dissatisfied.

I was kindly sent a complimentary copy of Amazing Fantastic Incredible, Stan Lee’s comicbook autobiography (with the “assistance” of Peter David and Colleen Doran) (and yes, reading this, one discovers that Lee follows Jim Steranko’s spelling of “comicbook,” so for the sake of uniformity I will use it here). To be sure, it has some funny moments. Stan Lee has lots of funny stories, and many of them make their way into the book at one point or another. In particular, Lee spends one page mostly throwing shade at Bob Kane, who is depicted (rightly) as an asshole, and that’s probably the highlight of the book because whenever somebody says “Bob Kane was SUCH an asshole” they are A) always right and B) worth commending.

All of that is well and good. But the book has a central problem, and it is this: I just said how Lee spends a page throwing shade at Bob Kane? Well, he spends five pages on the creation of Spider-Man, which is arguably the single most significant thing he did in his entire life. For the sake of comparison, some other page counts in the book: the time Stan Lee met Bill Clinton (three pages), the history of Spider-Man movie development (three pages, and remember Lee was only tangentially involved with most of that), characters Stan has created or co-created with POW Entertainment, such as Stripperella (five pages), the Stan Lee Imagines comics he wrote for DC (five pages), and recording the Merry Marvel Marching Society record (four and a half pages).

What I am trying to get here is that biography, when it’s written successfully, can’t just be a mostly-chronological list of “things that happened.” Biography is the marriage of factual events with traditional narrative structure – real life written into a pattern that resonates with readers. This means (depending on the biography) selectively editing out events, creating arbitrary beginning and end points, or playing heavily with flashbacks and flashforwards to make real life fit into the narrative structure. It’s not dishonest; it’s style.

And, to be blunt, it requires willingness to focus on the parts of your life you don’t like if they’re significant. There are at least three major friction points in Lee’s life (well, let’s be honest, there are lots more than that, but there are three really major obvious ones): his role in Jack Kirby leaving Marvel, his role in Steve Ditko leaving Marvel, and the fallout from the collapse of Stan Lee Media. Kirby’s departure is dealt with in three pages and Lee adopts a wholly unconvincing “well if Jack had only told me he was unhappy” position before ultimately appearing to imply it was probably for the best. Ditko’s departure is dealt with summarily, in one page, and again Lee professes not to understand why Ditko was unhappy, which is amazing bullshit given that Ditko hasn’t exactly kept why he was unhappy a secret (artistic conflict and the completely reasonable belief that Lee was refusing to support him when he did anything that might challenge fan expectations). Lee literally refuses to discuss the collapse of Stan Lee Media in the comic, which is surprising given that by all accounts Lee was duped just as most investors were by Peter F. Paul when the latter committed multiple types of stock and security fraud.

The result of a lack of any real narrative structure combined with Lee’s willingness to cover over the more problematic parts of his life with a smear of bullshit makes for a comic that, at its best points, meanders enjoyably through amusing anecdotes, and at its worst just meanders boringly. It’s a comic without a direction, because at 93 it appears Stan Lee still hasn’t decided what the story of his life is. And that’s his perogative! But that doesn’t mean we needed a comicbook about it.

I just finished ‘Raising Steam’, the last of the “adult” Discworld novels (although of course, Terry Pratchett famously considered the difference to be nothing more than branding). It’s the saddest of ironies that even though Pratchett’s memory was failing him by then, this is really the most consciously retrospective of his novels; it is, even more than ‘Unseen Academicals’, a deliberate summation of his stories to date written in the fairly certain knowledge that it would be the last time such a summation would be needed. If the Discworld was a thesis statement, this would be its conclusion.

And just as Pratchett intended, it evokes the memories of all that came before it. There are subtle hints and reminiscences that date all the way back to his very first book–not out of simple nostalgia, but in fact to elicit that spirit of which nostalgia is the exact opposite, the realization that things have changed and that change has been for the better. The Ankh-Morpork of ‘Raising Steam’ stands in conscious, deliberate contrast to the Ankh-Morpork of ‘The Colour of Magic’, and that contrast is perhaps Pratchett’s finest achievement as a writer. He delivered over the course of his career an achievement so audacious that it took forty-one novels (and an array of ancillary materials) to finish it up, offering for the first time an alternative to the path that Tolkien’s devotees had stamped into a rut.

I don’t think any of it was intentional at first; I think that when he started, Pratchett simply realized that the tropes of the Tolkien high fantasy had become cliches, and cliches are ripe for skewering with parody. So the first few Discworld novels were exactly that, parodies of epic quest fantasies (with a tourist standing in for the noble hero, and thinly-veiled versions of various fantasy figures guest appearing) and of apocalyptic “final battles” for the fate of the world. He tossed in all sorts of joking, half-thought out explanations of how a fantasy city and a fantasy world might work, with Assassin’s Guilds that actually regulated murder and gods that depended on the survival of their worshipers, but it was all cobbled together in the way that any good writer will do when coming up with those first mad rushes of inspiration.

And then Corporal Carrot showed up. And things began to change.

Because Carrot was the first fantasy cliche to appear in a Discworld novel and refuse to fulfill his function, even in a subversive way. Carrot was the Rightful King, the Aragorn of the Disc whose role in the story was to return and take his place on the throne (overthrowing the tyrant in the process, of course) and usher in the Good Old Days that once were and shall be again, bringing back the traditions that everyone loved and revered and restoring the Old Order that everyone was so happy with. But he didn’t do any of that. In point of fact, he really stopped being important at all after his first couple of appearances, acting more as a catalyst to transform Captain Vimes into the central figure he wound up becoming. Pratchett’s first real step toward his own vision of fantasy was to say, “No more kings.”

If ‘Guards! Guards!’ took a strong step by critically examining the role of the king in fantasy, then ‘Small Gods’ (possibly his best novel) took a giant leap by examining the role of gods. Because while there are thematic resonances underpinning the Rightful King trope, usually involving nostalgia and its ugly cousin, fundamentalism, most of us really have to think much anymore about a strange man riding in on a white horse to restore the monarchy. (Or, depending on the readership, restoring the authority of the monarchy.) Whereas religion is something that real human beings deal with on an everyday basis. With ‘Small Gods’, Pratchett wasn’t just talking about Fantasyland anymore. He was talking about us. Om was a stand-in for any number of real deities, and Pratchett wasn’t just examining the way that gods are used in the genre, he was examining the way that religion changes and is changed by human beings. The result was a genuinely profound book.

But it was with ‘The Truth’ that things really began to change. Because while Pratchett had started to genuinely resist the conservative (in the philosophical sense, not the political one) bent of fantasy as a genre, which generally views change as synonymous with corruption and in which the restoration of the ancient ways is viewed as victory, he had up until that point generally been articulating that more as a theory than as a practice. He’d introduced a few incremental changes, things like an upgraded City Watch and some thoroughly modern witches, but in general, innovation on the Discworld had been seen as a malign influence introduced from the outside. (As in ‘Moving Pictures’ and ‘Soul Music’. The sequence where the Patrician comes into the offices of the first movable press in order to confirm that nobody involved in its creation had found themselves influenced by strange voices that seemed to come from nowhere has to be the best example of lampshading a trope in the history of literature.)

But ‘The Truth’ ended with a real change. The printing press had come to the Discworld, and it had come to stay, changing civilization on a permanent basis. (This was also where Pratchett put aside “overthrowing the Patrician and restoring some older form of government” as a plot device once and for all.) It seems to have had an effect on Pratchett, forcing him to examine some of his own unthinking assumptions about the world he was writing in. ‘The Truth’ marked the point at which he looked at his relatively staid, unchanging fantasy universe and asked, “Why?” Or, if you like, compared it to the constantly changing real world he lived in and asked, “Why not?”

And so things began to change. The changes required a new character, Moist von Lipwig, who ushered in all of these new innovations and forced Pratchett to see all of his existing characters through the eyes of another. Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.”

And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.

‘Raising Steam’ completes a great work, one that says that fantasy does not have to be nostalgia. It does not have to be a longing for an imagined past, where the rightful king reigned and everyone knew their place and never dreamed of more. It does not have to involve faceless monsters and outside evils, and it does not have to be cruel. It gives us something to hope for, so long as we don’t treat people like they were things. And it’s a story we all can join in with. That’s the true gift of his achievement–all things strive, as he puts it. We’re all in this together.

‘Raising Steam’ is Terry Pratchett’s final word on the matter, but I like to imagine that his influence won’t end for a considerable time to come.

This is the Call for Votes for the 2015 Theszie Awards. You can vote here.

The Theszie Awards are the oldest fan awards in pro wrestling history, going back to 1990 (when Mr. Perfect quite appropriately won Best Wrestler and Junkyard Dog v. Ric Flair at Clash XI won Worst Match). They offer a record of wrestling fan opinion lasting decades, and although we may not agree with some awards in retrospect, what matters is that they offer a snapshot of every year of wrestling as the fans loved it. We think that’s pretty cool.

As usual, following the nominations period, we have compiled all of the nominations into pulldown menus to make voting faster and easier (since the pulldown menus should include most, if not all, of the most popular candidates for each award), while still allowing for write-in votes for those who don’t see their favorite choices as nominees. We do this strictly to streamline the voting process; this should not be construed as favoritism towards any wrestler for being nominated, as we do not nominate wrestlers ourselves.

(We have edited the nominations to remove some nominations that we thought were inappropriate, mistakes/errors, or unlikely to get enough votes to justify the nomination – for example, someone nominated Adam Rose for Worst Babyface, and whatever one thinks of Adam Rose he turned heel in 2014 and hasn’t been a babyface since – however, this does not mean people cannot vote for those wrestlers in those categories.)

We’ve also used TECHNOLOGY to let you save your ballot and return to it later, if need be. Finally, we’ve also given fans the opportunity to include their own commentary on their voting choices for each award or just The State of Wrestling in General in 2014.

A note on category changes: This year, after deliberation, we have removed four categories, three negative and one positive, in order to streamline the voting process further. Most Deteriorated was axed after we decided the category is frankly just depressing; voting for “which wrestler aged the worst” is simply not fun and we don’t need to bother with it. Worst TV/Youtube Show was killed for two reasons: firstly, we killed Worst Promotion in 2013 because we felt it was too generally negative in a broad-brush-tarring sort of way and Worst TV/Youtube Show seemed to have the same problem, and secondly, there really aren’t a lot of truly bad wrestling shows lately so there is insufficient competition.

Finally, we decided to axe Best and Worst Promotional Move. This was the toughest decision since the idea of awards specifically focused on the “business” side of wrestling is appealing. However, in practice, what happens is that most of the time these awards end up being awards for booking decisions and angles, because that’s what common wrestling viewers interact with most regularly. It’s true that a booking decision can be the best possible thing, business-wise, that a promotion does in a given year (for example, pushing Hulk Hogan in 1984 is what turned the WWF into the unstoppable wrestling juggernaut it is today) but these moments are rare, and signing decisions, TV deals, and other things fans don’t have as much familiarity with are, most of the time, more important. Basically, these awards were smark awards in a bad way, so we nuked them. You’re welcome.

The deadline for entering votes is February 7, 2016. Have fun!