May 7th, 2012 - File under Blog - 5 Comments;
As you may have noticed, it’s been a while since I’ve posted any essays or editorials in this part of the site. The reason is because my newfound employment at the Huffington Post is consuming most of my writing energies these days, and I didn’t want to just constantly be reposting everything I write there over here, too.
In any case, it looks like I will be writing a weekly column on the Canadian media at HuffPo for the near future, so if you’re into that sort of thing, please check out “Media Bites“, which is what it’s now called. I’ll try to add a permanent link somewhere on the site.
In other news, In an effort to pander more to the geeky side of my audience, I’ve recently started a video game character Tumblr called “Play American,” where I draw pictures of various characters from American-made video games. Video game character fanart blogs are a dime a dozen these days, it seems, so I was trying to come up with a fun gimmick that would set mine apart. Check it out, and be sure to post any suggestions you may have!
Lastly, for any Vancouver readers, I want everyone to be aware that I will have a table at the upcoming Vancouver Comic Arts Festival on May 26 and 27. It’s gonna be my first “con” appearance, and I hope that I’ll finally be able to meet and chat with some readers in a non-Twitter setting. Be sure to check out the site for all the deets. It’s free to attend!
I’m also on the VanCAF board, and in that capacity I’ve done a couple interviews with some of the show’s more notable guests. If you’re interested in learning more about some of the personal lives of webcomics bigwigs, you might find them interesting.
March 9th, 2012 - File under Blog - 1 Comment
Quebec students are once again striking over tuition, and in my most recent Huffington Post piece I look at whether their story checks out:
Obviously academic loans bring problems of their own. For one thing, they contribute massively to the long-term personal indebtedness of Canadians, which economists routinely cite as the single biggest ticking time bomb threatening this country’s economic future. But an even greater concern is the degree to which this merry-go-round debate over tuition, enrolment, and aid — the perennial obsessions of both real politicians and self-proclaimed student leaders — has sucked so much air out of the larger higher education discussion we desperately need to have.
Read more at about why a whiny strike won’t solve post-secondary woes.
February 24th, 2012 - File under Blog - Comments Off
You may notice that I haven’t offered much commentary on the NDP leadership race to date. That’s because it’s a huge bore, as I discuss in my latest Huffington Post column:
Attempting to follow the ins and outs of the NDP campaign is a bit like trying to watch a horse race in the dark: you can place bets, but the fun ends there. It’s an election that has produced no reliable polls and uses a voting system so convoluted and opaque it’s almost impossible to make any sort of meaningful prediction regarding who actually has a shot at winning the thing. One has to pity all the poor political reporters across the land being dispatched to “cover” a race which they now openly profess to be analyzing solely on the basis of random hunches and pet theories.
Read the rest here, baby!
February 17th, 2012 - File under Blog - 2 Comments;
Wrote a new article for the Huffington Post, this one about the always sad spectacle of Canadian television.
When pressed, the Canadian media-industrial complex will justify their skewered standards of accomplishment with the conveniently conspiratorial fairy tale that the only reason Canadians aren’t watching more Can-con is because the devil Americans wont let us. There’s no shortage of violent verbiage available to describe the horror; our markets are “bombarded,” “saturated,” “overrun,” etc. Yet in reality, thanks to the billion-dollar-a-year budget of the CBC and its not-much-less subsidized competitors, never before in history have Canadians had more readily available access to Canadian-made alternatives. It’s easier than ever to watch, say, Republic of Doyle rather than Two and a Half Men – yet we still elect not to.
Check it out!
February 9th, 2012 - File under Blog - 4 Comments;
Got two new published articles this week.
The first, for the Huffington Post, is on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebration, which officially began this week. My views are predictable:
Despite sitting eyewitness to an awe-inspiring sweep of human history, Elizabeth has somehow never uttered any words as moving as Reagan’s tribute to the deceased heroes of the Challenger, as poignant as Justin Trudeau’s eulogy to his famous father, or as inspiring as Churchill’s… well, anything. To the extent we remember anything she’s said at all, in fact, her most famous quotes are entirely self-centered: an “annus horribilis” of family squabbles, a monotone tribute to a daughter-in-law she never liked, and, of course, the bland catch-phrase “My husband and I…” that has long served as a warning sign of even greater vapidity to come.
If you’re tired of monarchy-bashing, I also wrote a pice for the fine website Cartoon Movement about the state of editorial cartooning in Canada, an art form I’m increasingly pessimistic about:
In the United States, the country that usually perfectly mirrors Canada’s cultural development, observers often remark that the decline of political cartooning in that country (spurned by a similar disillusionment with a graying elite) is compensated by the rise of other forms of political satire, from The Onion to South Park. No comparable trend seems to be emerging in Canada. A recent article in the liberal-leaning Walrus magazine blamed the country’s comparatively stricter laws on libel and slander as part of the problem, but a larger culture of political disengagement seems equally culpable.
I’d help me out a lot if you’d post your comments on the sites themselves, rather than on Filibuster.
February 2nd, 2012 - File under Blog - 2 Comments;
If you thought Bush-hatred in America was bad, you should get a load of Harper-hate in Canada, the subject of my latest article for the Huffington Post.
It’s a testament to the power of social media and the increasingly biased way most of us choose to consume our news that the Canadian party system is now largely polarized on the basis of a false dichotomy that exists only in the fevered imaginations of the country’s most dogmatic left-wing ideologues. Jack Layton may have claimed that hope is better than fear, but vast quantities of Canadian progressives seem to be motivated by little else.
They scream passionate answers to questions no one is asking, and organize ferociously to quash proposals no one has offered. It’s a particularly creepy style of democracy-by-fantasy, but it may well be the new normal.
Read the whole thing here.
January 26th, 2012 - File under Blog - Comments Off
In my latest article for the Huffington Post, I look at the British Columbia Liberal Party’s ongoing indifference to right-wing voters in the province, despite the fact that they clearly need their support in order to beat the opposition NDP. Quote:
In a particularly dopey piece in the Globe and Mail this week, Gary Mason commented that “the Premier’s efforts to cast her Liberal administration in a bluer hue has had all the subtlety of football’s end-zone dance,” which is certainly the beleaguered party’s preferred narrative at the moment. Yet in terms of actual, real-world sightings of ostentatious conservatism, Mason could only spot two: Clark’s recent import of “a top federal Tory strategist as her new chief of staff,” and the fact that she recently sat beside Prime Minister Harper at her son’s pewee hockey game.
I certainly hope she didn’t strain something from all that reaching out.
Read the whole thing here, and be sure to leave a comment!
January 23rd, 2012 - File under Blog - 5 Comments;
Just to mix things up a bit, I just wanted to write a quick post reviewing two things I’ve come into contact with lately, one bad, and one good.
The first is The Iron Lady, which is a movie so awful and poorly-made I simply cannot believe anyone approved its release.
Other reviewers have danced around this fact, but I want to put it as bluntly as I can: it’s not a movie about the life and times of Margaret Thatcher. It’s primarily a fictionalized, speculative drama about her life as an old woman, long since retired from politics, and the difficulties and frustrations she experiences as she mourns the death of her husband and copes with her own descent into senility.
There are flashbacks to her political life, certainly, and these are all the stunning clips you see in the remarkably deceptive trailers. But the Iron Lady is not even a movie that uses nostalgia as a simple framing device to tell a story of the past, in the way, say, Hoover dictating his memoirs was the frame of J. Edgar. The point of the flashbacks is primarily to reveal character and emotion, not history. The three main characters are Thatcher, her daughter, and the ghost of Denis, and the climax of the plot is the ailing widow gaining the courage to clean out her dead husband’s closet. It’s not even worth harping on about all the important political episodes the film fails to show because, again, that’s not even the point of this movie.
I think anyone who’s interested in politics and politicians has often wondered what life is like for former heads of state after they leave office, and how they cope with a life of anonymity and weakness after years as the most powerful and well-known person in their nation. In the extremely unlikely event she would have agreed to it, a documentary about post-politics Thatcher might have been quite fascinating, and perhaps a different director could have made a compelling little film about the sad retired life of some other foreign prime minister who’s considerably less famous and important. But to ruin what should have been one of the great bio-pics of our time with one of the greatest actresses of our time is simply inexcusable, and outright depressing in its carelessness.
Changing gears, entirely, this Christmas I asked my parents to buy me a new computer monitor. Get me a big one, I said, and they bought me a 27-inch Samsung, which cost them around $300. At the risk of sounding like a spoiled brat, it wasn’t very good, but that was more my fault than theirs. I had done absolutely no research into how monitors work, and since returning it I’ve realized that you actually have to be a pretty discriminating shopper in order to come home satisfied.
My monitor set-up. Dell Ultrasharp attached to a Macbook pro.
Unless you are willing to spend over a grand for one of those super top-of-the-line Mac Thunderbolt things, most monitors on the market today max out at a resolution of 1920 by 1080. Which really isn’t really that great. As this clever XKCD comic notes, that’s an amazing twice the resolution of your average smartphone. In practical terms, this means there’s a very clear limit at how big a 1920 by 1080 screen can get before everything just starts looking stretchy, blurry, and pixely, and in my experience that’s somewhere around 23 inches. I guess if all you want to do is watch movies, a stretched display doesn’t matter much, but if you’re an artist like me, and sharp focus and crisp pixels are important, anything above 23 is going to cause more problems than it solves.
Color also appears to be something most monitors simply aren’t interested in bothering to do right in any serious capacity. Apparently if you take color seriously, you’re supposed to buy some manner of $60 color-matching contraption to calibrate your monitor, since merely fiddling with the “RGB balance” settings won’t do much. Again, this might not matter much to some, but using a double-screen monitor set-up, as I do, I find it incredibly irritating to pull windows from one screen to the other only for all the hues and shades to brighten or darken or yellow or whatever.
I originally returned the Samsung for a smaller model, then returned that second Samsung again for my current monitor, a Dell Ultrasharp 23-inch, which I am incredibly satisfied with. It also cost 300 bucks, but has much better sharpness, color, and clarity than the 27-inch Samsung, and did not require any special ports or cables I didn’t already own. It’s also capable of swinging around to provide a “vertical display,” which I must say, has already become one of those how-did-I-ever-live-without-it-experiences, in terms of how much more user-friendly it’s made word processing and web-browsing.
But I ordered it online, and only on the recommendation of a particularly tech-savvy friend, which was unto itself fairly revealing of how needlessly difficult monitor shopping remains for a layperson like me. I suppose it’s uniquely frustrating because few things seem like they should be easier to select based on nothing more than looks than a big, shiny, glowing screen.
January 20th, 2012 - File under Blog - Comments Off
In my latest column for the Huffington Post, I look at Prime Minister Harper’s approach to foreign policy. To quote myself:
In contrast to the man’s constant waffling elsewhere, foreign policy is the only real realm of “Harperism” where the PM has never significantly recanted, ignored, or undermined his own past views — an occurrence only made possible by a shifting political culture that has moved foreign affairs to a conveniently low rung on the ladder of priorities. It’s the one realm, in short, where Harper still sounds like the unabashed right-wing Republican we were always promised (or feared).
You can read the whole thing here.
Twitter: JJ_McCullough