My Least Favourite Year

I was thinking of titling this entry as just, "Fuck You, 2016." But it seems somebody beat me to it. It was a really bad year. When people have mentioned that it was a bad year, some have tried to dismiss the concept by saying that it was just a bunch of celebrity deaths. If you are one of those people, I invite you to contemplate how you came to ignore the world beyond celebreties, yet dismissive of their mortality.

But was this really the worst year? On the scale of human history, clearly not. There were no plagues. There were no world wars. No major cities burned to the ground. No civilizations collapsed. Well, one began collapsing, sure. But still, this is no 476 (fall of Rome,) but a mere 330 (partitioning of the Roman Empire into East and West.)

So let's limit this discussion to my lifetime. With the help of Wikipedia, here are the contenders for Worst Year In My Lifetime, along with their credentials for the title.

1979

• Iran revolution, hostage crisis
• Sid Vicious dies
• Mardi Gras is cancelled due to police strike
• Salvadorian civil war begins
• White Night riots
• Margaret Thatcher takes office
• Skylab crashes
• Jimmy Carter's "Malaise" speech
• Lord Mountbatten assassinated
• The Who concert crush in Cincinnati
• USSR invades Afghanistan
• Chinese One Child policy is introduced

1985

• New Coke
• Ozone hole discovered
• Bangladesh cyclone
• Air India flight 182
• Brixton riots
• Mexico City earthquake
• Steve Jobs leaves Apple
• Volcano in Amero, Colombia
• Dian Fossey murdered
• Numerous plane crashes

1994

• Nancy Kerrigan attacked, media loses its shit
• Silvio Berlusconi elected
• Rwandan Genocide
• Kurt Cobain dies
• Ayrton Senna dies
• OJ murder/arrest
• Andres Escobar murdered (Colombian footballer who scored own goal in World Cup)
• Baseball strike
• Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's announced
• Newt Gingrich becomes Speaker of the House
• Russia enters Chechnya
• Whitewater investigation begins
• Mexican Peso crashes

1995

• OJ trial begins, media really loses its shit
• Cult attack on Tokyo subway
• Selena murdered
• Oklahoma City bombing
• Christopher Reeve paralized
• Busiest hurricane season in 62 years
• New Jersey Devils introduce the Neutral Zone Trap
• Srebrenica massacre
• Steve Forbes runs for President - is unsuccesful
• Second Quebec referendum
• Yitzhak Rabin assassinated
• Calvin and Hobbes ends

2001

• George W Bush takes office
• Earthquake in Gujarat, India
• Taliban destroys Buddha statues
• Mir crashes
• Berlusconi re-elected
• Aaliyah dies in plane crash
• September 11
• Anthrax attacks
• Patriot Act
• Enron goes bankrupt
• Shoebomber incident

2016

• Numerous celebrity deaths
• Ammon Bundy and friends occupy federal wildlife refuge
• North Korea gets into space
• Siege of Aleppo
• ISIS bombs Brussels
• North Carolina bathroom bill
• Panama Papers
• Syria/Libya refugee crisis
• Rodrigo Duterte elected in the Philippines
• Flint water crisis
• Zika virus
• Bastille Day attack in Nice
• Dallas police shooting
• Brexit
• Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando
• ISIS bombs Istanbul
• Numerous black people shot by police
• Colombian people vote down peace treaty with rebels
• Hurricane Matthew hits Haiti
• Berlin Christmas market attack
• Donald Trump elected President

So I think you have to agree that 2016 was, indeed, the Worst Year Ever (in my experience.) Because the Wikipedia year-in-review was still incomplete at the time of writing, I had to complete this list by adding more events from memory. It was truly depressing how many times I thought the list was finished, only to remember, oh, right, that happened this year as well.

But it's over now. So I want everyone to try harder next year. 2016, don't let the metaphysical door hit your chronological ass on the way out. 2017, you may have a low bar, but we're still expecting a lot from you; you have a lot to make up for.

How The Hell'd We Wind Up Like This?

It was kind of lost during Christmas, but there was a story about Avril Lavigne feuding with Mark Zuckerberg. How did that happen? Well, Zuckerberg released a video showing off "Jarvis," Facebook's AI assistant. In the video, Zuckerberg asks Jarvis to play a good Nickelback song, to which it replies that no such thing exists. Lavigne came to Nickelback's defense; keep in mind that she used to be married to Nickelback singer Chad Kroeger. Wait, they have divorced, right (checks) yep.

I never thought I'd say this, but enough with the Nickelback bashing already. I've never been a fan of theirs either, and I'm usually the first person to demonize someone for dumbed-down rock music. And yes, I've taken shots at Nickelback too. But this has gotten to the point where people are piling-on just for the sake of it. Like monologue jokes about France, people are joining in on the ridicule without even knowing what they're joking about.

Sure, their songs all sound the same. And "Figured You Out" had the most juvenile lyrics this side of the Bloodhound Gang. But be honest, "How You Remind Me" was a great song, and "Someday" and "Photograph" approached actual pathos. So, a few good songs, some crap lyrics, and a bunch of songs that sound the same: I just described half the rock bands that have ever existed. Much like Coldplay, people seem to be beating up on a band for being ordinary, even though they're in a medium that has always had its share of hateable artists.

But let's not be naive. The Nickelback hatred isn't about the band, but about the fans. Nickelback are the stereotypical favourite of the Bro Nation. That kid who stole your lunch money right up until he dropped out in high school? Probably listens to Nickelback now. The fratboy you hated in University? Big Nickelback fan. Half the people who voted for Trump? You're sure they listen to Nickelback.

Kroeger and friends are a nice visible target for a widely-hated subculture. And they're easy to be seen as the "other." Like Creed before them, there's a weird phenomena where they sell millions of albums and concert tickets, but you never seem to know anyone who admits to being a fan. So they're easy to attack without worrying about consequences. I'd say Lavigne went overboard in calling this an example of bullying; really it's just a way of making lazy jokes that sound hard-hitting, but don't require taking a stand on anything. Really, it's just unimaginative and repetitive. Sort of like a certain rock band.

Fan Of The Fans

Recently, I've written posts on both Stargate and Gilmore Girls. And in the process, I've also mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer and fan-fiction. That brings up something interesting I found about ten years ago.

I read an article about the world of fan-fiction; specifically, the sheer size of the subculture, and the fact that pretty much every story in every medium has at least a little fan fiction written about it. Yes, even movies and TV shows you barely remember have fan-fiction. Do you remember MVP, the CBC's short-lived soap about hockey players' wives? Well a couple of people cared enough to write about it.

Having never been exposed to this, I found it fascinating to see a site with reams and reams of fan-authored stories. I didn't read much of the fiction itself, but it was interesting to see what kinds of franchises attracted writers. It wasn't necessarily the most popular things. Also, it wasn't necessarily the worlds that traditionally captured fan imaginations: for instance, both Star Wars and Star Trek were at low ebbs during those early 2000's, so they didn't attract the attention you'd expect. I'm sure that if Internet-spread fan fiction had existed throughout the twentieth century, those two would have built-up story reserves that will never be eclipsed.

Anyway, the aforementioned shows, Stargate SG-1, Gilmore Girls, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were the three TV shows that had the most stories written about them. That made me wonder what the common bond that attracts fan-fiction writer would be. Witty writing? Smart female characters? I suspected the subculture has female-skewed demographics, and apparently statistics confirm it.

The question stuck in my mind because they also have another thing in common: I was a fan of each of them. So apparently, I look for the same things in TV shows that fan-fiction writers do. That's kind of odd, since I've never really had a desire to write fan-fiction. (Though now that you mention it, I've got some great ideas for a Stargate/Gilmore/Buffy crossover.)

But since I'm revisiting the issue, I though I'd go back and see what the most popular shows are now. Here's the top ten shows that have the most fan-fiction stories written about them:

1. Supernatural
2. Glee
3. Doctor Who
4. Sherlock
5. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer
6. Once Upon a Time
7. NCIS
8. Vampire Diaries
9. Criminal Minds
10. Stargate: SG-1

Again, not a lot in common, other than female viewership. But now I have some future binge-watch targets.

Ad Rock

In the past I've mentioned how video game ads often have incongruous music. But previously this has usually been to contrast beautiful music with gritty fighting. For instance, there's a Playstation ad now set to a choral rendition of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This.)"

(Off topic, but has anyone ever successfully performed that song to make it sound like "made of this" rather than "made of these?" Since "dreams" is plural but "this" singular, the correct lyrics don't even sound right spoken, nevermind in the song.)

But the latest head-scratching musical combo is the ad for Battlefield 1 - a WWI game - with Smashing Pumpkins' angst-rock classic, "Bullet With Butterfly Wings." I've tried to figure out how a song about the exhaustion of unfocused anger could be applied to a hellish conflict that changed how the world looks at war. Sure, "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" could be a poetic description of a WWI fighter plane, but that's stretching it. Online I found ads set to "Seven Nation Army" which at least makes sense in a super-literal sense. I don't know why they didn't go with that song for the TV ad. I guess they decided their demographic needed to be a decade older.

For that matter, who wants a game set in World War I? If it's realistic, it will be hours of trying to avoid rat bites in the trenches before going over the top and getting gunned down to end the game. My condolences to history teachers everywhere who are currently trying to figure out how to convince kids the war wasn't about dramatically batting people off horseback.

Personally, I've never been a war game guy. I'm not trying to put the concept down: I'm open to the idea that you can make a game that both entertaining and respectful of the reality of war. But going all the way back to the Platoon tie-in game, I've been skeptical of the game industry's ability to deliver them. I'm inclined to keep that opinion, since someone at Electronic Arts thinks war is comparable to Billy Corgan's angry pet rat.

Lock Around The Clock

They're refurbishing some of the apartments in my building right now, and today someone arrived to deliver supplies to one of those rooms.  Unfortunately, the delivery guy got the number wrong, and tried putting them in my apartment instead.  Of course, he figured out something was wrong when he tried to open my door and found that it was locked.  But it was an unsettling surprise to me to suddenly hear someone try opening the door without knocking first.

It's a good thing I remembered to lock the door, or it would have been more embarrassing.  Usually I do lock it, but sometimes glance at the door and notice that it's unlocked.  That makes me wonder, just how often does it really make a difference to lock it?  No, I'm not bragging about living in a nice neighbourhood where you don't have to lock the door.  I'm just marvelling at how society works.

Say I go away for a week: how likely is it that someone will actually try my door to see if it is locked?  Based on how many people have actually tried it while I'm here, I'd say it's likely that I could leave the door unlocked for that whole vacation, and no one would come in.  Again, it's not because everyone in the world is honest; it's because we expect doors to be locked.  So we don't actually have to lock our doors, but that's only because we always lock our doors.

You Quite Literally Can't Handle The Truth

Recently, I saw a graphic being passed around Facebook, about peppers. It said that you can tell the gender of sweet peppers by the number of lobes on the bottom. (plants can have genders too; you knew that, right? ) Three lobes: male, four : female. And this also has a slight effect on the taste and texture of the pepper.

This sort of claim lands in the shadow of doubt for me. Weirder things are true, but they usually aren't. So I googled "pepper gender," somewhat alarmed at what I might find.

Actually, I just got a link to the misinformation-quashing site snopes.com. They pointed out that it's not true; peppers don't really have gender. They also pointed out that this is an urban legend that's been around for a while, but it's recently received new life on social media.

So now there are going to be thousands of people around the world choosing their peppers based on incorrect information, possibly taking out their romantic frustrations on their vegetables. "Think you can go a week without calling, Mr. Three-Lobes?" That's hardly a concern, but this is of course just an innocent and less emotionally-charged example of a much bigger problem: misinformation being spread - and believed - all over the Internet.

What's troubling is the disregard for the truth. In the above example, I made an assessment of the believability given the unknown source. But I also took advantage of the fact that the Internet can be used to easily look up facts, rather than passively consume them. I also have greater credence to an authority than to an anonymous source. Snopes.com isn't exactly the word of God, but I'm going to believe them long before someone I don't know, and has shown no credentials beyond a modest ability with Photoshop.

But I seem to be the exception rather than the rule. People are quite willing to believe anything they see on the Internet, a fact symbolized by the Oxford English Dictionary giving its word of the year award to the term, "post-truth."

Post-truth will probably be a term to define our era, so it will be hilarious when future historians look back and see that it's predecessor as word of the year was the crying with laughter emoji. So any future research into how this became the post-truth era will be short and sweet.

So how did we get here? We have the greatest information sharing device ever, and it's led to a total lack of consideration for the truth. Coincidentally, that question was recently posed to Brooke Binkowski, Managing Editor of Snopes.com. She said that it was a result of the low quality of mainstream news. I find that hard to believe. I mean, I'm as critical of them as anyone; throughout the election campaign, I kept fantasizing about the eventual downfall of conventional media, picturing Don Lemon on the streets, holding a hand-written sign reading, "will repeat talking-points for food."

But the fact is, the public is abandoning established news services for even lower quality online sources. I don't think anyone is saying, "my newspaper's reporting is too superficial, I'm going to switch to this web site that says Hillary Clinton had Justice Scalia murdered.

Actually, I first saw the post-truth world coming twenty years ago when the Internet was first going mainstream. I remember seeing a political discussion, in which someone referred to how Franklin Roosevelt created the New Deal, and that triggered the Great Depression.

Of course, many have critiqued and questioned the wisdom and success of the New Deal over the years, but everyone remembers it as a response to the Great Depression. Reversing the causality is a brazen attempt to rewrite history. When called on it, the far-right folks in that old newsgroup hedged a bit, saying, yeah well it made the depression worse, and that's what they really meant.

But the incident opened my eyes to the possibilities of a media world where there are so many voices. What we know to be true is really just the consensus of experts. After all, I wasn't around for the Great Depression; my knowledge of it is based on the words of those that have studied it. It could be that I have been deceived, but I think it's unlikely that so many would be so wrong in such an organized way. But what about when the waters are muddied by many people claiming to be experts? Or what if you're just not that choosy about who's expertise you trust?

Really, I don't think there's any explanation for our entering the post-truth world other than, we can. All this time we've held together the concensus of society only because there are so few microphones. Despite all the rhetoric that The Man controls The Message to his own ends, the fact is that people who get to speak are usually more-or-less deserving of authority. Without that bottleneck on information we'll need to develop a new way of attributing authority.

Words For A Loss

One pet peeve I have with the National Hockey League is the way they record team won/loss records. Or, as they put it, won/loss/overtime-loss records. Winning in overtime gets you the full two points, so they're listed with ordinary wins with no distinction. But overtime losses get you a point, so they're listed in a separate column, after the regulation losses, where they used to record the ties.

The problem is, what constitutes a winning record? In sports life baseball and basketball that have only wins and losses, you just look at those two numbers and see which one is bigger. Our in sports like football and soccer, they have ordinary tires that you can just ignore as neutral, and compare the W and L columns.

But in the NHL, it's not as clear. Say a team has a record of 6-5-3. Do they have a winning record? They have more wins than regulation losses. But they have more total losses than wins. But they have 15 points from 14 games, so they have more than a point a game in a league where they give two points for a win. But that's not really true when they sometimes give out more than two points in a game.

The problem is, it can really warp people's expectations. Last week, I checked the standings, and there were only four teams out of thirty that had losing records, with only five more at even records. And I've heard players brush off bad seasons by saying the team is at .500 when they're really having losing seasons. No, I don't know how you fix it. Or maybe we want it this way. After all, this is the league that once had 16 of 21 teams make the playoffs; if we can't give every team hope to make the playoffs, at least let them mask how bad they really are.

The NeverEnding Story

They're now bringing back Gilmore Girls for a short run on Netflix. Yes, it's been off the air for a decade; this new series is going to take place years later, rather than pick up where the old show left off.  I was a fan of the original show, so this is something I'll probably watch if I ever subscribe to Netflix.  Hopefully that will be before they're ready to do a series with Lorelai and Rory in the Stars Hollow rest home.

Bringing back a show is an interesting concept, continuing a show in a different period in the characters' lives. On the one hand, it sounds like an intriguing premise: you can really explore characters in great depth if you examine how they change in the long run.

And it’s an interesting format that we don’t normally get to see in storytelling media: looking at characters over a long period of time. An epic book (or a long series of books) is the only place we’re likely to see it. Sure, there are movies that try to encompass an entire life, but there usually isn’t enough time to look in depth at the characters in a couple of hours.

But the problem is, we are used to the idea that once a story is over, the characters are free to our imagination. For instance, JK Rowling’s elaborations and extensions to the Harry Potter stories have often been resented by fans. It shouldn’t really matter: she dreamt the whole thing up, so there shouldn’t be anything wrong with telling us more about the world she envisioned when writing. But still, if you’ve imagined that world in a certain way, it feels like interference to be told you’re wrong, even if it’s the author that’s telling you. And even if you aren’t a fan-fiction-writing fanboy, you’ve still probably got some sort of unconscious vision of the story. Imagine that the creators of Cheers suddenly announced that somewhere out there, Sam Malone is having heart bypass surgery right now, that would be strangely disorienting, even if it has no impact on you.

So perhaps there’s something to be said for creating something and leaving it at that. Though I suspect that’s just because we’re accustomed to stories having a finite lifespan. Between reboots, spinoffs, and sporadic streaming programming, we may have to start getting used to open-ended narratives. Perhaps we should start getting used to the idea that characters keep coming back. And hopefully, the lure of unending profitability will urge creators to make deeper characters that have staying power.

Chill 'Em All

It's about time for my annual complaint about ubiquitous Chirstmas music. Once again, I'm trying not to sound too curmugenly. I'm trying to find a reasonable middle ground between people like myself who only enjoy a little Christmas music, and the folks who want their Christmas cheer pounded into their head non-stop, Clockwork Orange style.

First up, while I do appreciate a reprive from Christmas music in stores, playing "What Are You Doing New Years Eve" in November is not an improvement. I'm just thankful there aren't any Valentine's Day songs, or they'd be staring later this week.

I also just heard a re-write of "Mr. Sandman" altered into a Christmas song - "Mr. Santa, bring me some toys." I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. On the one hand, I've always figured that a way we could improve the Christmas music season would be to write more songs, so we would at least have a greater variety to play over the eight-weeks of Christmas. But rewriting existing songs to become Chirstmas-related? That's an awfully big can of worms to get into.

For a start, you might have already started by trying to think of other songs with "sandman" in the title that could be just as easily changed. And if you're similar in age to me, you immediately thought of Metallica's "Enter Sandman." There's some promise in the corus:

Silent Night
Holy Light
Take my Hand
We're off to Winter Wonderland

Of course, I knew someone would already have come up with lyrics along these lines. And in fact, someone has recorded an actual song. It's not quite the Christmas music diversity I'd hoped for, but at least now rock fans don't have to keep playing Trans-Siberian Orchestra. You occassionally hear their music in stores in the lead-up to Christmas, and it gives the experience an apocalyptic overtone that already-stressed shoppers just don't need. I don't think Merry Metallica will be much better in that respect. I think I'm going to do a search for Enya Christmas albums.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #36

In 2016, Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg will co-host a cooking show. And that won't even be one of the top 100 craziest things to happen that year.

It's The History Eraser Button, You Fool!

As a fan of the Stargate franchise, I was delighted to see that new trilogy of Stargate movies probably won't happen.

If you're confused, here's how it happened: Stargate was a 1995 science fiction movie from director Roland Emmerich, a poor man's Michael Bay. It was built around Kurt Russell and the premise that the Egyptian god Ra was an alien enslaving humans. It didn't have a lot going for it other than that, except for some impressive (for the time) visuals and action set-pieces.

A few years later, someone thought it would be a good premise for a TV spinoff. The idea got handed to some new people, and the came up with a complex backstory for all the cool looking stuff in the movie, added and rewrote characters, and injected a lot of humour.

The result was a show that was far superior to its inspiration in every way except special effects. On the list of TV spinoffs that exceded their movie inspirations, it's a solid number two behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Okay, Westworld has probably pushed it to number three, but you get the picture. It maintained a cult following, and lasted ten seasons, and spun off a further two series.

But in Hollywood's current attitude that absolutely anything with any name recognition must be made and remade as much as possible, Emmerich arranged to restart the movie series. The catch here is that he was going to ignore the TV shows and start over where the original movie left off.

Of course, in today's media landscape, reboots and rewriting are an accepted hazard of fandom. Different franchises have had their own ways of dealing with it:

• Star Trek - we'll start a new timeline, so we can change everything and pretend we're not changing anything. Your beloved characters are safe and sound and unchanged in their own timeline that we're never going to use again.
• Star Wars - we'll drop all the peripheral stuff that only the hard-core fans know about anyway. But the main story from the movies won't change at all. What about the prequels? Well, you know, it's like...look, is that Baba Fett?
• Batman - just accept that each generation the same story gets retold, but darker.
• Doctor Who - People used to think it was silly to have a show that reboots itself every few years, but you're not laughing now, are you?

But in Stargate's case, it seems a little more severe. Rather than change the actors or the tone, this would have rewritten the story, premise, and style. And I know it doesn't really matter; creating a new story with the same name and a superficial resemblance shouldn't take away from my enjoyment of the franchise as it was.

In today's pop-cultural world fandom is part of the experience. It's expected that there's going to be discussion on the Internet, extra stories in other media, and humourous in-jokes with fellow fans for years to come. Really, that's the most troubling thing about reboots and remakes: the idea that your part of the pop-culturesphere is going to be paved over to make way for someone else's experience.