This section is devoted to all the textual preferences that hold my interest--and as you can see, there are a lot of them. Although I've added my own little contributions to these areas here, there are also a healthy number of links for your perusal.
Collectively, I must admit that these interests take up a lot of my time, and many of my friends have become such (in part) because of sharing them in common with me--but there's a lot more to me as a person than that, so don't assume you're getting the whole picture here.
Those who know me will tell you how often I make allusions to different aspects of popular culture. On certain days, my conversations will run like a non-stop source of obscure quotes and in-jokes only I understand, and some people can get quite confused when they don't recognise my references. In fact, even the name of my personal homepage didn't originate with me, but came from somewhere else. (Kudos to you if you already know the specific quote and the scene it comes from.)
In terms of what I myself write about, there are no specifics--I write whatever I think of. Lists are something of a specialty of mine (I'm very analytical that way, I can't help it), so you can find plenty of ongoing projects of that nature here.
One of those projects is the study of fictional history, a pursuit that became such a defining specialty for me that I created a website devoted to fictional timelines which has since garnered me a great deal of (unexpected) public attention.
Now, I hate doing this because it's such an Internet cliché, but as some of my own content seems to be lacking, I have mostly links to offer in this section. Where those links are concerned, however, I've done my best to direct you to sites with the best and most informative content available online. I was forced to use Lynx for six months early in my "online life," so you'll find through these links that I have quite an appreciation for text over graphics, and I retain such a fondness for certain erstwhile sites that I've used the Wayback Machine to make sure you can still reach them...
I've also tried to highlight sites about aspects of popular culture you may not have heard of, those with rare information, or sites that have an unusual take on your otherwise familiar favourites. Please let me know if there are better sites out there.
More is being added here all the time, so come back, and come back often.
By far my most obsessive interest, Star Trek has at times been a very pervasive part of my life, to the point where my first professional fiction sale was the Star Trek: Enterprise short story "You Are Not in Space" in the anthology Strange New Worlds 10. For more details, you can read my annotations for that story, part of a trend where many Star Trek authors have posted such notes online.
One of my favourite social outings over the years has been seeing each new Star Trek movie as it comes along, starting when I was able (through a lot of careful planning) to get a rather large group of my friends together to see Star Trek: Insurrection in Winnipeg's biggest cinema on opening night. (The outing for Star Trek: Nemesis, however, proved somewhat less successful...much like the film itself.)
I could go into a long-winded discussion about the many reasons why Star Trek fascinates me so, but you're waiting to get to the goods, so on to it.
|
You probably haven't seen this picture before. It's the Spanish advert for Star Trek: First Contact (available to this day on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray for those who have yet to see it). The main difference between it and the English-language ad is the addition of a Borgified Earth in the path of the Enterprise. The slogan in the upper lefthand corner reads, "Planet Earth:/Population 9 Billion/None Human." It's actually the cover of the invitation to attend the Spanish premiere of the movie on February 20, 1997, and was sent to me by a longtime friend who lives in Barcelona, Julio Escajedo. (Julio and I share a number of interests, chief among them a fascination with the Borg.) This is one of those cases where I wonder who makes the decisions regarding foreign advertising of American-made productions. There are clear differences between this advertisement and its English counterpart, but the reasoning behind those differences is unknown to me. As a Star Trek fan in particular, my initial online presence consisted of the Star Trek Chronology, Beta Version (which remains available though it is no longer updated) and Star Trek: The Mirror Universe Chronology (which does still receive periodic updates). Beyond that, I can often be found on The Trek BBS, especially its Trek Literature forum. While you wait for me to come up with some more contributions to the genre, other talented fans have already put up some great stuff. Check them out. |
|
This fixation has grown in recent years along with all the continued publicity, and with new friends I've made who were bigger fans of the original trilogy than I had ever been. To be honest, the aforementioned group outing to Insurrection was in part a trial run to see if I could successfully plan such a trip for the premiere of The Phantom Menace in May 1999. I was able to get around fifteen of my friends together then, so I had little doubt I could get at least as big a group for the first new Star Wars movie in more than fifteen years. However, a combination of factors meant that my quest for tickets turned into something of a fiasco. It's a long story, so I won't bore you with the details, but at least I showed up on the local news.... Much like my Star Trek presence, I originally contributed to Star Wars fandom online by co-writing what would become the Star Wars Timeline, Version 6.5 Beta. Much like that original Star Trek work, this timeline is no longer being updated. What is it about this universe that makes it so endlessly entertaining? Well, I haven't tried to answer that question, but you should come look at some cool stuff. Luckily, there are a number of specialised Star Wars sites out there, so it should be much easier for you to find what you're looking for. |
"Time will tell...it always does." Through more than fifty years and many incarnations, the Doctor and the TARDIS are like old familiar friends, no matter where they land. I have many childhood memories of staying up late on Friday nights to watch PBS airings of the series...admiring the Doctor's ingenuity and individuality ("the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism," as Craig Ferguson put it), becoming attached to various companions, and thinking the Daleks were some of the coolest aliens on television.
If you're really curious, my favourite Doctors are the Fourth (Tom Baker), the Seventh (Sylvester McCoy), and the Tenth (David Tennant); and my favourite companions are Sarah Jane Smith, the Second Romana, Ace, and Donna Noble.
|
From a certain perspective, I was late to discovering the Highlander franchise, watching the original feature film on home video primarily because of its connection to the Queen album A Kind of Magic. It wasn't until Highlander: The Series began airing locally (late in its first run) that I truly became a fan thanks to that take on an Immortal MacLeod. To this day, I still argue that the television series is the best version of The Game and that Duncan MacLeod is a more compelling character than Connor MacLeod. Due to that enthusiasm born in the Nineties, I was a regular for many years on the alt.tv.highlander Usenet newsgroup (and I still check in on the group occasionally), making friends there who remain a part of my life; and I was inspired to make my only trip to a franchise-specific con, the one-off Legacy convention in Washington, DC. For the benefit of others online, I also eventually put together a guide to the many convoluted and incompatible Highlander continuities. |
|
Unlike my experience with Highlander, I got in on the ground floor with the Firefly franchise--I watched "The Train Job" when it first aired in North America in 2002, knowing little about the premise ahead of time, and was fully onboard by the end of Shepherd Book's opening narration. This 'verse was instantly appealing to me in a way the Buffyverse or Joss Whedon's other creations had never managed to achieve (even with the episodes being aired out of order at that time), and I was quick to identify as a Browncoat and become involved with the show's online fandom. Predictably, what I'm known for in that fandom is the Firefly Timeline (so prominent at one point that it was linked from Universal's official website for the feature film Serenity and featured on Whedonesque twice), but much of its online presence has always revolved around message boards.... |
|
Like most people of my generation and background, I grew up with the first three feature films in this franchise--and I would never take anything away from Harrison Ford's iconic portrayal of the character--but it was actually The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (including George Hall's take on Indy in the Nineties for the show's bookends) that got me fully engrossed in the life and times of everyone's favourite fictional archaelogist. It was a great series that stayed in production continuously for five years, though few people seem to know about that, and its production values still hold up today. For a long time, this corner of my fandom was contentedly passive, until I decided to do some "quick" updates related to the series on the Indiana Jones Wiki...which I continue to work on diligently, having built up a significant body of contributions there with no end in sight. I've been gratified to discover I'm not alone in that focus amongst the broader Indiana Jones fandom, with multiple fansites (beyond the excellent and longstanding one linked above) devoted to the series more than the feature films. |
MTN, or the Manitoba Television Network, was an independent station located right here in Winnipeg. It was around for over ten years, and its goal was to be a "Very Independent" alternative to the Canadian and American national networks out there. For this and many other reasons, it also happened to be my favourite television station.
MTN aired most of the continuing genre series that I followed at the time, including all the new Star Trek series (ever since the premiere of The Next Generation) and everything from Earth: Final Conflict to Highlander: The Series (with the extra four minutes not shown in the US!) and its spinoff, Highlander: The Raven. Unbeknownst to its owners and operators, MTN played a significant role in my formative fandom years.
They also made some very cool commercials for these series, which most local stations never bother with (I'd love to meet their advertising people, especially now that this is even less common), and they didn't shuffle them around in their schedules, as stations elsewhere are wont to do. In general, they seemed to live up to their mandate as a station that set itself apart from the rest. They even answered viewer email quickly.
Given all these facts in their favour, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to promote this station's practices as best I could...until they changed into A-Channel, part of another burgeoning national network, and then Citytv after that. Although many things stayed the same, despite the name changes, that spark that made MTN special seemed somewhat diminished in the aftermath.
This is my tribute to MTN...Very Online.
That is all for now in terms of interests that I'll actually write about at length (or more precisely, those that mostly date from my early childhood). Fear not, however--there are more choices than ever for you below.
Some of my other pop-culture hobbies are addressed in the following quick links:
There, that should give all of you enough choice.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no distinction between pop culture and so-called "real" culture. They both have a powerful effect on society, and the former is just as legitimate an art form as the latter. Nevertheless, for convenience, I have provided a separate section here for other types of expression to acknowledge that they're often treated as different from one another.
Chief among these in terms of influence on my own life is the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, which is one of the reasons why many of my theatre reviews for The Charlebois Post were from there. The Fringe has had such an effect on my life, in fact, that I decided to give it a separate page on its own, which I am still in the process of putting together.
As someone with an English degree, I also feel obligated to elaborate on my own literary interests, but I haven't the time at the moment. Soon, I hope to have more to say regarding these aspects of modern society, with even more links to cultural sites that I find of interest. I hope you enjoy the experience.
Smack Dab in the Middle of the Blue