Category Archives: bizarreness

The Golden Age of Television

Readers, yours truly is not a person to whom the positives of life are either readily apparent or understandable, but even someone as typically dour as myself can’t deny that we are living in a golden age of television.

It’s he-re…

Now I’m not exactly sure why that is- why all of a sudden we seem to have had a jump in quality and quantity of shows. An age thing, perhaps? I considered that, but as much as we could argue that we simply prefer the television shows we had when we were in our 20s, I don’t think my generation is alone in the belief that TV is better now than it was a decade ago.

Let’s try to figure out why. Continue reading

I Shouldn’t Have To Say This, But Community Should Be Good [Or At Least Better]

It’s one of those weeks where Friday rolls around and I find that I’m writing my fifth post of the week. Granted, two of them were reviews and one of them I co-wrote, but it’s still a lot. One of my favourite things to do to shake up the ol’ grey matter is watch a little TV, so of course I ended up finding myself unable to blog about anything else but the finale to Season 5 of Community.

It’s not working.

Strangely enough, this is the show that’s appeared most on this site [save for 2 Broke Girls, but y’know]. While I began with discussing Season 3’s wonky airing schedule, I very soon turned to providing constructive criticism. Then came two posts where Gordon and I discussed Seasons 4 and 5, respectively, in which I took to defending the show and the directions it was taking [in contrast with his outright vilifying it]. Having just come off of that last episode I’m not sure I can maintain that stance anymore. Continue reading

The Mental Health Issue

There’s an entire graveyard of first-drafts of this piece sitting somewhere in the dusty virtual archives of CWR, but after eluding me for so long (and I mean months, people) I finally think I’ve got this complicated and multifaceted post down.

Let’s get right to it.

Mental Disorders Are Partly Your Fault

See this comic?

As much as it’s making a good statement about the way we treat mental illness (and we’ll touch more on that in a second), the simple fact of the matter is that the idea that mental illness is something that just “happens” is wrong. The comic asks us “Would you really tell someone with a broken hand to just ‘get over it’?”. To which I say, “No, but I would yell at him for not wearing cast or for trying to punch through cinder blocks.” Continue reading

2 Music Videos That Flipped The Sexual Script [And Failed]

People have been flipping gender roles and sexual scripts for longer back than I care to research. It’s as simple as a sitcom depicting a wife coming back from a long day’s work and her husband meeting her with a pair of slippers and the evening paper. “This doesn’t match up with life as we know it to be!” the audience thinks. They shake their heads, they laugh, they go on with their lives.

Since then we’ve arguably become more open-minded, largely due to pop culture that communicates that women can in fact have professional careers, men can be sentimental and form embarrassingly close relationships with one another, et cetera. That obviously doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain areas that overall continue to be stuck in trends others are making moves to abandon. Take for example, an art form I’ve barely if ever discussed: music videos. Continue reading

Generational Time Zones

You’ll notice, readers, that this post was published exactly at 9:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. This is partly because I want to avoid Evan’s routine beatings as punishment for tardiness, and mostly because you, as an overwhelmingly Western audience, expect everything to be exactly on time.

Now if you were all mostly from Bolivia, or Syria, or Morocco, or Thailand, chances are that you wouldn’t care so much. After all, 9:00 in the morning is really more of an approximation than anything else, right?

Taken from a rather insightful infographic on the differences between Eastern and Western cultures.

Continue reading

Shame Day: Noah Bashers

I haven’t seen Noah yet, but I also haven’t seen anything by Aronofsky that I didn’t like. You probably know him from such movies as The Black Swan, The Wrestler, and The Fountain– all tending to center on people pursuing their dreams and passions even at their own destruction.

Now in spite of his impressive filmography, Noah has nevertheless come under fire from several directions, though perhaps none more vocal than the conservative (heck, even moderate) Christian community. Continue reading