Category Archives: television

Tropes, Archetypes, and Why Original Creative Writing Is Like A Game of Rock, Paper, Scissors

Culture War Reporters, since its inception, has never been a place for fiction of any kind. As a result, when both Gordon and I hang out we often find our discussions centre around stretching our creative muscles, asking questions like: “If you had to come up with a team of mercenaries, with a minimum of five members, what would it look like?”

The issue with all questions like this is that we run into a little something King Solomon said, way back in the day [emphasis added]:

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
  there is nothing new under the sun.

How do you come up with something original, something that truly hasn’t been done before? Continue reading

Evan and Gordon and Kat Talk: Beauty

EVAN: Today, ladies and gentlemen, comes yet another E&GT that’s causing me seriously think about changing the title of the feature. Kat joins both Gordon and me in a three-person discussion we’ve been meaning to have for a while.

Today’s topic is one of Gordon’s making, so without further ado I am turning it over to him-

GORDON: Beauty is our topic for today.

Or perhaps “attraction” might be a better title. We’re going to be hashing out whether or not there’s an issue with being attracted to contemporary standards of beauty.

Now I bring this up because it’s been pretty well established that our contemporary standards of what’s attractive are, well, pretty unrealistic and often unhealthy. Though the 300 pounds of sheer blubber that would’ve turned heads two hundred years ago admittedly weren’t much better.

Continue reading

Aaron Sorkin VS Women

My roommate and I have been watching The Newsroom without fail every Sunday evening. For anyone unaware, The Newsroom is the latest creation of Aaron Sorkin, perhaps most famous for his show The West Wing and his favored medium of people having very fast conversations while walking.

The show’s premise is actually pretty interesting. Set in an alternate reality where there’s actually a single news channel actually devoted to journalism and integrity (as much as anyone can hope for, anyways), anchor Will MacAvoy (Jeff Daniels) and his intrepid crew struggle to keep the beacon of integrity and unflinching honesty lit in a mire of shady politics, fear-mongering, and cheap entertainment. Continue reading

Why I’m Not Scared Of Porn

Last week, Evan and I discussed the recent move by the Cameron administration in the UK to block pornography from British internet servers by default (it can be accessed through request). As Evan is currently on tour in the Mexican state of Sinaloa as his luchador alter-ego, “El Astronauta Más Sexy Y Famoso,” he’s asked me to write today’s post, and I’ve decided to pick up on last week’s talk.

We had blasted a few arguments back and forth (with me arguing that the ban did far more harm than good) but one line of reasoning that I didn’t get a chance to use was this:

There’s a lot worse stuff out there than porn. Continue reading

Fixing Doctor Who

As with many elements of modern culture, I walk the blurry line between fandom and general enjoyment. I like plenty of stuff, but I wouldn’t say I love anything. I enjoy comics- more than the average man on the street- but I’m definitely not on a level where I could seriously discuss comics with someone who’s actually into them (as Evan can attest). I enjoy heavy metal, but I couldn’t name the leading band of the past couple years or tell you the difference between Finnish black metal and Swedish death metal.

This is neither, just for the record…

Even though this gets me simultaneously branded as a nerd  by people who aren’t fans of _______ and a poser by people who are, I nevertheless get a pretty unique perspective on things. I can see how they work- what their appeal is- without getting objectivity compromised by being too emotionally invested.

Now I think I’d be hard pressed to think of a better example of this than Doctor Who.

Continue reading

Talking About Celebrities Talking To People

I’m going to start out with a few fun facts for readers both old and new alike.

At the time of this writing our blog has approximately 85,750 views. We have been averaging roughly 175 hits per day ever since the very talented Kat came aboard, and she’s largely the reason we’re almost at 200 on a Friday evening in spite of my not having posted yet. As is the norm, far too many of the search terms used to find this site have been people looking for porn; we began catering to fans of a particular sub-genre once Gordon wrote that one post about the hijab.

The most hits we have ever gotten was a result of massive Facebook sharing of a post I wrote about the bombing that happened in Boston. That all-time high was 562 views.

Last week Kanye West tweeted about Pacific Rim, praising it for being “easily one of [his] favorite movies of all time.” That first tweet was retweeted 8,853 times, and memorialized 5,177 times by all his twitter followers who chose to favourite it. To put that into context, Kanye West has about 9.7 million people following him on Twitter.

Kan-Jaeger West

Continue reading