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A rail gun in the works at the US Navy has an effective range that covers all of North Korea. Don’t you just love gunboat diplomacy?

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Some of you may have seen the recent commercials for the Dodge Magnum. The truck is being reviewed by a panel of strange creatures. There’s a flying unicorn, a muppet, and a happy squirrel, just to name a few. Another panel of Chrysler specialists interview the creatures for their opinion on the car. They all agree that it’s not fuzzy-wuzzy.

Indeed, there is truth in this advertising. The Magnum is marketed as an unholy alliance between the sedan and the SUV. It’s primarily for young to middle aged men fighting for their virility in an increasingly wussified world full of 4-stroke rice buggies.

This all makes sense, but it doesn’t make me want to buy the car. It could be that I’m not in the market for male compensation equipment as personal transport. It could also be that I’m puzzled by all this disdain for “cute”. With the exception of my girlfriend, people wouldn’t say I’m a “cute” person. Yet I have a distinct appreciation “cute” things. I don’t see cute as an affront to my male qualities. On the contrary, the fact that I am a quite large and heterosexual male allows me to appreciate cute as something foreign to my nature.

Yet still, Dodge wants to return to me my manhood. I wonder how they’ll return all the gasoline that machine probably uses.

I took a look at this article and was intrigued by its accusation that Japan is an infantile society for its obsession with cute things. It’s an interesting comment on how the West defines the concept of cute. It’s seen as something to arouse parental instincts in people, rather than as an aesthetic idea. Cute is often mistaken for simple, but if you take a look at maid cafe’s, shoujo manga, Takarazuka musicals, or anything else that involves the Japanese idea of cute, you realize the kind of work that goes into these cultural products. Instead of leaving cute as the exclusive domain of children, this society has appropriated cute as an aesthetic method, and we get Hello Kitty and the Nintendo Wii. In dismissing cute, we rob ourselves an entire universe of aesthetic technique.

Besides, if there is something wrong with a 6 foot tall, 270 pound man checking out cuteoverload.com every day, then I don’t want to be right.

If you ever want to expose the inner recesses of adulation and fervor for fictional characters or settings, you need to look no futher than Fan Fiction. This would be referring to the practice of fans of a particular book, movie, or television series to start writing stories about their favorite characters and sharing them out among other fans. It started out in its current incarnation in the 1960’s with the Star Trek series, and thanks to the internet, such stories are now legion, covering properties from Seinfeld to Hellraiser, sometimes even in the same story.

In this modern age along with the internet we have copyright law, and since these stories are written without the express permission of their creators, this makes them quite illegal. Personally, I find fan fiction to be quite benign. The writer’s don’t make any money from it, and most of the pieces are so terrible that they are practically unrecognizable from the original product. In a legal sense, though, they are diluting the copyright of the writers who actually pay for groceries with the money they make writing these characters. After hearing the fan perspective on this issue for so long, I find it interesting when writers take a harsh view of this practice.

Lee Goldberg is one case in point. He is a working, Hollywood writer of such shows as “Diagnosis Murder” and “Monk” who has taken on the unenviable task of denouncing fan fiction in his blog, The Writer’s Life. Taken from his perspective, it’s easy to see why most fan fiction is such contemptible crap. So-called fans can take your work and turn it inside out and backwards, in essence creating the literary equivalent of something that slurped out of a David Cronenberg film. Techniques Slash, Mpreg, and Mary Sue Characters are used to create abattoirs of egotistical wish fulfillment so terrifying that you would flee from the keyboard before I could tell you what the hell those words mean.

Worst of all, it’s a time sink that detracts from the real writing you could be doing. At the end of her very caustic rant against fan fiction, Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm describes, step by step, how to get your story out of the ghetto of fanzines and copyright infringement and get you back to practicing your craft. I believe that this makes fan fiction different from drawing fan art, or participating in a garage band. With a few paragraphs you can make a written story fundamentally different from the creator you so desperately want to emulate.

That being said, I should tell you all about the time I wrote someone else’s characters.

If you google my name, chances are you’ll come across the comic I wrote for a few years back called “Shifters”. It was kind of a Teen Wolf meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer series about a girl named Farrah who suddenly discovers that she’s a werewolf. It was drawn by Marie Tary, a friend who ran table top role-playing games with my friends in college. She had this comic online and was at a loss for what to write in it. So, being a bit of a scribe myself, I took up the task for a few issues, adding some new characters and helping the comic build a bit of a following. As I started getting into my upper level CIS courses, I found I no longer had the time to keep up with the comic, and so I left in 2002.

The question is, while Marie is carrying on her comics, what have I been doing? Aside from a short monologue and a blog or two, things have been rather quiet on the publishing front for me, internet or otherwise. I’ve even started drawing in the past couple of years. Looking at those essays and rants on fan fiction revealed to me something. I’m afraid I’ll write fan fiction.

I just want to go on the record saying that I don’t have a problem with fan fiction. Heck, even I tried it a couple of times. However, I never published my stories on the net because of the ugly realization that I was writing someone else’s story. The idea that I could put so much effort into crafting a story only to find out later that it’s already been done is a great fear of mine. The idea that my pet obsessions could get in the way of my story is also frightening.

Looking at these stories, I realize that their purloined trappings are but a shackle for real story inside. When I started them, I wanted to take the properties to places they had never been to, or never could go for fear of violating their series bibles. Why not just make my own? As I mentioned in other posts, much of my writer’s block stems from a lack of courage. True, I can’t go off writing 500 pages of exposition like some people, but that shouldn’t stop me from writing 250 pages of story. It might be crap, it might be something. But until it get’s on the page, who’s going to know?

I was on my way to Vancouver one day for an e-commerce seminar when I heard the Eagle Ridge Bluffs protesters state their case on the radio. I quickly switched the station in disgust. These people had resorted to protesting the expansion of the sea-to-sky highway to Whistler after many years and millions of dollars had been put into designing the highway, putting to together cost and environmental evaluations to make sure that this was the safest and most cost-effective way to get people to and from the resort in time for the 2010 Olympic games. And now it was all going to be cast aside thanks to the tireless sitting efforts of some quinquagenarians with too much time on their hands.

It’s been said that protest is dead because the language of resistance has been appropriated by the establishment to sell Nike and Coca-cola. I think that’s only part of the equation. Protest has lost its effectiveness because it is has started to become unnecessary as a communication tool. This is not India in the middle of the British Occupation. Rule of Law has progressed to a point where you can stage a protest without getting a riot baton in the face. The most these Eagle Ridge Protesters had to deal with was a terse letter and some harsh language. In our society, with all it’s modes and avenues at our disposal, these protestors have decided to go with the grown-up equivalent of a toddler holding his breath to avoid nap-time.

Now, I am under no delusion that society is perfect. We have poverty and ignorance just the same as any other era. However, when I hear that a group of people have blocked off a highway or marched on the Vancouver Art Gallery to prove their point, I find myself tuning out, whatever the issue may be.

There’s a piece of commercial real estate in the old town of Abbotsford. The shop is called Da kine, named after the marijuana cafe in vancouver shut down a few months ago. Over the windows are draped signs of with various slogans decrying the police, the city hall, and the local free newspaper. I wonder if Tim Felger realizes that he’s appealing to *People* to carry out his bizarre political designs.

No one seems to take the idea of political capital seriously. Have you ever heard of the Marijuana Party doing anything to help anyone else? Do they even care that they need to be a force in the community before they can garner any votes?

It’s not that demonstrations in and of themselves are bad. The trick is that they have to be used more sparingly than they have in the past, and they must be enacted with good faith. Take the Nation-wide marches of the immigrants in the United States. Many of these immigrants do not have the resources to put together a proper awareness campaign. Appearing in one might lead to arrest or deportation. So what do they do? They take a National walk-off the job to show how much the American economy depends on their work. 300 million dollars was lost in Los Angeles through one day of protest. This may not have gotten anyone citizenship, but it certainly took the idea of deporting millions of illegal immigrants off the table.

To be heard in the information age takes more than a shrill voice and placard. To confront the problems of today, we need use our heads as much as our hearts. We are all creatures of want and need; satisfying the needs and wants of others are the first steps to satisfying our own. With the freedom afforded to us as a Liberal Democracy, we can all find the way to our dreams.