WRITING: Gender-Specific Adjectives

In a recent essay at Tiger Beatdown on why Doctor Who‘s Amy Pond is frustrating, Lindsay Miller offered this succint point: “Can we all take a moment here to agree, unequivocally, that “feisty” is the single most condescending adjective in the English language [...]?” At that same site, s.e. smith asked what we mean when [...]

Derivative Works IV: Taking Back the Culture

In previous Derivative Works pieces, I’ve written about how the stigmas regarding fanfiction are inaccurate, and how derivative works can use a majority-centric work to create a space for a minority. In that last essay, I wrote about how cover songs can ‘queer’ a mainstream song, giving queer voices a way to access a song [...]

Derivative Works III: Cover Songs and Culture

I originally wrote this article for Generamus Magazine, though I remain unsure if it was printed in their most recent issue, or whether it was slated for the third, upcoming, one. Here, it will work as the third in my series of articles about derivative works, this time discussing how cover songs can stand in [...]

‘Who’s Your City’, Place, and Creative Energy

Richard Florida‘s work, about the rise of the creative class, has been a key influence in how I think about the direction of the world and its economies ever since I read The Flight of the Creative Class in school last year. Since then, I’ve read The Rise of the Creative Class, and am now [...]

PERSONAL: How the Internet Has Changed My Life

This morning, I was reading a review of a book that posits that the Internet has destroyed our ability to memorise and focus, and that spun off into questions about what technology actually offers us. I’m not here to argue against the writer’s suggestions (in fact, as my recent attempts to dig back into reading [...]

Cultural Changes in TV: Contrasting Just Shoot Me and Ugly Betty (Nov. 2008)

In my first year at Ryerson (Nov. 2008), the term paper we were assigned to write was a compare-and-contrast research paper comparing two television shows, and what the differences between them showed about TV at the time. The paper was well-received, and I was recommended to keep a copy of it as a portfolio piece [...]