The heady days of 15-20 posts in a month — our usual target — are gone. It’s been a steady, sad decline these last few months. But take heart, this is usually how it goes for semi-personal blogs, er, I mean, websites. And that’s just how it goes for the Same Page Team. We tried our best.
The big sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL) know they have a unique and valuable property, so they are working to maximize their TV contract dollars. They don’t care that ESPN is losing subscribers, and FOX Sports is hemorrhaging money. They want their money and they want it now. They are basically treating ESPN they way ESPN treated its subscribers.
In his own way, though, Drake has always had something bigger driving him. Cliché as he’s made it, there’s truth in his projection of Toronto culture. He’s the city’s global ambassador, and one local sports team has gone so far as to give him money for it. Outside of the island joys of “One Dance” and “Too Good”, we didn’t see much of this on Views. On the new More Life playlist, though, Drake is taking in more voices, more languages, more culture. In North America’s most diverse city, it’s the sounds of summer, and it shows how excited Drake is at Toronto’s evolution, creating a music well beyond Canadiana.
If the Academy Awards were trying to conceive of a way to stay interesting, to keep atop the social media conversation, there were worse ways to do it. Believe me, they’ve tried — even elsewhere on last night’s broadcast. Thanks to a stunning last second reversal in the Best Picture category, everyone is talking about the Oscars this morning. There’s a lot to unpack here. (Not least of which: How did Warren Beatty end up with an Oscar in his hand as he retook the mic in the show’s final moments?) And look at that, we’ve largely set aside the award show’s more, uh, problematic elements.
The 89th Academy Award nominations were announced yesterday morning, which means we’ve had over 24 hours to sit with the news. Feeling angry yet? If not, you soon will. Because it’s time for the latest edition of the Oscar Nomination Outrage Scale (or ONOS; pronounced, as always as O NOOOOOOOS). We take rage pretty seriously around here.
In its eccentricity, Vine was a community of sorts. It was rewarding to be a member; if you scrolled enough, different corners revealed themselves to you. It got easier to find the weird underbelly after 2014 too, when the app’s user base contracted slowly, giving in to Instagram video and Snapchat. Vine didn’t mind. Its users birthed woozy 8mm nature videos, remix threads where different users would create music collaboratively, even feature-length movies told six seconds at a time.
For anyone who became a fan on the strength of his stand-up, acting, or first musical breakthrough, 2011’s compelling (if uneven) Camp, Glover’s shifts in attitude and ambition were seeming a thorny road to follow him down. Yet any concern trolling anyone might have engaged in following Glover’s marked shift towards the weird is obliterated by the triumphant debut of that show he left Community to make: Atlanta.
One month and over 30,000,000 downloads since its July 6 release, there’s little left to say about Pokémon Go. The basic premise has been covered exhaustively (wander your city looking for all available Pokémon, compete against other trainers at area gyms); stories of players finding dead bodies or being lured into armed robberies have already passed into urban legend. In the two weeks following its official Canadian rollout (though enterprising players found ways to skirt regional restrictions long before), the sheer volume of players to be found on Toronto’s streets boggled the mind. If you passed someone with their phone out while walking, it was all but a given they were playing this game.
You are presented with the full edition of Wells’ The Time Machine. The tale now reads like a genteel odyssey, one man’s wanderings through time for no other reason than to see what’s there. The book’s monsters don’t scare you anymore — they seem almost quaint, like desperate little nocturnal apes — but something else does. Time continues to pass.
When you hear of the “good old days”, it’s usually from some middle-aged white man — an uncle, perhaps — who wants to tell you how things were just better then. I suspect you’ve heard this spiel before, around the kitchen table, in a boardroom, or online. This hypothetical man usually leaves out that it wasn’t such a great time for many people. And yet, how much art, how many books and albums and retrospectives continue to be released that lionize, in some way or another, this alleged golden era?
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