There’s a long list of new television shows this fall all vying for your procrastination. Some will be worth your time, others won’t. Over the next couple weeks, I’m going to break down a number of new shows and help you decide where it’s worth wasting time rather than studying. This week I’ll start with four I’m looking forward to.

The Blacklist
Premiers Monday, Sept. 23.

Predictions about Hollywood’s demise, or about fundamental shifts in the way studios produce movies, seem to arise summer after summer as the media and the Internet respond to various box office failures. But not much has drastically changed for Hollywood since the introduction of 3D, despite what doomsayers say.

Six major films “flopped” at the box office this summer: R.I.P.D., Turbo, After Earth, White House Down, Pacific Rim and The Lone Ranger.

With the heat of summer bearing down on us, finding an excuse to stay inside and away from the sun, the mosquitos and the seasonal allergies can be a welcome blessing. Of course, there is no better way to waste away the limited days of Canadian summer than video games, and what better games to do so with than Canadian ones? Some people may be surprised to hear that Canada has the third largest video game industry in the world, and that we have created dozens of games that have entered the definitive canon of the medium.

For me, the morning of June 20 seemed like any other. My house was as dry as it usually is, I was able to travel downtown without much trouble and I had managed to stay far enough away from the river that I remained oblivious to the impending disaster. I only realized something was wrong when I received a panicked text from my mother in California, asking if I was safe. After some initial surprise, my first reaction was to do what I always do when I want to know what is happening in the world: I checked Twitter.

Women are vastly underrepresented in the tech industry, making up only about 25 per cent of the information and communications technology employees in Canada — even though over half of the country’s workforce are women. This disparity has been noted by The Chic Geek, a new Calgarian organization that aims to increase the number of women in the tech industry.

Even to a person who is familiar with video games the list of speakers at this year’s Ottawa International Game Conference could seem perplexing. Looking down the list, one can find that for every independent, bearded artist there are half a dozen suit-clad marketing gurus — with a few nerdy programmers sitting awkwardly between those two vastly different groups. People this different can’t possibly be representative of the same industry, can they?