Category: By Guests

Invisible Mikey: Lessons From TV

oldtv

Mass media impacts lives, and each generation adopts current technology for the sharing of information, communication and entertainment. Five years ago, during my last round of college, I realized how differently my younger colleagues in class were experiencing media than I had. I use the Internet, but I’m a different animal. I was part of the first television generation. During my formative years, it was only available in black and white, and there were no remote controls.

Sometimes I read opinions written by columnists and bloggers who state unequivocally that television can have no positive influence, especially on children who watch. I don’t care what the studies say. I am living proof that TV could influence in meaningful, positive ways. You may prefer to believe I was just lucky, but I learned many important things from watching TV. Here are three: read article

How Switching Tasks Maximizes Creative Thinking

Remember when somebody told you to “sleep on it” when the next step in your great idea wouldn’t come? And you did and it worked? Well, you aren’t alone:

switchingtaskstobecreative

by Christian Jarrett read article

Robin Reed: American Borer Story – zzzzz

American_Horror_Story_Season_1

I finally caught up with “American Horror Story” season one via Netflix. I heard a lot of good things about it, and the ads made it look like it was a new kind of horror story, something innovative and original. As a horror buff, I keep hoping that movies and TV will break out of the old and hackneyed ideas that are endlessly repeated.

Unfortunately, AHS starts with the oldest and most hackneyed idea of all. A family buys an old mansion for a lot less than market value because a murder occurred there. Do they do any research about what actually happened?  No, they blindly get themselves into a mortgage without even looking the house up on the internet or going to the library and looking at old newspaper stories. They buy a house that is so notorious that it is a stop on a bus tour of murder sites in L.A. and everyone calls it the “Murder House.” The place probably has a Wickipedia entry. How hard would it be to find out that the murder the realtor told them about is just one of many? read article

A Really Good Writer Finally Discovers…STAR TREK?

WTF?

A writer who never watched the original STAR TREK?

OMG! OMG! OMG! read article

LB: If I Hadn’t Made It in Television, I Would’ve Been a Comic Book Writer

…Like my buddies Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway. (Although Gerry did a fine job of escaping that ghetto, didn’t he, by rising to Co-Executive Producer of LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT, among other TV shows?).

I’ve always thought that those working in the two media had a lot in common, and recently two writers still working in comic books have cemented that theory – John Ostrander and Martha Thomases. Here’s Martha’s take on soap opera, which coincidentally happens to be right in line with, yeah, you guessed it – mine.

Thomases Art 130111 Martha Thomases SoapSoap by Martha Thomases (ComicMix.Com) read article