Two interesting news stories about VR. All we can say is that the people making this happen are going to need one Acme Boatload of WRITERS!
Augmented reality content makers often position the technology as a new storytelling medium. And who loves stories more than children?
Don’t know how you feel about them, but we at TVWriter™ love TV shows within TV shows. There’s something about the absolute falsity of such a situation that drives LB wild with delight, and a delighted LB is, well, he’s a much easier boss to work for, if you know what we mean.
Anyway, we don’t know how we missed this article when it came out way back in August, but here’s a look at some great shows that aren’t really shows or are they:
LB’S NOTE: A quick heads-up. The pic we’re using to illustrate this article is of a show within a show that placed 13th with Paste Magazine but has been, from the moment I first saw it on Community, absolutely numero uno with me – Travis Richey’s Inspector Spacetime. So:
LB’S NOTE: Comic book legend in his own right (or as “Conway’s Corner” puts it “minor pop culture ‘icon'”) and longtime friend and co-worker Gerry Conway voices an opinion with which I wholeheartedly agree:
Since the news of Stan Lee’s death I’ve wanted to write something meaningful about my own feelings for him, what he represented to me as a creator and as a human being, and what kind of impact his life had on my life. For many reasons (I was dislocated by the Woolsley Fire and haven’t fully settled down since our return) I haven’t had a chance to give such an in-depth appraisal much thought. Honestly, I doubt I could do a full appraisal of Stan’s importance in my life even under the best of circumstances. His work and presence as an icon and as a human being helped form who I am today. To write a full appreciation of Stan I’d have to write my autobiography.
Among my most vivid childhood memories is my discovery of the Fantastic Four with issue 4, the first appearance of the Sub-Mariner. I was nine years old, and I’d been a comic book reader for years at that point. I knew about Superman, I knew about Batman, I’d read the early issues of Justice League. I was a compulsive reader, voracious (still am)– devoting hours a day to books and stories and comics and even my parents’ newspapers. (Both my parents were avid readers. My dad read science fiction, my mom loved mysteries.) I vividly recall the astonished joy I felt when my mom took me to our local library and got me my first library card. I was six, I think, and the reality of a roomful of books just for kids seemed like a gift from heaven. I won all the reading awards at school– any competition for reading the most books in a year was over as far as I was concerned the first week. By nine, I’d already graduated from “age appropriate” books for pre-teens to Heinlein’s juveniles, Asimov’s robot stories, and the collected Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. I was a total reading nerd.
NOTE FROM LB: For all practical purposes, today is TVWriter™ Stan Lee Remembrance Day. I don’t have my act together enough to write my own memories of Stan the Man or go into why I believe he’s one of the most important figures in world culture today, but, fortunately, many other people do. For example:
Growing up as a kid in the 1970s, Stan Lee’s name was in every Marvel comic book I pulled off the Spinner Rack. “Stan Lee Presents…” was at the forefront of every dynamic splash page that opened any Marvel publication. He was a larger-than-life presence, his image drawn into the actual comics, and at times, as a caricature illustrated atop the masthead of his popular “Stan’s Soapbox,” where he wrote about a wide variety of topics outside of comics. Regularly featured in the back pages, Stan’s Soapbox exposed us to his unique voice and personality, inviting us into his personal views on everything from bigotry to racial division. Simply put, he was the personality behind it all. Stan Lee was Marvel Comics. Period.
