See, the universe does supply answers. Sometimes not the one we want but the one we need. Since the blow ups are still occuring in my family of origin (come on, who in my life is surprised at that one… Hmm no takers, wait nope that person just had an itch…) And the “bugaboos” (that is a made up word. If anyone out there uses that word for anything or is offended at it because it sounds like a word they have heard anywhere-that is not the use of this word and I CAN definitively say, as the person who created the word and owns the rights to it… STOP USING A WORD I CREATED if you are using it wrong. Down the rabbit hole we go… A Bugaboo is an issue that scares you or makes you uncomfortable after a situation has happened that in some way damaged you. It is like the ghost of Christmas past but instead of being Christmas it the ghost of… That inner child! Yay, new connection made!) Are now being multiplied left and right kinda like gremlins. Remember those? No too young for that? Ok furbys. Ah yes light dawns in a whole generation of people. When did I become a responsible adult? Ah, yes, that pesky thing called marriage. And when did it really hit home that I was IT as far as adults go? That would be when singing the shma and watching the light go out of my soul mates eyes… But when did it really break through? No one is asking, and this right here is what is so dangerous about the Internet. We forget what we are writing goes far and wide. That someone can twist our words to say whatever they want. And thus there are twitter wars and people who are famous for being famous telling us what to drink eat wear. Etc. But there to is the fun part. Remember the days where if you loved a celebrity you would send a hand written letter written over a period of days, edited over and over and a clean copy (without erasures or white out) would go to the celebrity. Two weeks or so later you would get something in the mail with a form letter and a small thing (a boomark, a headshot, etc). Now, you get to interact with authors and all the fans. Rather then a cold weekend trying to LARP we have people who role play online. Some of those are author approved and even the ones that aren’t allow us to interact with characters that started in someone else’s head. Isn’t that great? And we can connect with the authors who create our favorite universes. Have a question, ask the writer and if you are lucky get an answer. And it’s amazing how many times fans argue about a definitive answer from an author. We take it for granted that we can reach out and connect with someone. It’s amazing when you look at how far we have come. I remember when the Disney Channel started along with Nickelodeon. Now, if we can’t see our show on TV, there are instantaneous uploads. What a magnificent world we live in.
Ok, so I feel the need to speak up. I don’t know whether or not what I am seeing on facebook is a collaboration between google Microsoft apple and facebook. I don’t know if I am only seeing the posts of people in my sphere ir not, and none of us ever thought about what would happen in the last 20-30 years. When Disney started a TV channel of was controversial too. I don’t know that we need to be fermenting dissent. And none of us ever thought that the Internet was anything but a geekdom. So, this is what happens. Instead of lamenting our unintended consequences why don’t we look ar how far we have come since the 1940s. I choose to believe in people, in g-d and the fact that no matter what we will be ok. Maybe I am wrong. My world has personally been shattered twice by the pivotal losses of the two men of my life. Dad 32 days before the big wedding we’d been arguing over every tiny detail of for 18 months. And Jerome 10 years ago. I guess I didn’t learn enough from the first loss. But I firmly believe in the soul and G-d and that we will all see each other again. But I believe Jerome and my dad are with my girls because that’s where their heart is. And yes I may be more Anita blake then Belle but oh, the beasts library. Why are their laptops we can carry in our pockets? Because we were tired of carrying our full towers to gaming tournamwbts. None of us thought about how we would get to our future bit just put it… Someday after most everyone dies. But I want to be the heroine of my story. Full stop. And somehow I ended up in a place where I am a stereotype… Why? Because I am a book nerd. I read the originals and all the new copies so I know how bad things can get. But they also have come so far… So, if my friends who are freaking out will breathe for a minute the oxygen will calm you down. That’s the way your brain works and as we go farther and farther with cars that can drive themselves and complete access almost instantly to authors, actors, everything. Read the in death series by Nora Roberts as JD ROBB. We will get there , maybe. Or jt ellison and know true fear. Fear of secrets, fear of natural disasters which can shatter you by taking those you love. Or just of being completely consumed. Why? Because throughout history we have had to revisit our fears. And this is life. Complicated… Messy and oh so amazing. So when your car tells you you aren’t paying attention that’s because reading in cars gives you headaches, so there are audiobooks. That explains it. And we bitch if its not exactly like the voice in our head. And seat belts and airbags… Shoot look at car seats. Why? Because we are worried about our kids- either because of evolution or something else. But does it really matter? Look around and ask yourself if its better now then it was. If not, do your best to fix it. Stand up to those who are evil because all it takes for the villain to win is good people to do nothing. But I read them all. Which led to a whole new category of writing. With people like me as authors. So keep speaking up and celebrate the happy that much harder for all the sorrow along the way… And those are the books that take me away. I love that Seanan McGuire writes books with Shakespeare quotes as titles. And, that is just too cool! And then there are the others and somehow my worlds of tech and science crossed with my geekiness my need to understand and brought me here to this weird intersection of space and time where I just have to say. We are better off, but I agree with all my authors that we have to speak up. It won’t be anyone’s cup of tea, but ok. I want nothing to do with 50 shades of grey… But my fantasy books… Now, you can pry those out of my cold dead hands. But every bad cloud has a sun behind it. It will pass. And you hold onto the good that much harder. Why? because it is tempered by steel. We had to so we did. And now we are doctors and lawyers and lawyers and its progress. Yes we have a way to go, but all of it it progress…
So, for the last few days, while the rain was falling I am a little ashamed to admit that rather than curling up with my favorite books and the new ones, too, I have been binge watching TV shows through Amazon Prime and Netflix.
And it started me thinking a little bit about how much things have changed even as they have stayed the same. We hardly ever think about the constant access we have to one another these days or how much information is shared constantly between us.
Another concept occurred to me as well. I have a little bit of an obsession that I’ve had since my early teens. That obsession is a comic book series called elfquest and the way that I got involved with that comic book series was kind of a fluke. I was on a road trip with my best friend’s family to Hilton Head and once we got there I took my book that I was reading in the car and had brought with me to read it the beach and read it at the beach while we were sunbathing. This had an unintended consequence, since I was reading I was laying on my stomach all day while we were at the beach and by the time that we left my back had passed the color red and it’s sunburn on the way to the color purple. I took an ice bath once we got back to where we were staying but that wasn’t enough for this particular burn and aloe and laying on my stomach was not cutting it either So eventually the decision was made that I was going to return home and so I had to ride from where we were staying to the airport I had finished my book that I had brought with me for the trip and it was a pretty long drive to the airport so I looked everywhere in the car and found the first graphic novel for elfquest that my best friend’s little brother had brought along to read on the trip. I didn’t really like comic books and I couldn’t imagine that anything could possibly dull the amount of pain that I was in but it was a long ride and I decided to give this graphic novel a chance. I got to page 87 in the book and as soon as my parents picked me up at the airport I demanded that we stopped at a bookstore and pick up the book so that I could finish it. As I convalesced from my own stupidity in getting burned so badly I entered the world of Two Moons and voraciously ate all eight of the graphic novels that has been released at that point. this started my love of elfQuest and through the years I’ve enjoyed every single comic book manga book poster figurine t-shirt and anything else that you can think of that is involved with elfquest. Were that trip to happen today I do not know that I would have ever discovered elfquest because I would have been able to download a different book to entertain me on that drive to the airport and I would have missed out on one of the few things that have been consistent in my life my love of Elf Quest
But I started thinking about TV shows. These days there are a few different ways we get our TV. There are the network (public, cable, and premium) shoes that we still watch as they are released weekly. There are the entertainment providers like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu that release an entire season at once. Add in that the way we have watched TV has drastically changed and the younger me would have been shocked at all if it.
When I was a kid, we had family dinners that had to be over in time for my dad to watch a business show. And then depending on the night, we would either all go our seperately ways, sometimes watching TV sometimes not and then we would come together to watch certain shows as a family. Sometimes we watched Dallas although that was not one of my families staples. We watched Dynasty and LA Law religiously. It did not matter what else was happening in the world outside our living room. This was family time and we would discuss these shows in between episodes too. They were a part of our lives, one without a pause or rewind function and if you missed an episode you missed it.
Today you can watch any episodes of any show on any device. If there is a show we all watch, like Game of Thrones, we discuss it on social media almost immediately… Some of us talk during the episode.
Even if there is a show we all watch, the experience is of our choosing. We choose whether to watch it live on the tv or later on a dvr–we choose whether to binge watch over a weekend or closer to each series shows broadcast. We choose who to watch with or even how we will watch together.
I remember when the Disney Channel was first to be added into the world and Nickelodeon and HBO. I remember when it was questioned what these Channels could possibly offer that wasn’t already out there. Now the most basic of television packages comes with more channels than we know what to do with.
The question is are we better off? And my answers are as esoteric as they are necessary. I love being able to communicate with my family and friends 24/7 and yet we are far less connected to each other. We don’t have much anticipation or time for speculation these days until we get to the end of the season and our waits for answers are much longer.
As I watch my kids with their headphones and tablets. I think of how much things have changed and I wonder if our interconnectedness is a gift or a burden…
And then I turn on the read to me function in Google play books, put my headphones on and travel to whichever world I have chosen.
But in the back of my hand I wonder how many of those unexpected Treasures my children have missed simply because they have a hub of entertainment in their hands and thus no reason to read a friend’s little brothers comic book. And then I wonder how many I’ve missed in The Last 5 Years since I too carry my library of thousands of books around with me.
When I was a kid, tv was 3 channels- ABC,CbS, and NBC. We had a Public Access channel too. Then we got VCR’s which allowed us to record shows to watch later. We also got Disney and Nickelodeon. So fast forward a bit and we got VCRs which along with codes published in tv guide would automatically record shows for us. The next step was Tivo and then we got to DVR Pay Per View and we are almost to today! As I binge watched netflix over the past few days, I realized that its changed again. Netflix is not even keeping up with the broadcast episodes-and we are not complaining! Why?
