Tag Archive: commentary

News & Media Overload: Living in fear is no way to live

December 8, 2015 0 Comments

Read the comments on any news story involving a violent crime or follow any active news feed, and you will see comment after comment lamenting the state of the world and talking about how fearful we have to be of, well, pretty much everyone. If the comments at your local news site are anything to go by, you could be the victim of a home invasion at any moment. Your children are in danger of being snatched up 24 hours a day. That guy in your neighborhood taking a walk is probably a rapist. And so on. The problem with all this fear is that it’s largely baseless. Unless you live in a community like Camden, NJ or St. Louis, MO, chances are that you’re…
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Rants, Uncategorized

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Twitter hashtags are (still) not news

November 23, 2015 2 Comments

A few weeks back, I ranted a bit about Twitter hashtags being mined for shitty “news” by shitty websites. It’s more than a pet peeve. Pet peeves are minor annoyances. This isn’t a minor annoyance. This is a form of Internet cancer. Today, thanks to the wonders of Farking, I came across a great blog post by someone whose Tweet became the “THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!!” social media story of the day, a minor nothing that was turned into yet another misleading and false tale of Internet anger thanks to shitty news on shitty websites. You might remember a story from earlier in the year about a lipstick color that had people up in arms. This blogger saw a lipstick called “Underage Red,” Tweeted about…
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Rants

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MAD MEN: Seeing the show as a Period Piece

November 10, 2015 0 Comments

The following is taken from Celebrating Mad Men, available in paperback and for Kindle. MAD MEN AS A PERIOD PIECE “I’m interested in how people respond to change. Are they excited by the change, or are they terrified that they’ll lose everything that they know? Do people recognize that change is going on? That’s what the show’s about.” – Matthew Weiner  . One of the great joys of Mad Men comes from being immersed in a time and place that is not our own. We delight not only in the look and feel of the show, but also in the way in which it’s instructive when it comes to how people lived and behaved just a few short decades ago. It not only allows us a glimpse into that world, it also puts…
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Television, Works by Eric

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TWITTER HASHTAGS ARE NOT NEWS, DAMMIT!

October 20, 2015 1 Comment

Unless you’ve been unplugged for the last 24 hours or make it a policy to ignore anything related to geek stuff (in which case why would you be reading this blog?), you’ve probably heard about the #BoycottStarWarsVII hashtag making the rounds on Twitter. Stories about it are blowing up social media right now, and understandably so, given how shockingly offensive and ridiculous the movement behind “Boycott Star Wars VII” seems. The story goes like this: there is a growing movement to boycott Star Wars: The Force Awakens because, those behind the movement say, it’s an anti-white movie that glorifies minorities and is part of an agenda to minimize white people. An appallingly shitty viewpoint, no question about it. Except there is no movement. This news…
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Rants

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Watchmen and The Lord of the Rings Are Strikingly Similar Landmarks

October 13, 2015 6 Comments

Watching The Rings Moore’s Watchmen and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Are Strikingly Similar Landmarks   When one talks of vital contributions to the art of comics, one cannot ignore Alan Moore. With a body of work as consistently terrific as his – he has more certifiable classics under his belt than any comic writer of the last 30 years – targeting any given tale as his “best” is an impossible task. But of Alan Moore’s contributions to comicdom, one truly stands as not just an undeniable landmark, but the undeniable landmark, putting its stamp on comic history forever: Watchmen, the powerful 12-issue collaboration with Dave Gibbons circa the Reagan-era 1980s. Just how big a landmark is this now classic tale? Alan Moore’s Watchmen is to modern comics what J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord…
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Books & Authors, Comics & Graphic Novels, Geek Stuff

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