nteresting discussion this Thanksgiving after a couple of Go cage-fights with my sister. Of course, what else can siblings and the nieces and associated boyfriend talk about? What do we have in common?

Media!

Everyone connected through their Hulu and Netflix viewings. My brother was watching The Musketeers (didn’t know that). My niece’s boyfriend and I shared a laugh over One Punch Man. Some people had watched Chance. There was a difference of taste about Jessica Jones. And the women tittered over the coming revisiting of the Gilmore Girls.

It’s the “New Media”, my sister explained.

Yes, but (and sometimes, it’s my purpose in life to add the “but”, it seems)…

It’s great that there is a new media. When The Mindy Project got cancelled, it was quickly picked up by Hulu. Had this sort of thing been around a decade ago I’m sure my beloved Firefly would have continued. Now, just about any weird comedy or surprise-ending drama can (and likely has) been made. In a sense, this is the same moment book publishing went through when self-publishing took off. Now anyone at all can get into the game. No more corporate committees and agents and such. Good things, bad things, rotten things, ill-conceived and directionless things could all be pushed out into the media sphere.

And that’s good. But I must point out that I watched 75 episodes of Hikuro No Go. And likewise in Space Brothers. I watched all three seasons of The Musketeer and both seasons (several times) of Rick and Morty. It’s rather like that time I spent playing the video game Spelunky, only to glance at the game stats and see that I had 2500 games (at about 10 minutes apiece) out there.

All that time comes from somewhere.

For me, I haven’t been writing much (professionally). Oh, I have a collection of erotica for an on-line publisher who has commissioned me in the past. But Jurassic is gone now. And besides being the president of an always-struggling model railroad club and astronomy events and Go and that goddamn Roku box, I don’t have a lot of time. It would seem that we’re swimming in New Media, that everything is available, that DVD collections are as relevant as the VHS libraries they replaced. And that what little time we had, time for writing, for loving, for communicating, for visiting, for walks and chats and friendships, is all going into entertainment.

Remember, time is the one thing you can’t buy more of, and there isn’t any way of winning another life (like some Spelunky powerup). Sure, it’s great to have a century of entertainment at the click of your remote. But is it a good thing? Is will this end up as just a new version of The Matrix.

Be well. Be wary. And be conscious. For you writers – write!

>>>HERE IS A LINK TO MY BOOKS AND NOVELS, THINGS I WROTE WHEN ALL I HAD WERE VHS TAPES AND AN ATARI. LIFE WAS SO MUCH SIMPLER. AND I WROTE THREE TIMES A WEEK. ENJOY THESE EARLIER WORKS OF MINE!<<<

P.S. Interesting point. I went to enter this into my Dog Ear archives and found I already had commented on New Media earlier this year. Might as well repurpose an old entry, so here it is, RIGHT HERE!