Photo: Mary Jane “MJ” Watson (played by Kirsten Dunst) and Harry Osborn (played by James Franco) in Spiderman 3 (2007).

Traveling down the memory lane archives has taken me back to watching the Tobey Maguire Spiderman trilogy that was released during the early-2000s.

Tobey Maguire’s Spiderman was my masked ...

Plenty has been said about giving characters flaws - we've talked about it around the site, on the Quackcast and out loud, to ourselves, on the bus and in the park.

Characters gotta have flaws!

But something I've thought about more lately, in the years well after starting my ...

I grabbed the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey 2-pack and rewatched then after many years. I knew those movies well when I was a youngster, especially the first one. Many, many repeat viewings. Both movies held up REALLY well, and feature “Fool ...

There used to be an unbreakable connection between myself and my desktop computer during my college days. My computer was an extension of me, a mech of sorts and as I started getting better at creating and using programs like Photoshop, SketchUp, AutoCAD, and Revit, I needed to constantly upgrade ...

We grin and support John Wick as he ploughs through dozens of people per minute in his revenge quest over his murdered dog and ruined car, but we gasp with shock when the Wicked Witch of the East pursues a single person to take revenge for killing her sister with ...

Nearly a billion people, perhaps more, are being confined in their homes as you read these lines, due to the Covid-19 quarantine to stem the pandemic. A good percentage are going stir-crazy right now, or are juggling with the limitations and necessary work-arounds of having to stay in a single ...

I like mentor characters.

This is not just me of course; the mentor and protagonist relationship is powerful. Some of the best moments in many stories are the first encounter with the mentor, the training and sense of discovery for the protagonist, and the eventual loss of the mentor character ...

There's a theory that the key to success is simply to rip off the story of King Arthur, ok? But you have to do it in a way that isn't too original or a slavish knockoff, there has to be perfect balance… only then can you be a ...

Having completed the (very quick) foray into the workings of motivations, ideologies and behaviors, the time has come for a look-see of all your amazing comments, from all three articles!

I haven't done this before so I'm not entirely sure how to present them. I'll wing it ...

Who's it for?

In writing instructional books, there used to be this bit about deciding who your story/screenplay/series is FOR. This is a notion used in the industry (so I've read) to figure out who the audience is going to be for a given project. In ...