Kari Lucin is a writer and graphic designer living in southern Minnesota.
She is a big geekette, and her principal hobbies are playing Dungeons & Dragons and other pen-and-paper roleplaying games, playing video games, and watching hours and hours of television on Netflix, from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” to “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
She has the attention span of a sugar-crazed, highly-caffeinated, semi-rabid squirrel and has been known to leave books in awkward places, such as cupboards, speed boats, the Metrodome and, occasionally with disastrous results, bathtubs.
She likes science fiction, fantasy, westerns and mysteries and thinks that generally, 
vampires should not sparkle. She also loves odd music, including that of Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Rasputina and the Decemberists. She’s interested in feminism and how it intersects with and can improve pop culture, including movies, comics books and tabletop gaming.
In writing this blog, the author hopes to bring a bit of geek culture to the rest of the world. Yes, there is a geek culture. There is a geek community, too. Wil Wheaton and Neil Gaiman seem to be two of the leaders, and Ada Lovelace (right) is a matron saint.
But if you don’t know who they are, that’s totally okay. The geek community is pretty tolerant, and there’s room for book geeks, word nerds, theology hounds and math-lovers.
Geeks are cool like that.
The Atom Foundry 
I like the blog! You have such a fun voice when talking about the things of journalism!
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Thank you very much! I don’t focus on it too much–I never know really what people are interested in, and since I have the attention span of a sugar-crazed rodent, I just flit from topic to topic at random.
But I do like thinking about these issues, and I like your blog very much–you grapple with many of the questions reporters have to ponder every day.
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awesome. best. blog. description. ever.
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Sorry to bother you here but I cant find any other way to contact you. Im trying to post a comment to one of the acticles on the sun. After I’ve logged in and post a reply, nothing gets posted. When i log out, log back in, and try to post again, it says that i’ve already said that. Suggestions? Thanks
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I honestly don’t know. I’d send a note to support@areavoices.com. Maybe it’s a caching issue–did you clear your cache to check if it went up after you posted it the first time? Maybe it’s posting and it’s not telling you.
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It’s too bad you shut down the comments section of your Young Justice post. I would like to have heard what plot holes you were referring to (really!). I think the contrivance you were referring to as an idiot-ball is known as the “idiot plot,’ a plot which only makes sense if the characters are stupid. I only located one instance of this in the episode “Alpha Male.” If you found others I would love to hear about them. Maybe another post is in order?
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Hmm, I haven’t shut down anything as far as I know. Normally I leave comments on moderated, and approve pretty much anything that’s relevant. Unless WordPress has a time expiration to comments you should still be able to comment on every post, that’s how I like it.
I was pretty careful to avoid any specific discussion of plot points in Young Justice because I didn’t want to spoil any of it for prospective watchers. I enjoy spoilers (I like to see how artists work as well as the work itself) but others generally don’t, so anyone who hasn’t seen the show and wants to should probably stop reading now.
There were a lot of plot holes, but off the top of my head, the idea that Miss Martian was leaving brain-damaged baddies in her wake and no adults either a. noticed, b. were told by any of the young people or c. did anything about it, was fairly baffling. This happened literally in front of Martian Manhunter at one point, too, and this was particularly inexplicable. I’m sure they could have explained it away somehow, but the easiest thing to do would have been having J’onn leave before she did it–and they didn’t. And then Superboy alluded to the fact that she’d done it before, more than once, and that that’s why they broke up. Yet the adults still didn’t either notice, or care.
(It was also a little weird that Black Canary fills the role of a psychiatrist in this show, which confused me as none of the other media that she’s in ever indicates she has any sort of degree or solid background in this type of work. And this one didn’t allude to her background either, which is weird, too–if this BC is a psychiatrist, psychologist, or at minimum some type of counselor, why not just mention it?)
No, the contrivance I was referring to is actually known as the Idiot Ball, hence the link to the TVTropes page for Idiot Ball, here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotBall
“Coined by Hank Azaria on Herman’s Head: Azaria would ask the writing staff, “Who’s carrying the idiot ball this week?” This is generally not a compliment. Frequently, the person carrying the idiot ball is acting out of character, misunderstanding something that could be cleared up by asking a single reasonable question or not performing a simple action that would solve everything. It’s almost as if the character holding the ball is being willfully stupid or obtuse far beyond what has been established as “natural” for them. Frequently, it’s only because the story (and by extension, the writers) need them to act this way, or else the chosen plot/conflict for the episode won’t happen.”
If J’onn had asked “Hey, why is this guy I was literally just interrogating suddenly a drooling idiot, Megan?” Aqualad probably wouldn’t have been brainfried and giant swathes of plot wouldn’t’ve happened at all, most likely. And generally speaking, J’onn is not stupid enough to not notice something like that. He held the Idiot Ball that episode.
I actually liked Young Justice, and I would call it a pretty good show. It just misses the “great” mark for me exactly because of scenes like that.
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Now that you mention it, I did notice these “idiot ball” points as well. I even pointed them out to Greg Weisman on “Ask Greg.” I agree with you that J’onn would have noticed M’gann brain-frying that Krolotean. Certainly, Batman would have noticed. I mean this is frigging Batman we’re talking about! I don’t remember what Greg said about the krolotean but he did say that the YJ Black Canary does have a PhD in counseling. I do agree that it would have been worth mentioning.
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There were a lot of times the adults (and sometimes the kids) held the Idiot Ball to make the plot go. That was definitely the example that stuck out the most to me, though, partly because it would have been incredibly easy to fix by simply having J’onn leave before she did it.
Other times it was done to solve the tricky problem of “how do we force the kids to solve this rather than have the adults interfere, since it’s meant to be a show about the kids?” It’s somewhat understandable from a writing point of view, but it was also annoying because it dragged people out of character.
Good to know about the counseling thing, that whole deal makes a lot more sense now. I have not seen another version of BC where that was part of her character (though I have an extremely limited Black Canary sample of JLU-verse BC and Arrowverse BC).
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