Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Just watched Burgess Meredith in “Time Enough At Last” one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes! I’ve seen it at least 20 times. It’s sooo good. I’m a huge Twilight Zone fan. Anybody else love the Twilight Zone?

It’s starting to look like a ghost town around here too. Hope you are all doing well! Stop by when you have time.

I love the Twilight Zone, too - I've got the boxed DVD set of all 5 original seasons. I wasn't allowed to stay up late enough to watch them when they originally aired back around 1960.

I vividly remember a midday teaser for the show that must have run sometime around then - I would have been 9 or 10. It was for the episode "Eye of the Beholder" - the one where a young woman has been hospitalized to correct some monstrous congenital disfigurement. Her face is in bandages so we never see her until the very end - when we learn she's beautiful by OUR standards, but everyone around her is, by our standards, hideously deformed.

The teaser didn't get into the morality of the story - it just aired the shock cuts from the show revealing those deformed faces. Those faces - my God, those faces - 9-yr old me was too terrified even to look away. I could only watch, paralyzed in horror as the screen flashed from one to the other, too quickly for me to process, too quickly to blot out. Scared the living crap out ot me.

I didn't see that episode until long after the show had gone into syndication. By the time I finally did, I was maybe 15 - and even then, I felt a little electric tingle of horror at the climactic moment when the bandages come off, we see a lovely young Donna Douglas - and then the Faces. That little shiver I felt was the fossilized remnant of that 9-yr old's traumatic terror that must have lain dormant inside me up to that time.

As a kid, I liked the show for its bizarre twists & outre settings - its weirdness. Now it's the writing & production values, accomplishing with makeup, clever photography & lighting what CG makes too easy now.

Another show I liked was "The Outer Limits". That was another writers' show, more hard sci-fi than TZ's allegorical morality plays. My favorite episode (or one of them) was "Nightmare" - Ed Nelson, James Shigeta, & a very young Martin Sheen as soldiers taken prisoner during an interplanetary war & relentlessly interrogated by the Enemy. The plot twist is learning who the actual enemy is.

Both TZ & OL were reborn sometime in the 80s & 90s, & most of the new shows somehow never quite measured up the originals. I thought some were quite good on their own - but I never felt they quite deserved induction into the Canon. Something about glorious B&W photography that can help turn a yarn about aliens into Art.....

Doreen Peri wrote: October 20th, 2026, 1:04 am
...It’s starting to look like a ghost town around here too. Hope you are all doing well! Stop by when you have time.

Yeah, things a bit slow around here. I've been preoccupied with my cataract surgery coming up - recuperation alone at home after eye surgery is a bit daunting. No stooping, no heavy lifting... and the medication schedule is bit crazy, like a ballet - I've written a few software hacks to help me keep track of it all. I hope to have it all behind me by the start of the year.

That was another great episode, yeah! Eye of the Beholder. I loved Outer Limits, too, Roy! Great show

I’m glad you’re getting your cataract surgery! I will need it soon myself. You should get through it fine, but I understand being a little anxious. Everyone I’ve talked to about it is so happy they got it done and can see 20/20.

here's another twilight zone fan. always loved "the invader" just loved the twists. I think most of my earliest short stories had twists in them. I have had my newly reborn eyes for five years now but still remember the thrill of seeing things so clearly. the drop schedule is brutal but worth it.

 
Thanks, both, for the reassurances...

Doreen Peri wrote: October 20th, 2026, 11:07 pm ...I’m glad you’re getting your cataract surgery! I will need it soon myself. You should get through it fine, but I understand being a little anxious. Everyone I’ve talked to about it is so happy they got it done and can see 20/20.

Same with hip replacement. For me, it was a kind of rebirth.

I'm less concerned with the surgery itself (tho' that's scary enough) than I am the recuperation - there's no one here but me to do any heavy lifting. I've rearranged things in my kitchen to minimize the number of times I'll have to access below-counter storage, reorganized the 'fridge so everyday items are within easy reach; and for those times I'll need to get at the crisper drawers - like every day - I've stolen a low, armless swivel chair from my old recording studio. I'm also practicing squats.

The medication schedule is a bit funky. Post-surgery: eyedrops administered 4 times daily for the 1st week, 3 per day the 2nd, 2 per day for the 3rd week, and 1 per day for the 4th. It gets complicated because partway through the 3rd week, the OTHER eye will be operated on - so for a week or 2, one eye will be getting a certain number of drops per day, the other eye a completely different dosage. Plenty of room there to make a mistake, methinks. So I filled out a desk calendar explicitly stating each eye's dosage for the months of Nov & Dec: "2 drops R, 4 drops L", or whatever. And to be absolutely sure, I wrote a computer program that queries the system date, and displays that day's dosages, plus any appointments I might have. And to be even surer, I've written a batch script to run it AND then run Chrome, & hijacked Chrom's desktop icon so it looks like the only way to get to the internet. So whenever I go online, my hack will run first, displaying my dosage schedule for that particular day.

winddance wrote: October 21st, 2026, 12:05 pm I have had my newly reborn eyes for five years now but still remember the thrill of seeing things so clearly. the drop schedule is brutal but worth it.

That's what it was like when I got my 1st pair of glasses! I was maybe 13 or 14, & astonished when I could see individual leaves in the canopy overhead, not just a blanket of color - and roofing shingles! And the blackboard at school, even from the back row. I also remember it made me clumsier for a while - bumping into door jambs, or tables & freestanding chairs. It was like my brain wasn't used to seeing clearly, & had to recalibrate my depth perception.

Winddance— The Invaders— yes! Terrific episode. Agnes Morehead when she was young. I loved the unexpected twist at the end too. I’ve seen all of them many times but I still watch the Sci Fy channel when they have TZ marathons! That’s great you’ve had the cataract surgery too and can see so clearly. Sometimes I wonder why they don’t replace people’s lenses routinely to correct poor eyesight without waiting for cataracts to develop.

Sasha — wow oh wow! You’ve coded a custom medication reminder on your computer? That is so awesome! Also real smart arranging your kitchen in advance. You’ll do great, I’m sure! It’s going to be awesome to put this behind you. I can’t wait to hear how happy you are when you can see clearly.

I don't recall that Moorhead had a single line in that episode - just did it all with grunts & facial expressions. It was an Actors' show that had no trouble getting names to sign up. Ida Lupino, Vera Miles, Robert Redford, Lee Marvin... They knew it wasn't tv as usual.

I'm curious what my vision is going to be like. I'm guessing that everything is going to look bluish for a while - assuming that eyes gradually yellow with age like paper... removing that yellow will favor its complementary color, blue. I do this all the time retouching photos - if I think a scene could use a little yellow, I take out a little blue. Same difference.

That program I knocked together isn't a very sophisticated one. It just does the job, which is to scan a spreadsheet I'd filled in with a line (or two or three...) for every day between now & the end of the year, and display what I'd written for the current system date. From there I can step through the spreadsheet one date at a time; but as software goes it's pretty crude. I wrote it in QB64, a distant descendant of the old GWBASIC a lot of us learned back in middle school. Unlike its ancestor, it's a compiled language, with a lot more control structures, like LOOP WHILE or LOOP UNTIL. Earlier versions required the executable to retain access to an extensive library of DLLs (internal subroutines for performing routine system-level tasks), but the version I use automatically embeds any that it needs into the EXE, so while the executables are a bit larger, they're more portable. I wrote another one just a few days ago to graphically display the system time as a digital clock, since it's getting hard for me to read the one written as text in the corner of the monitor.

...ironic, someone with failing eyesight preaching about photo retouching...