Skip to content

Tag: facebook

Giddy for ‘Your Loss’

Published by Starshine Roshell on October 15, 2018

Hometown Girl Kit Steinkellner Creates, Writes New Facebook Watch Series

You wake up in the middle of the night to pounding rain and realize you’re alone in bed. Your husband never came home — and now he’s not answering his phone. Panicked, you jump in your car and plow into the storm, scouring the slippery streets for his car. What if you don’t find him? you wonder. What if he’s …?

This scenario, or one like it, happened to Class of 2004 Dos Pueblos High School grad Kit Steinkellner a few years back. But it had an exceptionally happy ending: Not only was her spouse okay, but Kit turned the idea into a new web TV series called Sorry for Your Loss.

Premiering on Facebook Watch in September, the show stars Elizabeth Olsen as a young woman struggling to recover from the sudden death of her husband. It has a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the first episode had 2.8 million views in the first week — and it was all inspired by that one horrific night of worry.

Continue readingGiddy for ‘Your Loss’

My Child, My 'Friend'?

Published by Starshine Roshell on August 4, 2011

As a mom or dad, you hear it all the time. Too often. It’s one of those firm parenting axioms recited by smug sages — like “sleep when your baby sleeps” — that’s as nonnegotiable as it is unachievable.

“Children don’t need a friend,” the advice goes. “They need a parent.” And it’s true. Except on Facebook, where it turns out to be entirely false.

After years of careful evasion, my husband and I finally let our 8th grader create a Facebook account. We’d been holding out, we said, because publishing personal information to hundreds of people requires a modicum of maturity; crude comments and damning photos can have disastrous consequences.

But here was the real reason: We didn’t want him to see our crude comments and damning photos on Facebook: The status updates whining about our kids’ whining. The picture of dual-mounted street signs at the intersection of Inyo and Butte. The absurd pages I support, including one called “When I was a kid I thought Cal Worthington said ‘Pussycow,’ not ‘Go See Cal.'”

But our reasons for keeping the kid off social-networking sites (“Beware the cyber bullies, whatever those are”) were growing thinner, and our hypocrisy (“We’ll discuss this later, son; I’m busy on Facebook now”) ever fatter. So we caved.

Continue readingMy Child, My 'Friend'?