TV
📺 Watched The Baby-sitters Club S02E07, Claudia and the Sad Goodbye. 💔😭
If you know, you know.
📺 The Babysitters Club S02E03, “Stacey’s Emergency,” brilliantly depicts what it’s like living with chronic illness.
I’m only now catching up on the second season of The Babysitters Club and having Mary Ann as a triple virgo is brilliant. 📺
📺 Me, watching Bridgerton: How can anyone tell these Bridgerton brothers apart? They all have the same coloration. I guess two of them are a little taller? But I’m not sure.
📺 Watched Velma. The two primary criticisms - that it relies too heavily on meta-humor and that the characters are selfish & don’t grow - are spot on, and yet I still found it compelling enough to watch all 10 episodes.
📺 Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures is exactly the Star Wars show I would have written as a kid:
- Kai Brightstar
- Nash Durango
- The Crimson Firehawk
Brilliant targeting for its audience.
Starting Season 7 in my rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, finding myself very glad there’s so much other Trek media including TNG tie-ins so I basically never have to say goodbye to my Enterprise D friends. 🖖🏻📺
Response to Charlie Jane Anders's "What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures"
🔖📝📚📺🍿 Read What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures by Charlie Jane Anders (Happy Dancing newsletter).
Anders talks about the way a universal translator gives us shortcuts to understanding other cultures that don’t really show how hard it is to actually understand another culture.
She offers a lot of examples of this and asks,
How is it that Han Solo understands Chewbacca, but doesn’t speak Wookiee himself? And vice versa?
It’s been a long time since I was getting my Master of Arts in teaching and had to take a course on how Language Acquisition happens (almost 20 years), but I recall that we tend to understand much more of a language than we can speak, and I’ve certainly found that to be true recently.
For W’s Fulbright, we spent two months in the Netherlands, and had learned some very basic Dutch using Duolingo before heading over there. I often didn’t understand what people were saying, but I always understood more of what they were saying than I could ever speak myself.
Our first week there, some young people overheard my son saying his favorite Dutch word, “kat,” on the bus. They asked us about our being Americans and then one of them wanted to know if we were full of “kattenkwaad.” We didn’t know this word, and the person who asked didn’t know English well enough to explain it, but his friend tried.
I asked if it meant behaving like a cat, and he indicated not exactly. He tried to explain by example: pushing the stop button on the bus, then not getting off when the bus stopped.
“Oh, like, pranks!” I said.
“Yes, like pranks.”
“Mischievous,” my sister suggested. He wasn’t sure about that one.
Weeks later, I found this book in the shop a short walk from our house:
Google translates this title as “First Aid for Mischief: The Survival Guide for Cat Parents.”
I don’t think it captures the sense entirely, based on our bus conversation, but it’s hard to be sure.
🖖🏻📺
Data: *has a personal problem* *does extensive research* Captain Picard, I have done all the research but I do not have the answer to my problem.
Picard: What do you think about the problem, though?
Data: *blinks*
Just another reason I identify with Data.
📺💬🖖🏻 “I can’t say being equal parts irritating and endearing isn’t slightly familiar.” Picard 3x06, The Bounty. IT ME.
📺 Shrinking is doing a great job dressing a teen in 90s throwback clothes and if y’all see me walking around in overalls with one side undone now you know why. THIS IS OUR MOMENT, XENNIALS, find a grown-up way to wear the clothes you loved as a teen!
📺 Watched Key & Peele - I Said….
This is a beautiful sketch that heightens literally as high as you can go. Strong one to have early in the show.
🔖📺🎮 Read Television Is Better Without Video Games and Video Games Are Better Without Gameplay (Ian Bogost, The Atlantic).
Maybe Ian Bogost should stop playing video games.
📺🖖🏻 When I watch TNG or Picard, Data is Data, but anyone else Brent Spiner plays is Brent Spiner doing an awesome job. But Data is, viscerally for me, Not A Character Brent Spiner Plays, but instead A Guy (an android guy but still).
📺 Watched Ares.
Brilliant dark academia horror with all the hallmarks: secret society, dangerously powerful young people, gorgeous fashion, a lower class newcomer, with the spirit of LEGENDBORN or ACE OF SPADES critiquing the aesthetic’s Eurocentrism.
🔖📺👱♀️ Read Sarah Michelle Gellar Returns to Fighting Form: “I’ve Earned the Right to Stand Where I Am”.
“Was it an ideal working situation? Absolutely not. But it’s OK to love Buffy for what we created because I think it’s pretty spectacular.”
📺 Finished watching Wednesday. Glad I stuck with it. I appreciate Wednesday refusing to be in the same teen drama show as everyone else. I was delighted by the ending. Be warned: replies may contain spoilers.
📺💬
Tyler: Come on, don’t you like a day that’s all about you?
Wednesday: Every day is all about me. This one just comes with cake and a bad song.
🖤🌧️🖤
📺 Watching WEDNESDAY and every time Christina Ricci says, “Wednesday,” I’m all, “Are you talking to yourself?” in spite of the killer job Jenna Ortega is doing.
Revised 5 TV shows to introduce me, now in chronological order of release! 📺
- Star Trek: The Next Generation 🖖🏻
- Animaniacs🐁
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer 👱♀️
- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 🥨
- GLOW 🤼♀️
'Wednesday' is full of "Whoa." 📺
I just finished the first episode of Wednesday. I have so many thoughts and feelings.
First, I’ve seen criticism that the Addams Family works best when you have the whole family. (Sadly, I can’t find the link to where I read this right now.) I completely agree but the decision to rely on the trope of a teen rebelling against their parents means any family time here is very tense. So I don’t want the whole family together because they’re not as loving as I’m used to.
As Emmet Asher-Perrin points out, the Addams Family movies are all about family as a safe haven, on the unconditional not just love, but positive regard they have for their children. That vibe isn’t present here.
(I’ll mention at this point that I haven’t seen the recent animated Addams Family movies, and that I shunned the musical because a huge part of the premise was Wednesday wanting to be normal for a boy and that’s just… not very Wednesday.)
But.
Jenna Ortega is brilliant. She perfectly revives My Generation’s Wednesday (what’s my generation? Xennials I guess?). Her delivery is beautiful. Her physicality is on point (🤺).
I really appreciate the Christina Ricci cameo. She’s adorable.
I love how this feels like a goth Veronica Mars. I’ve seen comparisons to Riverdale, but at least in the first season, Jughead’s narration is reportage, not reflection. He is wryly commenting on the corruption in his town. In contrast, Veronica and Wednesday give us interiority that isn’t self-indulgent.
It has me thinking about what bell hooks has to say about confessional writing, how perception of it is gendered. I’ve been reading remembered rapture lately.
I can’t deal with the family tension and all of the school bits are sort of… just being the cliche rather than commenting on it?
We’ve seen this roommate dynamic in Wicked (I may have started singing “Loathing” to myself when Wednesday and Enid met). There doesn’t seem to be a new take on it here.
Also: the embrace of the supernatural beyond the Addams’s immediate circle feels a little off to me here. In Charles Addams’s comics and in the 90s movies, the world was pretty normal. To suddenly have a school full of vampires, werewolves, gorgons, and sirens feels not exactly random, but out of place.
On this note: Thing. Thing has scars, Frankenstein’s creature style, and I don’t love it. I think because a disembodied hand is enough weird. It requires no additional weird.
The costumes are wonderful. The exterior view of the school makes me super happy.
I’ll give it a few more episodes but giving the Addams Family the Riverdale treatment with a Harry Potter setting, Doyle/Cordelia-on-Angel visions, and a more-Veronica Mars-than-Jughead voiceover feels mostly like trying to do too many things at one time.
(Also, I’ve seen comparisons to Nancy Drew, Buffy, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch but none to VMars, which feels super weird to me.)