📺👱‍♀️🖖 Glen Weldon’s rewrite of song titles from “Once More, with Feeling” to include Star Trek stuff is precisely calculated to delight me, specifically.

📺 Watched The Baby-sitters Club S02E07, Claudia and the Sad Goodbye. 💔😭

If you know, you know.

Does anybody else know why all I feel like doing is lying in bed and watching Netflix Originals? 📺

📺 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:

Dutch book: Eerste Hulp Bij Kattenkwaad - First Aid for Mischief

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.

Full-on happy misty-eyed over this week’s Picard. 🖖🏻📺

📺 Want to watch:

  • SMILF
  • Catastrophe
  • Motherland
  • The Letdown
  • Workin' Moms

📺💬🖖🏻 “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.

🖤🌧️🖤

📺💬 “It’s not my fault I can’t interpret your emotional morse code.” 🖤 Wednesday 🖤

📺 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 🤼‍♀️