Rewatching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and while remembering how good it was, I had forgotten how good it is.
Can't believe there are people who pretend with a straight face that the previous animated adaptation was better than this.
Yes, they're all different adaptations of the toy line(s), by different creators who each hold separate but overlapping sets of rights. I think it's amazing, like a "my cup runneth over" situation.
I guess to be more precise, Revelation is an adaptation of the previous adaptation (I think of it as "the sequel to an enhanced reimagining") and the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons are fresh adaptations of the toy line concepts.
...dang, I had forgotten they gave us Catra's suit and Scorpia's ballgown just past halfway through the first season. The iconic power of this show.
Also forgot that Noelle and Molly attended the Princess Prom together.
The shot of sullen Catra holding the sword perfectly parallel to the floor as she drags it along the Fright Zone's wall like she's scratching a claw is amazing.
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Here's a thing: if you write an essay about your warm and complicated feelings about your husband, and it has a headline, lede, and deck about how awful he is and how much you hate him, AND the essay is behind a paywall?
Most people who see those things won't read the essay.
That "Oh, nobody is reading critically these days, readers are so stupid and gullible." take is missing the point. You can talk about how a savvy consumer should know better than to fall for false advertising, if you want, I guess, but this isn't a question of literacy.
Very possibly not.
And arguably the sardonic, self-deprecating (by way of family-deprecating) approach to the essay's intended point is valid, if a terrible idea given the current state of the art/the industry.
This was a cold-calling sales job, but it wasn't phrased to us or the customers as a sales job. We were the "scheduling" department. The sales reps were in the field. We were supposed to call someone and get whoever answered the phone to say "yes" to a visit from the sales rep.
The company was nominally a home-improvement company. Sold siding and windows and a few other things (gutters, maybe?) so that if we encountered somebody who didn't believe us when we told them they needed X, we would pivot to Y and then Z.
There's more than one cause of this (as there is for everything) but when I hear it phrased like that I can't help but think about how much we have relied on moralization and stigmatization in place of health education, in all aspects of life.
We've got a culture that largely gave up on teaching kids to like vegetables (and teaching parents how to help them do so) in favor of the message "No one likes eating vegetables, but you have to do it, because it's good for you."
Our compulsory physical education involves games but in a "You've got to play this sportsball because today we're playing this sportsball" way, with a lot of bullying and sanctioning of bullying, and adolescent anxiety multipliers built into the system.
So I started playing Control after watching the first of @JuliaLepetit's recent VODs. I'm not super far into it so please no spoilers, but I find that it's a game with a lot to say and I think by the time I'm done I'll have a lot to say about it.
It's fun to watch Julia play it because as a visual artist she keeps stopping to point out things that I would never notice, in particular how the game designers achieve the difficult trick of staging the big areas so that when you enter them you get a striking visual.
Which, you're probably thinking that's not a hard trick, games do it all the time, but I'm not talking about a micro-cutscene with strategic camera focusing and panning. What's trickier is doing it in free-roaming mode with the camera following the player's shoulder.
As somebody who reads a lot of books that aren't written for adults, including books written for a lower grade level than even the first Harry Potter was: they are right and they should say it.
I will also add that a big part of J.K. Rowling's clout lies in mass market appeal. While she wrote from a very narrow perspective, she wrote something that marketers knew how to position to sell to millions.
And a lot of what makes stronger writing stronger is a sharper focus.
And another thing about this kind of comparison is that Rowling's claim to fame is having written 7 books in a single continuing narrative. If R.L. Stine didn't compete at her level, it's unsurprising as he was playing a different game.
So health update: continuing the trajectory of feeling better, continuing the practice of resting as much as I can till I'm well past being sure I'm over it.
(And increasingly confident that "it" was just my body's usual reaction to a bad cold.)
Today is not a day I would get much done anyway, as it's the most important floating feast day in the current calendar of my life: the day I sit downstairs and wait for the FedEx truck to pull up with the meds I need to function the rest of the month.
My meds are a scheduled controlled substance, so the courier is not allowed to simply place it on the porch and leave. I have to actually open the door, sign the pad, and give my name. It wouldn't be the end of the world if they come and I miss it. Just another day of this.