Lanna Michaels (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lannamichaels) wrote2023-08-12 09:40 pm
lannamichaels) wrote2023-08-12 09:40 pm
Entry tags:
Movies and books
- Great Muppet Caper: The ending did not change my opinion on the quality of the movie.
- The Muppets Take Manhattan: This movie benefits from comparison to the Great Muppet Caper, because it has a much better script and songs. However. That said. I would have appreciated a spoiler for the whole "Kermit gets hit by a car and then has amnesia" plotline. Which is on me for not reading the Wikipedia summary, I guess, but what the fuck was that choice.
Also, it has not escaped me how terrible Miss Piggy's plotlines are in these two movies.
The best part of having watched these movies is this opportunity to use my We're Here To Heckle The Muppet Movie icon in a supremely on-topic way. - The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty: I gave it about 150 pages and gave up. If you want a book about Fantasy Discrimination, this is the book for you. Since I don't, it's not.
- Catfishing on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer: This is as delightful as everyone says it is. From the cover and the blurb, I was a little concerned. I feel like this is one of those "yes, it's filled with this and this and this heavy stuff, but it's good and it's funny" books. So yes this is definitely a mother and daughter on the run from abuser, and how technology and the panopticon makes life awful and difficult for them, and about terrible high schools, and it takes its responsibility to the target audience seriously by giving them tips on internet security, sex, gender identity, and even namedrops Scarleteen. And it's good!
- Chaos on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer: Okay, this one I had problems with.
- Steph had lived her whole life being held to a specific and careful standard of internet and cell phone privacy, knows she is not allowed to let herself be photographed and why, and just recently had a harsh life lesson into how people can find you through insecure phone applications. And yet she keeps a game that she knows is spying on her and then lets it dictate her actions to the extent of taking photos of people without their consent? And even taking feedback during the process of just how the picture has to be framed? Steph, who snuck out of school to avoid television cameras, because her abusive dad might find her? That Steph? I nearly threw the book across the room.
- And okay. I gave the first book a pass on this because there were so few adult characters, but this one does not get a pass. All the men are useless or bad; the best one is Nell's flake of a dad, who has to be manipulated into doing anything and is in a truly incomprehensible polycule, I have no idea why his partners bother with him.
Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods? This book is not at the level of Spinning Silver about it, but I was thinking highly uncomplimentary things. Men Are Bad is not, in fact, a great thesis to be making. - It also suffers from an Ender's Game-type problem. In Ender's Game, it's a plot point that Ender's siblings basically take over the planet by becoming bloggers. This book wants you to believe in major social chaos caused by flash mobs of strangers ordered around by cell phone games, particularly in Minneapolis in January. It also expects you to believe that teenagers will shoplift just because their phone told them to. I am offended on behalf of teenagers. I think it's telling that the way the book gets Nell in particular to do it is by making her have to do it to find out about her missing girlfriend. From, it turns out, an AI who has no good reason to actually tell her anything accurate about that. Are all the other random shoplifters thus manipulated? It does not seem that way.
- And the most minor complaint of all is that I have no idea why Nell's mother abandoned her in such a strange and dramatic way and I'm not sure the book does either, except to lean into Nell's mother being strange and dramatic.
Slightly less minor complaint about Nell's mom: she belongs to a prepper cult that has guns everywhere. She shoots at a guy multiple times and manages to not hit him. What is she, a stormtrooper in Star Wars? - I did, however, note with bemusement the author's Jewish Exhaustion explanation of what the sin of Sodom actually was. That was supremely out of place and out of character, and the way it was explained in text raises a whole lot of questions about Steph's friend Hermione. But as authorial self-indulgence goes, I've seen worse. (There is not a single Jew in these books.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Right?? Not only that, she downloads the game in the first place for no other reason than that a random kid she has just met tells her to! Even my kids know better than to download completely random apps, and they haven't been brought up like Steph!
It also expects you to believe that teenagers will shoplift just because their phone told them to. I am offended on behalf of teenagers.
As someone who as a teenager had an acquaintance who shoplifted, and also who did a few things I'm ashamed of now (not shoplifting) due to peer pressure, I... I think it depends on how much they think their phone's instructions are like peer pressure. I read the book too long ago to remember exactly, but I thought there was a sort of "everyone's doing it" vague sense. (Though most of the not-good things I did had to do with peer pressure from a very specific person that I wanted to impress, so I suppose that's probably hard to replicate with a phone app...)
no subject
no subject
And then the app being like "hey go to this random place, take construction tools, and do destruction!" is like the author thought "hmm, I see all these people congregating to play Pokemon Go on their phone. What if they were violent" and did not stop to consider that the joy of these kinds of games does not actually involve physical labor and mob behavior.
And even the constructive one? Ah, yes, a group of random people could definitely build a coherent snow sculpture of an octopus. There will be no different artistic visions, everyone will go along with the plan, there will be a plan, everyone will work together... etc etc.
Also: another thing about it being an app, it's not even a good app. There's no in-app reward for doing anything for the Mischief Elves. They don't level up. They don't get anything. It's all orders and no benefit.
no subject
YEP. Same. Although I was not as good a person as you and did not drop out of the friends group on my own. (Fortunately, the group disintegrated on its own due to the kids in it, including the one I was trying to impress, going to different schools in the next grade. Ugh.)
re: the saws and the octopus and all: haha, I forgot all these details. Yeah, fair!
Also: another thing about it being an app, it's not even a good app. There's no in-app reward for doing anything for the Mischief Elves. They don't level up. They don't get anything. It's all orders and no benefit.
I think my brain assumed there was some sort of in-app benefit that wasn't really shown in the book, because my mind can't really envision an app like this that doesn't have gamified levels and in-app friends and little badges and whatever. Lol.
no subject
But no! It's just constantly spying on you and telling you to do stuff and just so happening to arrange things for you so that you can do its biding. And people just go along with it!
This is not the first work of fiction I've seen involving apps that tell you do to things IRL and people do them, but at least in those stories, the apps themselves were doing Weird Mind Control stuff to people to make them do it.