mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

We made it! All three prequels!

Holy shit this movie is so much better than the other two. It's not perfect, but you can understand what's going on! The characters say sentences and they make sense with the other sentences! Scenes exist for some kind of sensible purpose and don't go on way longer than they should! Concepts and characters are introduced before they're needed so the audience can follow along and not constantly be like "where are we? who's that guy?? what's happening???" I declare it a cinematic triumph. Really though, I had a good time watching this.

( cut for length )

Anyway, here's a video where Palpatine is played by Kermit the Frog.

Embedded video: Fan edit reimagines scenes from the movie with Palpatine replaced by a Kermit the Frog puppet.


We are doing the sequels next. sdk has seen them before, but I have not.

After rewatching the Original Trilogy, sdk and I allowed our enthusiasm to carry us forward into rewatching the Prequel Trilogy. That was... well, it was certainly a decision that we made.

I saw this movie in the theater and had not seen it since then. I knew it wasn't a cinematic masterpiece, but I did go in with a positive attitude hoping to enjoy some cheesy silliness and at least have fun razzing it. I'm afraid I was not able to maintain that attitude; I actually found the movie unpleasant to watch. So if you love it, maybe skip this post.

( cut for length and negativity )

In conclusion, I don't recommend this movie. I do, however, recommend this:

Embedded video: Music video for Weird Al's song "The Saga Begins", which retells the plot of the movie to the tune of "American Pie" by Don McClean.


Nonetheless we plan to persevere with Attack of the Clones, which I think I have seen part of. Maybe it will be better! Let me dream!

Last April was Edutainment Month on my journal, because LGR used to review edutainment games every April but he stopped because the videos weren't profitable, so I decided to take up the mantle. It was my intention to repeat the exercise this year, but then I realized I wouldn't have time in April to do it, so this year I declare that Edutainment Month falls in March.



Anyway! This is the original version of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and it taught me to type. We first got a home computer when I was six or seven (my dad was an early adopter) and since it was a DOS PC, I was going to need to do some typing if I wanted to use it. At that age I was still very much in the "rulebound teacher's pet" phase of my childhood, so I was extremely receptive to being told exactly how to use the keyboard.

( more about the game )

But the most interesting thing about this game is Mavis Beacon herself. She is not a real person, she is a marketing character like Betty Crocker. The game and the character were created by three white American dudes, ( but the model whose photograph they used for the box art was Renee L'Esperance, a Black woman from Haiti. )

Just last year, a new documentary came out called Seeking Mavis Beacon. It follows the efforts of filmmakers Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross, two Black women, to find and speak to Renee L'Esperance, the most iconic face of the character. Which (spoilers) they never do, though they come much closer than anyone else ever has, and turn up a lot of new details about how the character of Mavis was created.

( I was absolutely not ready for how wild this documentary is. )

You can play Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for free in your browser, and you can stream Seeking Mavis Beacon on Hulu in the US, and probably other places.

On Monday we got to see a showing of What We Left Behind, Ira Steven Behr & David Zappone's crowdfunded documentary about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There was a pretty big turnout, and it was a treat to get to see it in a theater full of fans.

Much of the film is a traditionally structured documentary, telling the story of the show's creation, reception, and legacy through interviews with actors, producers, crew, and fans. But interwoven between these scenes is something very different: They reunited a group of the writers, and had them come up with a story for the first episode of an imaginary season eight.

Just getting to watch the writers work was worth the whole ticket price. I know a lot of TV shows are plotted collaboratively, but as a writer who always works alone I was never really sure what that looked like. This movie shows you! As they bounce ideas off each other and talk them through, you get animatics showing how things might look onscreen, including storyboard panels being sketched and then erased as the writers change their minds. The episode they come up with sounds amazing, and I did feel a bit sad it will never really be produced, though also inspired by the creativity on display.

The interviews were also enjoyable, with a lot of good insights into the characters and discussion of DS9's status as the 90s-era Trek "middle child", always compared negatively to TNG and VOY and seen as too different, too dark, too cynical, and maybe a ripoff of Babylon 5 (something I heard so many times back then). I agree that DS9 was ahead of its time in some ways, and it definitely seems to be more respected now than it was then... sometimes to the point where (IMHO) it can get talked up more than it perhaps deserves. Don't get me wrong, I like DS9! I agree, a lot of the criticisms they mention in the documentary were unfair! But it's not like the show was perfect either.

( Which kind of brings me to something in this movie that made me feel weird )

But overall I did find the movie a good watch, and I'd recommend it if you're a fan of the show. (Or maybe even if you're not! walgesang had never actually watched DS9 — gasp — but after seeing the documentary she's been on a Netflix binge.) I don't think it's getting a regular theatrical release beyond the one-night deal, but at some point it'll be available on DVD/streams, I'm sure. Here's the trailer:

Over the last few days I watched the first two Back to the Future movies with my kid. They were favorites of mine when I was his age, so it's nice to see that they held up pretty well, though it did bear some repeated explaining that the movies were made a long time ago (*sob*), and that's why they thought we'd have hoverboards by 2015, and why even when they're in the "present" their clothes are still weird, and what exactly is this Walkman you speak of?

I may have mentioned at some point here that Back to the Future was the first thing I can remember writing fic for, when I was knee high to a grasshopper. But of course, since it's me, I didn't write about Doc and Marty going on another adventure, no. Instead I wrote a whole story about Jennifer, a character who is barely in the first movie, and is unconscious for 90% of the second. Who cares about this character? Apparently not the writers, and probably hardly anybody else who saw the movies, but I did. I didn't want her to get knocked unconscious the second she starts to do anything, I wanted her to have an adventure too!

I think being drawn to side characters is just inherent to my personality. Maybe it's a rooting for the underdog thing, or a desire to see a larger picture of the world, or plain contrariness, I don't know. It's just how my mind works, and apparently always has.

So we've been working through the catalogue of classic kid-appropriate movies, and today was Mary Poppins, which I hadn't watched since I was little. It's always interesting the things you notice with grown-up eyes. This is basically the Harry Potter set up -- father figure is mean and doesn't understand, then we find out magic is real.

But Harry's story is the more realistic one. Vernon never lightens up, and Harry learns that if you're different, you need to choose your own family and don't look back. This is a reality many of us can relate to.

By contrast, Mary Poppins is utter fantasy, because dad actually sees the light. A lot of kids have wished for that, but you're more likely to fly away with an umbrella than to ever see it happen.