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shadowkat1. Church vs. Society
I really don't like arguments over semantics. I find them frustrating and disconnecting. Also, Zoom has its issues - such as people can fight in the chat room during a sermon on the church's live-stream. I find this distracting. What were they arguing about?
Well, over whether the church is a church or a society. Apparently some have issues with the word church (yet, oddly not worship). I'm the opposite, I have issues with the words society and worship, but no problems with church. Why? Well, when I was a small child my father associated the word church with people and got across to me that church = loving people who made it up. "Here's the church, here's the steeple, open up the doors? Here's all the people" - he would say, wriggling his fingers. So I look at the building and see a beautiful mahogany church with stained glass windows, a steeple, and open the doors - lovely people. When I think of society? I think of discord, disconnection, exclusion. And nasty sociology professors - I have not had pleasant experiences with sociologists. Worship? I think of people blindly following something without any question. Cults. So it chafes. I think we are like this about certain words. Words often have a personal and emotional weight. One of the people in the Zoom chat stated that - that it is personal for everyone. Yesterday, I bought a book - "What is your pronoun - beyond he and she" - to understand the emotional weight of personal pronouns and how to think beyond them. It is hard to communicate and connect with others, when a mere word can cause so much division and misunderstanding and disconnect.
I've been feeling very disconnected lately. On Meetup - someone posted a workshop, eight hours in length, spread over mulitple weeks, meeting for two hours every Monday on Zoom, placed in a variety of chat rooms, with exercises, and packets, and it's $400. I think not. I'm struggling with Zoom.
Work uses Microsoft Teams, which honestly isn't much better.
2. The Stunning Second Life of Avatar The Last Airbender
"A fifteen-year-old cartoon is an unlikely contender for most-watched show in America. And yet when “Avatar: The Last Airbender” arrived on Netflix, in May, it rose through the ranks to become the platform’s No. 1 offering, and even now it remains a fixture in the Top Ten for the U.S. The series first ran from 2005 to 2008 on Nickelodeon, and swiftly made a name for itself as a politically resonant, emotionally sophisticated work—one with a sprawling but meticulously plotted mythos that destined the show for cult-classic status. Last summer, after “Game of Thrones” flubbed its finale, fans and critics held up “Avatar” as a counterexample: a fantasy series that knew what it wanted to be from the beginning.
Like all such stories, “Avatar” (created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, and no relation to the James Cameron blockbuster) demands some exposition. In a world where nations are defined by their connection to one of the four elements—water, earth, fire, and air—maintaining the peace falls to the Avatar, the only person who can achieve mastery of them all. Just as the Fire Nation launches an attack, he vanishes. The series begins a century later, when a twelve-year-old boy named Aang is discovered and revived by a pair of Water Tribe teen-agers—and the Fire Nation is well on its way to global conquest. The first two episodes are largely what you’d expect: world-building punctuated by moments of whimsy. In the third, Aang returns to the temple where he was born to find the aftermath of a genocide. He is, he discovers, both the Avatar and the last of the Air Nomads.
Where earlier shows might have hinted at such an atrocity for adult viewers’ benefit, “Avatar” is overt, taking seriously its young audience’s capacity to confront the consequences of endless war. Moral ambiguity abounds, and people from all nations see the conflict as, variously, an opportunity or a tragedy; there are Earth Kingdom citizens who have become cynical or apathetic after generations of fighting, and those from the Fire Nation who are fully capable of doing good. Aang, like the monks who raised him, is a pacifist at heart, but the series makes it clear that his is not the only way of bringing balance to the world. On the eve of his confrontation with the Fire Lord, one of his past lives—a warrior named Kyoshi, who has killed would-be conquerors before—counsels that “only justice will bring peace.”
While that larger conflict looms, the series is less interested in dramatic clashes between armies than in relationships and realities on the ground. Aang and his companions spend much of their time in villages ravaged by the war, and among the refugees displaced by it. As they venture farther into the world, Konietzko and DiMartino marry the more traditional “monster of the week” format with longer-term story arcs and character development. Early episodes are largely self-contained, but the heroes’ relationships and emotional states don’t simply reset at the end of those twenty-two minutes. The protagonists change the course of the war and are changed by it in turn, accruing new abilities, beliefs, and anxieties as they go. They’re allowed to fail—sometimes catastrophically—and to atone in ways that take multiple seasons to come to fruition. Zuko, the prince of the Fire Nation, is introduced as a storm cloud of teen-age angst and unresolved trauma, blinded by the need for his father’s approval and the Fire Nation’s distortion of its history. Under the guidance of his uncle, who challenges his preconceptions, Zuko makes slow, painful progress toward redemption, and is eventually forced to reckon with the cost of his country’s exceptionalism. As a child, he says, he had been taught that “the war was our way of sharing our greatness with the rest of the world.” After travelling the globe in pursuit of the Avatar, he has seen enough to recognize the “amazing lie” for what it was: “They don’t see our greatness. They hate us—and we deserve it.”
When “Avatar” won a Peabody Award, in 2008, the judges praised, among other qualities, its “healthy respect for the consequences of warfare.” Despite these themes, it never mistakes darkness for depth of meaning. It’s often funny, and sometimes silly, tempering weighty material with humor befitting its twelve-year-old hero. In 2020, that balance allows it to function as both a comfort watch and a means of catharsis. “Avatar” engages directly with the perils of encroaching authoritarianism, and the inaction, inadequacy, and abuses of the bureaucrats and military leaders tasked with fighting it. It also offers a universe in which such crises feel surmountable. The show is beloved by political commentators ranging from the Times’ Jamelle Bouie to The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, who pledged, following its arrival on Netflix, to “just do tweets about Avatar until November.” A subsequent exchange captured the series’ quasi-escapist appeal: “Tired: Tweeting about American politics / Wired: Tweeting about Ba Sing Se politics,” Grace Segers, a reporter at CBS, wrote, referring to the Earth Kingdom capital, where a ruthless police force operates with impunity under an incompetent king. “Could be nice to cover a less oppressive gov’t,” another user replied.
Since its première, in 2005, “Avatar” has spawned graphic novels, video games, and a sequel series, “Avatar: The Legend of Korra,” which broke new ground with a same-gender romance between two central characters, Korra and Asami. Last year, Netflix announced a new live-action adaptation. (The less said about “The Last Airbender,” M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 attempt at the same, the better.) “Avatar” has also cast a long shadow in animation, where its influence can still be felt: writers and directors who made their names through the series have gone on to play key roles in “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” “Voltron: Legendary Defender,” and “The Dragon Prince.”
Perhaps the clearest successor comes not from a former writer but from an early fan. Nine years ago, Noelle Stevenson was a college student posting fan art of characters like Zuko and Korra on her blog. When Korra and Asami officially became a couple, in the series finale, Nickelodeon ruled that the two were allowed only to hold hands—but the hard-fought moment made bigger strides seem possible to those watching, Stevenson among them. This year, as a showrunner in her own right, she succeeded in advocating for a more demonstrative queer relationship in “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,” which now sits alongside “Avatar” on Netflix. “There was not anything like this on TV,” she said, of the slow-burn lesbian love story at the heart of the series. “And then Korra starts happening, and Steven Universe starts happening and that wall starts getting chipped away.”
“She-Ra,” too, embraced subject matter once deemed unsuitable for its demographic, and has been rapturously received by children and adults alike as a result. The fresh proof of concept is heartening—now that “Avatar,” like its protagonist, has returned after too many years away, it seems likely that the next generation of showrunners is once again watching."
I'd watched some of the first season on Nicklodeon, then lost track of it when it premiered 15 years ago. So, now I'm watching to get the whole thing. Which is three seasons.
3. We're Going to Run Out of Television
Yet, somehow I'm not that worried.
4. The Kun Fu Nuns of Kathmandu
Oh, the text of the article has since been updated to show how the nuns are handling COVID-19, according to a textual note at the top.
5. Why Arizona is Suffering the Worst COVID Outbreak in the US
It is admittedly odd that it is Arizona. It does not have the densest population in the US.
I really don't like arguments over semantics. I find them frustrating and disconnecting. Also, Zoom has its issues - such as people can fight in the chat room during a sermon on the church's live-stream. I find this distracting. What were they arguing about?
Well, over whether the church is a church or a society. Apparently some have issues with the word church (yet, oddly not worship). I'm the opposite, I have issues with the words society and worship, but no problems with church. Why? Well, when I was a small child my father associated the word church with people and got across to me that church = loving people who made it up. "Here's the church, here's the steeple, open up the doors? Here's all the people" - he would say, wriggling his fingers. So I look at the building and see a beautiful mahogany church with stained glass windows, a steeple, and open the doors - lovely people. When I think of society? I think of discord, disconnection, exclusion. And nasty sociology professors - I have not had pleasant experiences with sociologists. Worship? I think of people blindly following something without any question. Cults. So it chafes. I think we are like this about certain words. Words often have a personal and emotional weight. One of the people in the Zoom chat stated that - that it is personal for everyone. Yesterday, I bought a book - "What is your pronoun - beyond he and she" - to understand the emotional weight of personal pronouns and how to think beyond them. It is hard to communicate and connect with others, when a mere word can cause so much division and misunderstanding and disconnect.
I've been feeling very disconnected lately. On Meetup - someone posted a workshop, eight hours in length, spread over mulitple weeks, meeting for two hours every Monday on Zoom, placed in a variety of chat rooms, with exercises, and packets, and it's $400. I think not. I'm struggling with Zoom.
Work uses Microsoft Teams, which honestly isn't much better.
2. The Stunning Second Life of Avatar The Last Airbender
"A fifteen-year-old cartoon is an unlikely contender for most-watched show in America. And yet when “Avatar: The Last Airbender” arrived on Netflix, in May, it rose through the ranks to become the platform’s No. 1 offering, and even now it remains a fixture in the Top Ten for the U.S. The series first ran from 2005 to 2008 on Nickelodeon, and swiftly made a name for itself as a politically resonant, emotionally sophisticated work—one with a sprawling but meticulously plotted mythos that destined the show for cult-classic status. Last summer, after “Game of Thrones” flubbed its finale, fans and critics held up “Avatar” as a counterexample: a fantasy series that knew what it wanted to be from the beginning.
Like all such stories, “Avatar” (created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, and no relation to the James Cameron blockbuster) demands some exposition. In a world where nations are defined by their connection to one of the four elements—water, earth, fire, and air—maintaining the peace falls to the Avatar, the only person who can achieve mastery of them all. Just as the Fire Nation launches an attack, he vanishes. The series begins a century later, when a twelve-year-old boy named Aang is discovered and revived by a pair of Water Tribe teen-agers—and the Fire Nation is well on its way to global conquest. The first two episodes are largely what you’d expect: world-building punctuated by moments of whimsy. In the third, Aang returns to the temple where he was born to find the aftermath of a genocide. He is, he discovers, both the Avatar and the last of the Air Nomads.
Where earlier shows might have hinted at such an atrocity for adult viewers’ benefit, “Avatar” is overt, taking seriously its young audience’s capacity to confront the consequences of endless war. Moral ambiguity abounds, and people from all nations see the conflict as, variously, an opportunity or a tragedy; there are Earth Kingdom citizens who have become cynical or apathetic after generations of fighting, and those from the Fire Nation who are fully capable of doing good. Aang, like the monks who raised him, is a pacifist at heart, but the series makes it clear that his is not the only way of bringing balance to the world. On the eve of his confrontation with the Fire Lord, one of his past lives—a warrior named Kyoshi, who has killed would-be conquerors before—counsels that “only justice will bring peace.”
While that larger conflict looms, the series is less interested in dramatic clashes between armies than in relationships and realities on the ground. Aang and his companions spend much of their time in villages ravaged by the war, and among the refugees displaced by it. As they venture farther into the world, Konietzko and DiMartino marry the more traditional “monster of the week” format with longer-term story arcs and character development. Early episodes are largely self-contained, but the heroes’ relationships and emotional states don’t simply reset at the end of those twenty-two minutes. The protagonists change the course of the war and are changed by it in turn, accruing new abilities, beliefs, and anxieties as they go. They’re allowed to fail—sometimes catastrophically—and to atone in ways that take multiple seasons to come to fruition. Zuko, the prince of the Fire Nation, is introduced as a storm cloud of teen-age angst and unresolved trauma, blinded by the need for his father’s approval and the Fire Nation’s distortion of its history. Under the guidance of his uncle, who challenges his preconceptions, Zuko makes slow, painful progress toward redemption, and is eventually forced to reckon with the cost of his country’s exceptionalism. As a child, he says, he had been taught that “the war was our way of sharing our greatness with the rest of the world.” After travelling the globe in pursuit of the Avatar, he has seen enough to recognize the “amazing lie” for what it was: “They don’t see our greatness. They hate us—and we deserve it.”
When “Avatar” won a Peabody Award, in 2008, the judges praised, among other qualities, its “healthy respect for the consequences of warfare.” Despite these themes, it never mistakes darkness for depth of meaning. It’s often funny, and sometimes silly, tempering weighty material with humor befitting its twelve-year-old hero. In 2020, that balance allows it to function as both a comfort watch and a means of catharsis. “Avatar” engages directly with the perils of encroaching authoritarianism, and the inaction, inadequacy, and abuses of the bureaucrats and military leaders tasked with fighting it. It also offers a universe in which such crises feel surmountable. The show is beloved by political commentators ranging from the Times’ Jamelle Bouie to The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, who pledged, following its arrival on Netflix, to “just do tweets about Avatar until November.” A subsequent exchange captured the series’ quasi-escapist appeal: “Tired: Tweeting about American politics / Wired: Tweeting about Ba Sing Se politics,” Grace Segers, a reporter at CBS, wrote, referring to the Earth Kingdom capital, where a ruthless police force operates with impunity under an incompetent king. “Could be nice to cover a less oppressive gov’t,” another user replied.
Since its première, in 2005, “Avatar” has spawned graphic novels, video games, and a sequel series, “Avatar: The Legend of Korra,” which broke new ground with a same-gender romance between two central characters, Korra and Asami. Last year, Netflix announced a new live-action adaptation. (The less said about “The Last Airbender,” M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 attempt at the same, the better.) “Avatar” has also cast a long shadow in animation, where its influence can still be felt: writers and directors who made their names through the series have gone on to play key roles in “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” “Voltron: Legendary Defender,” and “The Dragon Prince.”
Perhaps the clearest successor comes not from a former writer but from an early fan. Nine years ago, Noelle Stevenson was a college student posting fan art of characters like Zuko and Korra on her blog. When Korra and Asami officially became a couple, in the series finale, Nickelodeon ruled that the two were allowed only to hold hands—but the hard-fought moment made bigger strides seem possible to those watching, Stevenson among them. This year, as a showrunner in her own right, she succeeded in advocating for a more demonstrative queer relationship in “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,” which now sits alongside “Avatar” on Netflix. “There was not anything like this on TV,” she said, of the slow-burn lesbian love story at the heart of the series. “And then Korra starts happening, and Steven Universe starts happening and that wall starts getting chipped away.”
“She-Ra,” too, embraced subject matter once deemed unsuitable for its demographic, and has been rapturously received by children and adults alike as a result. The fresh proof of concept is heartening—now that “Avatar,” like its protagonist, has returned after too many years away, it seems likely that the next generation of showrunners is once again watching."
I'd watched some of the first season on Nicklodeon, then lost track of it when it premiered 15 years ago. So, now I'm watching to get the whole thing. Which is three seasons.
3. We're Going to Run Out of Television
Yet, somehow I'm not that worried.
4. The Kun Fu Nuns of Kathmandu
Oh, the text of the article has since been updated to show how the nuns are handling COVID-19, according to a textual note at the top.
5. Why Arizona is Suffering the Worst COVID Outbreak in the US
It is admittedly odd that it is Arizona. It does not have the densest population in the US.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-13 11:49 pm (UTC)We're watching old Star Trek and The Rachel Maddow Show together. Separately, he's watching old westerns and I'm watching HGTV. He's also watching Aussie football with our son.
I have some old dramas on DVD I can watch if I want: thirtysomething, China Beach. Fringe, for something a little newer. And The X-Files, of course, as long as I can pretend that seasons 10 and 11 never happened.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-14 01:44 am (UTC)But yeah, there's so much television out there, and that is still being made - that I honestly think we aren't in any danger of running out until possibly 2050, assuming they stop production entirely and really don't make any more. Which is not happening. They'll figure out a work-around.
Hypothetically speaking? If they were to stop producing television series tomorrow? It would still not be until around 2040 that I would run out of things to watch.
I don't really watch that much to begin with. It looks like I do, but not really. I see General Hospital each day (right now it's re-runs...which is hilarious and surreal, considering soap operas never do reruns. That is until COVID hit and they ran out of new episodes and can't get back into production yet to do more.) And watch the Governor's Live Briefings and the Weather on NY 1, that's about it. I have been watching Beechum House on PBS and at the moment Last Airbender during the weekends on Netflix.
Not all that much. I find it hard to focus too long on things at the moment. My mind hops about like a bunny rabbit. Or I don't think at all. I wander about Greenwood, not really thinking, just being, it's very restful.