I’m currently getting my dopamine pathways hijacked by writing movie reviews, but I also love rewatching movies in quick succession. So what do I do when I watch something like 9 to 5 once, write a review, and then watch it again the next day? My initial review was sort of a recap, so going into the meatier themes that made me love the flick seemed about right.
I’ve been having my dopamine pathways hijacked and re-hijacked a lot lately. Earlier this year I got hijacked by a project in Adobe InDesign; that was knocked out of place by an abrupt obsession with crochet on July 31st; I was seized by an interactive fiction project in September that I now have minimal motivation to finish; modding Skyrim took over my dopamine pathways when I lost the novelty of drawing dragon flong.
Hence I do recognize that my desire to write movie reviews, and blog posts in general, especially the kind you’re reading right now, is just another rollercoaster ride for my poor stupid golden retriever dopamine pathways.
Since we’ve established this relationship is frail and will vanish at the drop of a molecule, let’s get into the RSS reader.
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Her Hands, My Hands read one of the urban fantasy classics, First Grave on the Right. Great commentary.
Is it a classic if it was published 13 years ago? It was everywhere 13 years ago. But that was the beginning of my career, and that feels like old-timey days now.
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RBmedia released a list of the bestselling audiobooks of the year.
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I wonder if deciding to remove dog meat from South Korean menus is as good as it sounds, or if it’s a complicated expression of the increasing Westernization of the region. I’ve never eaten it. That would be insane from my cultural perspective. Is it from theirs? I wonder what is lost when a traditional food source is banned.
That said, despite my frequent threats to turn my French bulldog into French onion bulldog soup, I still like dogs better than people and I’m not sad to think of more living dogs.
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Why are Millennials still attached to American Girl?
Parts of this article seem like they might be worthy of consideration, particularly when the opinion comes from outside the article.
Brit Bennett, in her 2015 Paris Review essay on Addy, asks, “If a doll exists on the border between person and thing, what does it mean to own a doll that represents an enslaved child who once existed on that same border?” Such complexity, even uneasiness, was how the brand thrived.
But other parts of the article get my eyebrows lifting.
Almost all dolls prepare girls to perform womanhood. Baby dolls ready them for mothering; Barbies for being sexual objects. Rowland’s twin innovations—a multifaceted, highly detailed consumer universe paired with a doll that was herself a girl—invited girls to perform themselves.
I never once mothered a baby doll in my life, but my baby dolls used to make out with other baby dolls in the closet a lot. My Barbies were up to some weird brainwashing scheme. I really, really don’t think I’m unusual in this experience. One weird assumption like this makes me disengage, honestly.
Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that everyone loves nostalgia, American Girl dolls are easier to buy once you’re a grownup, and some Millennials are at the point where we can get fancy frivolous things for ourselves.
Since I mostly played with 12- and 18-inch fashion dolls as a kid, the sheer size of American Girl dolls was the main source of my interest. They take up a lot of room. I ended up buying a custom boy American Girl for my kid when he was small and the creepy thing lurks in a closet somewhere.
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Karen Gillan still hasn’t managed to escape Steven Moffatt’s writing.
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Swedish dockworkers are refusing to unload Teslas at ports in broad boycott move.
I love this for them.
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Very specific rules around breastfeeding videos mean they can be monetized on YouTube again. I don’t even know how to start unpacking the levels of Bothered I am about this whole entire subject. I breastfed for over six years straight between two children. There’s a major rift in intergenerational knowledge surrounding breastfeeding which communities are still trying to heal. So yeah, folks need videos to help them. But we still have to get really specific about what kind of videos can get compensated for views, just in case there was some nipple and someone might be able to fetishize that? Oh, and make sure there’s a child in the shot. That helps somehow.
I hate tech companies. I miss nursing.
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So…Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa is another one I could pick apart for days.
The origin of Oompa Loompas is not as some random magical orange humans. (link is a PDF)
In his 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl depicts the iconic Oompa-Loompas as African Pygmy people. […] In Dahl’s 1973 revision of this text he depicts the Oompa-Loompas as white.
Cocoa’s production is troubling, so there’s some cognitive dissonance in seeing a wealthy English actor pout over someone stealing his cocoa beans.
Not to mention that changing Hugh Grant’s proportions means they didn’t cast a little person. Here’s a statement made in regards to a past movie:
A rep for “Little People of America” tells TMZ, the entertainment industry should be actively casting little people.
The rep adds, “This means both casting people with dwarfism as characters that were specifically written to be played by little people … and other roles that would be open to people of short stature.”
I’m not sure how many people were actually at risk of seeing yet another Willy Wonka movie, but I’m not, and this doesn’t change the maths.
