The Nowhere King

So I just watched a..... really strange Netflix show called Centaurworld. (Spoilers)

The opening was really intense and set the scene for great battles to save worlds. (First 4 minutes and 40 seconds of the show).

And then horse falls into another world and spends the next season trying to get back to her Rider. 

You know, I like some weirdness. But this one was too weird for me. I'm not even sure why I kept watching it. Season 1 was filled with bizarre creatures that have conversations with their own farts, and so on. There were important messages in it, but it was hard to take some of them seriously. The "Taurnado" song was really cool (And "Where does Food Come From" got stuck in my head for far too long). During this season, Horse goes from being a powerful warhorse to a "wibbly wobbly" cartoony horse. 

 At the end of season 1 (Episode 9 starting at 14:10) Horse finally makes it back to rider. And then follows a truly touching reunion.

Then the villain appears. 

And man, this is one freaky monster. And the song. It's brilliantly creepy. The melody is so lovely. But the words are so dark, and the music box background is off-key and sets your teeth on edge. 

Ooh, shivers. Awesome. 

Horse and Rider escape, and there's another season where humans and centaurs building their forces to fight the Nowhere King. Man, it twas so cringy that they just left that knife in Stabby's back the whole time. Yeah he had been a monster, but still. (And is Becky Apples going to become wibbly wobbly too if she stays in Centaurworld?)

Then in the last episode, we find out where the Nowhere King came from. It was awesome.

The elktaur is so normal looking compared to the other centaurs (though I like the designs for Wammawink and Zulius). I love watching his animation. He's both cute (his front half) and elegant (his elk half), even though he doesn't seem to see any of his own good sides.  Did he saw off his own antlers to look more normal? Elk do shed their antlers, but it doesn't seem that's what happened this time. 

Anyway, the Nowhere King's back story was really impressive. I was glad I watched through the show, just to see the monster and his origin.

Losing Respect

A friend recently told me that it's difficult to like Harry Potter now, since JK Rowling has shown herself as hateful to certain groups of people. 

It's hard. We both grew up with Harry Potter, and loved it. I still like it. My brain separates the creator from the things they create, if this sort of circumstance. For better or worse. 

But there's another argument. Harry Potter has grown far beyond her. So many people have poured themselves into this world. Even if she's hard to admire anymore, I can at least admire the good people who have also taken a part in making Harry Potter.

 I mean, you're welcome to boycott it too. That's a fair reaction.

Characters from Everywhere

At the zoo, we have a poster for Turning Red in front of the red pandas. A lot of kids run over and comment on the movie. Once I was there talking to some teenagers, and started telling them about how the film crew had studied our pandas to help them animate Mei. 

One of the girls said that she loved the movie, but then added, "Maybe I just like it because I'm Chinese."

I felt so sad hearing that. It's so important to have different characters and cultures in movies and books. I also like Turning Red, and I told her that I related to it too, for different reasons. (My favorite movie is about a different country and culture too.)

Keyboard Obstacles

Recently Lan, my ball python, has wanted to come out and play in the evening. That's when I'm writing, or doing stuff on my computer. He'll end up crawling around my keyboard. Sometimes he pushes buttons. I have to be careful that nothing important gets pushed by accident!

And sometimes he'll tie up either one or two of my arms.

Music as its Own Story

The Fantasia movies don't get too much attention out of Disney films. But I always loved them. In high school, we got to play part of the Firebird Suite - my favorite Fantasia song. We were playing with an incredible professional band. It was awesome. 

And in this semester's band concert, we're going to play Rhapsody in Blue! The first time I heard Rhapsody in Blue was in Fantasia 2000. And I cannot hear this piece without playing the cartoon in my head. Even in rehearsals, I'll be thinking "this is the part with the pile driver," or "the little girl dropped her ball!" The professionals make it sound so easy, but now that I'm hearing someone practice it, I realize how hard the piano piece is.

So I had to watch this one again. It struck me all over - how the heck to people listen to music and come up with pictures like this? For all of the music I've played, unless it already goes with a movie or something, I never see anything. Which is fine. I love listening to and playing music. But it's still amazing people can make a song into a story.  

I also never write music. I made a couple stabs long ago, but most of them ended up stealing melodies or harmonies from other songs. Not all, but most. I've had a couple original melodies of my own. Well, maybe one that I think is actually nice. And I've written things that could potentially be song lyrics. But it never works to put them together. Maybe if I knew more about chords I could write music. But I don't really want to. I have to many other projects I care more about.

Origins of Language

I've been wondering recently, how was human language created? Some languages are clearly related, while others seem to have nothing to do with each other. And oddly, some languages that ought to have nothing to do with one another have bewildering similarities. 

So, did language evolve in many different places? How would that be possible? Or did it start in a basic region and slowly spread? They sure don't sound like they evolved together. But how could language have evolved in so many different places?

(I suppose I could look up the answer. Assuming anyone knows anything about it). 

Zebra

Giraffe

Nubian goat

An Avatar Sequel

Welp, I saw Avatar 2. 

Spoilers. 

It was beautiful, of course. Better graphics than the first one. 

I loved the first Avatar. I was cautiously hopeful that I would like the second one too. Until I saw a trailer. Actually, it wasn't even a trailer I saw. I just heard a line from a trailer while I was in a different room. It said that humans were coming back to Pandora. That line told me pretty much everything I needed to know. Instead of the story moving on, they were going to bring back the same enemies and same problems that they spent the whole first movie fixing. Though I didn't expect them to literally bring back one specific enemy. They did the thing that drives me crazy: the sequel essentially wiped out all progress that they made in the first movie.

And it just feels weird to think that humans want to come live on Pandora. It's not like it's a particularly welcoming home to them. And this time the attempted colonization is funded by a bit of liquid that comes from the brains of alien whales. How the hell would anyone discover that such an impossible-to-get liquid prevents humans from aging? Did they just take samples of every single fluid on the planet and test for immortality effects?

The movie started with a big info dump, covering years and several new characters. It took a long time before I could figure out which character was which. 

But also the characters were frustrating. At least Jake and Neytiri were. I guess you could say that concern for their kids was affecting their behavior, but I just felt disappointed in them during most of the movie (like Neytiri's behavior toward Spider). But they were mostly overshadowed - there were too many characters to let them all shine. 

Why did Jake think that running away was going to protect his family? In the first movie, he said that the humans would come like a rain that never ends. He knew that running away wouldn't help anything if humans continued to spread. And he abandoned the rest of their people to fight the humans alone. And also, half the time I didn't have any idea why he was mad at his younger son? He was just randomly bullying him. 

Quaritch declares that during his hunt, he's going to think and act like the Na-vi. But he never does. He just gets an ikran. 

The one girl has such a strong connection to Ehwa. And we never see her reaction when she learns that she can never connect directly to the Ehwa's trees. 

Killing the whale was basically a repeat of cutting down the great tree in the first movie. And the final battle was like a mashup of Avatar and Titanic. Blue people fighting on a sinking ship.

And killing a kid seems like a violation of trust between viewer and creator. It just leaves such a bitter feeling at the end of a movie. 

I just tricked myself in one of my stories.

I was writing my fanfic - A Pokémon battle between my Ponyta and Gladion's Type:Null.  

Or, more appropriately I was editing it. I wrote the scene long ago. Gladion tricks my trainer in the battle. I'd forgotten all about it. So as I was reading through, I fell for Gladion's trick, hook line and sinker.

Well, hopefully that's a good sign if I can trick myself in my own writing.