The 12 Year Old That Silenced the World...And Didn't Impress Me

This appeared in my Facebook feed recently. I was tempted to leave a comment on the actual post, but I figured it would come across as too confrontational. By the same token, I didn't feel comfortable making my own Facebook post on this, because it would be too long. But that's what I got this blog for!

As some of my Facebook friends are already aware, I have a tendency to pick apart advocacy posts. I don't like seeing misleading info being spread about, and while I certainly don't have all the answers, I've become a lot more cynical about what I think of as "bumper sticker ideology." IMHO, platitudes are only a starting point, at best.

So here we have this kid speaking at the United Nations, and I must say, she was pretty well spoken, and I agree, overall, with her topic, but it still came across to me as mere propaganda. And really, "silenced the world"? The chamber was certainly silent, but I would expect no less for any speaker. And what did she really say that we haven't heard before?

Here's the highlights that particularly bugged me:
"...come thousands of miles to tell you adults you must change your ways."
I didn't even know (although I could guess) what the topic was, yet right away I was turned off. That statement would come across as pompous even from an adult, let alone a kid who's not even old enough to drive.

"Coming up today, I have no hidden agenda." 
If you did have a hidden agenda, like that of the grown-ups who may have funded you, or who may have helped write your speech, would you tell us? To be fair, I'm sure you yourself believe in what you're saying, but how much of that is from your own deep research, your own debates (with yourself as well as those on the other side of your chosen issue), and how much of it is from your parents, your teachers, or Ranger Rick magazine?

"I am afraid to go out in the sun now."
Now we're getting into hyperbole. Wear a hat, sunglasses and sunscreen.

"I'm only a child, and I don't have all the solutions"
Do you have any? In your entire speech, you didn't make the case for any initiatives or groundbreaking ideas to clean up the planet or feed starving children. It was just one long lecture about how we're not doing enough.

"We are afraid to let go of some of our wealth...in Canada, we live the privileged life...
I Googled "most charitable countries" and I found this article from the BBC, which lists Canada in the top 10 most generous countries. Sure, they're still behind the United States (fist pump) but c'mon, give your country some credit! And btw, how much did that trip to speak at the U.N. cost? And did you donate or volunteer with any relief organizations helping those begging children you saw?

"At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us how to behave in the world."
Now you're sort of ripping off Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Again, to be fair, it was a decent speech, and I can at least admire her courage in speaking to a large body of distinguished persons, but that doesn't change the fact that she is still a child, whose worldview is largely shaped by the adults she depends on. If she was speaking for issues like, say, traditional marriage, the sanctity of unborn life, or coal miners losing their livelihoods, she would be dismissed, if not outright heckled, by progressives as a mere propaganda tool.  So basically I don't like it when kids jump in the political arena. They don't have much to say that can't be said by an adult, and it's hard to critique what they say without looking like an ogre. But I think if you are willing to roll with with the grown-ups, you should at least be willing to take the critique that grown-ups do.

I love the English language...

Once there was a champion sword fighter who decided to build a fence around his place. He went to a lumber store to get wood for a nice picket fence, then he set it all up and whitewashed it. Then one day he got a court summons. It turned out the lumber he bought was stolen, and then sold to the lumberyard. In court he swore he had no idea the lumber was stolen, and if he knew he would never have bought it.

After hearing his testimony, the judge said: "What we have here is a fencer taking offense at a fence built from materials that were fenced!"

It's been awhile...

So I know it's been a long time since I actually posted, but I've decided to get back into the swing of things. I feel like I've let a lot of things fall by the wayside, and I'm looking to pick at least some of those things up again.

I figure as good a time to start as any would be to hype my friend Zach's comedy group, ImprovBroadway. Full disclosure, I was given a free seat in exchange for this post, but I still left them a tip after the show, because they are indeed worth the money! They've had several different venues over the years, starting out in a piano store, then moving from there to the Covey Center for the  Arts. Now they have their own studio in Provo. The theatre is a bit smaller than the Covey Center, but I think it works better for audience participation. For example, at the last show I attended, they pulled a date couple (who had been dating for a while) from the audience and asked them to describe how they met and their first date. Then they re-enacted with Shakespearean language, and a few other artistic touches.


As you may have guessed from the name, ImprovBroadway is an improv comedy show where no two productions are the same. Each show consists of improvised scenes, many of which involve audience participation, and an on-the-spot musical production. Like  Who's Line is it Anyway?, they're good at coming up with songs at the spur of the moment, and they play off each other wonderfully. Unlike Who's Line, they keep their comedy clean, so it's safe for kids, and safe for a first date. They remind me a lot of Studio C in that respect.

So if your in the Utah County and want to see something fun, check out ImprovBroadway. They even teach improv classes!

Everything's fair game in comedy...except sexual assault

When I watched this SNL segment, I wasn't exactly horrified, but I did feel a little uncomfortable, and upon reflection, I find it interesting that sexual assault is not usually joked about (and pedophilia almost never). Murder, yes, robbery, yes, but not rape.

Here's my guess on why that is. We can at least tolerate black comedy like "Death to Smoochy", "Murder by Death", "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" because death will come to us all anyway, whether by someone else's hand or not, and joking about it shows a bit of bravery. Also, I think most of us, for at least a brief point in our lives, have been angry enough to kill someone, and joking about it releases some of the pressure that anger generates. Same goes with stealing, or numerous other selfish acts. With sexual depredation on other hand, its a different story. It's harder to rationalize, even in jest, someone "deserving" sexual assault, not like killing someone you despise, or stealing you think you're entitled to, plus you'd be doing something to someone that they would have live with, and taking something that could never replaced.

Now it's not my place to judge the people who laughed at this monologue, (to those who DO judge them, you are not God, and you are not mind-readers). But I'm okay with keeping sexual assault, especially on children, a taboo subject, even for comedy.

Stand by Me Alternates

On April 30th we lost Ben E. King, writer of "Stand by Me". Being born well after the 60s, I was not familiar with this tune growing up, and the first version I heard was Timon and Pumbaa's, which I still think is a fun spin on the old tune:

And here's another, more recent version:

Holy Pause Button, Batman!

Some more pause screens from Batman: Arkham City.

Back with Batman

Sorry I've been away for so long, things have been hectic with school and work, and I haven't been doing much to blog about the past few weeks. But now I'm getting back into the regular groove again.

I was playing Batman: Arkham City yesterday, and I found some fun little details in the city that I never noticed before.

Dr. Leslie Thompkins is one of Bruce Wayne's confidants in the comics, and runs a medical clinic for Gotham's addicts and criminals in the slums.

As you can see in the top picture, when you look at the police station from a certain distance away, it looks like the Bat Signal is on, but when you zoom in, or move any closer, it turns off.

After Batman and Freeze finish fighting over poison antidote, and discover that Harley Quinn stole it, you can see the hole in the wall she made to take it out of the safe.

 I thought it was funny to see an Arkham mug in the GCPD, as I would expect the Gotham police wouldn't have cared for the place (what with it's lax security and all). Somebody start making these for real!

And here's another pause screen!

Good, Clean, Family-Friendly Violence

Picture from http://www.deviantart.com/art/Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Squirtles-180731767

So, last week I talked about how I loved the concept of the gritty Power Rangers parody, but didn't care for the execution (which is why I didn't link directly to it and I won't now). The parody made me think about the violence of the actual Power Rangers TV show, and why I suddenly stopped caring for it.

I liked Power Rangers when I was a kid (my Mom didn't), and I admit I'm still a sucker for flashy martial arts and dramatic finishes. In time though, it increasingly bugged me that each episode, each season, was basically the same basic formula: Cheesy, rote dialogue, monster shows up, Rangers fight it (mostly without even trying that hard), monster blows up, Rangers go home unscathed, more cheesy dialogue...lather, rinse, repeat. Then when I started learning real martial arts, I became increasingly annoyed that there was nothing at stake in these shows. The creator of the "Power Rangers Bootleg" said that he got to thinking about the idea of sending kids into combat to fight evil, and thought, "Wait, this is Ender's Game, they'd end up with PTSD!"

To which I respond: Why would they? There is virtually no risk involved, virtually no casualties, and little collateral damage resulting from their fights. They don't get wounded, they hardly even get bruised, and in the entire history of Power Rangers, I believe there are only two Rangers that have died in action. The rest of the time they walk away without a scratch. It's all basically a game.

You could argue that the violence has to be toned down for the kids, but I think that, in a way, toning it down makes it worse. You have live-action people doing things that in real life would result in concussions, broken bones, lacerations, etc., yet they don't even pretend to ever really be hurt. It looks too harmless, and thus easier to imitate.

Another thing that turned me against the Power Rangers is the advent of other action shows that are still relatively clean but take violence seriously. An excellent example would be Avatar: The Last Airbender. Legend of Korra was good at this too, but Airbender had that excellent finale when Aang was faced with the task of bringing down Firelord Ozai. The show's creators had to follow the trope that a family-friendly hero must not kill (at least not too blatantly), but they found a smart way to work with that. Aang was from a pacifist, vegetarian culture, had never personally killed someone before, and wasn't keen on breaking that streak. Even if you didn't agree, you could still sympathize with him. When he talks with the ghosts of avatars past, instead of telling him to find another way, or even directly ordering him to kill Ozai, they counsel him to consider all his options, and not hold back simply because he's squeamish. Eventually Aang finds a way out when he gets the ability to drain the elemental bending of others, but even that has its own risks. So the show ends up having its cake and eating it too. They get their big finale, Aang gets a reprieve from killing Ozai, but he still has to exert himself like never before to win the fight, and drain Ozai's firebending with being overwelmed by Ozai's energy.

So there's not much blood in Last Airbender, but people still get smacked around good, get badly hurt, and wrestle with the consequences of their actions. If they find a way to incorporate this into upcoming Power Rangers projects, great, but I doubt they will, married as they are to the original Rangers formula.

One more thing that bugs me about Power Rangers, is how easy it is for the heroes to pick up martial arts techniques. The original Rangers were great martial artists to start with, but subsequent Ranger corps often have very little fight training going in, and the learning curve is generally over after the first or second episode of the season. This is insulting to actual martial artists who spend years honing their skills to the point to expert perfection, and it misses valuable opportunities to structure the story around the characters learning to fight. Again, there are plenty of shows that have Power Rangers beat in this regard. One that I followed all the way through was Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight, part of the Kamen Rider francise, a similar set-up to Power Rangers. In Dragon Knight, the main character takes more the half the series to get proficient enough to hold his own in a fight, without needing his more experienced partner to rush in and save the day all the time. Likewise, in the current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series, when Splinter starts training April in ninjutsu,  it takes a long time before she is competent enough to fight alongside the turtles, and even then her inexperience often shows.

I think this approach to action shows, where you have the good guys get hurt once in a while, and take time to become expert fighters, helps viewers to be much more invested in the characters, and gain more appreciation for those who learn difficult skills for real. I think it also helps them remember that even when you are fighting for what's right, violence still has a cost.

Power Rangers Gritty Force

A couple of weeks ago I watched the "Bootleg Power Rangers" video, and I have to admit, at first I thought it was pretty awesome. Not only was it a good parody of "gritty" reboots (and of Power Rangers in general), it was a good action flick.

However, the F-bombs and prostitutes did kind of shake me out of my nostalgia trip. Those elements didn't need to be in there, and as far as making a "real" Power Rangers show or movie with that kind of atmosphere, I agree with Jason David Frank, in that Power Rangers is a kid's franchise, and making it messy or trashy would make it not be Power Rangers anymore.

That being said, I don't agree with Saban trying to get the video taken offline. It's a parody, it doesn't take anything away from Saban's brand. They might have a leg to stand on if JDF was actually in it like the creators wanted, because they don't have the rights to the "Tommy" character established by the series, and having Mr. Frank in the video would make it look it had Saban's official approval, which they don't want for the reasons I explained above.

This whole deal has got me thinking about the place of violence in kids' entertainment, and I plan to go in-depth with the subject next week.

No Man's Sky vs. Star Citizen

So I've been doing some reading on a couple of upcoming space games, No Man's Sky and Star Citizen. Both proclaim themselves to be creating a whole game universe for players to explore, both are claiming revolutionary game-play, and neither have announced a release date.

No Man's Sky features a procedurally-generated galaxy, with an algorithm that generates 2 to the power of 64 planets. I plugged that into the Windows calculator and it gave me the number 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. The English translation, according to the Wikipedia entry on large numbers, is that there will be over 18 trillion planets in No Man's Sky. According to the creators of No Man's Sky, it would take five billion years for a single player to explore the whole galaxy, assuming that player hit one planet per second. I did a little math myself to work out how long it would take for ten million players to discover every planet and I calculated that if each player discovers 10 planets a day, it would still take over 5 billion years to uncover the whole galaxy.

But how much content is there actually going to be in No Man's Sky? The game's creators emphasis that in addition to exploration, there will be danger, there will be advancement, and a genuine punishment for dying. However, from what I've seen so far, it looks the planet variety will be the same as the variety for the biomes in Minecraft; multiple varieties, infinite ways those biomes can be shaped, but still ultimately the same elements repeating themselves in different ways. I used to play Minecraft 1.8, where I was able to content myself for a very long time simply exploring the world and setting my own challenges. One that kept me going for quite a while was exploring the cave systems. I would set a goal to cover every single area in a cave system, and mark where I've been with torches, block trails, and signs. Between fighting the monsters and getting lost, this was quite challenging and engaging for me, but it still ran out. Since I was playing an outdated version, I didn't see the need to build anything meant to last, nor could I partake in the various features in the upgraded versions. On top of that, my humble PC only has so much room, so when other games came along that I wanted to try, I uninstalled Minecraft. I intend to get the "finished" version someday, when I have the money and the hardware, but I've put it aside for now. I'm concerned that No Man's Sky will have the same limitations as my Minecraft experience; a near infinite playing field, but not much to play with in that field.

On the hand, we've got Star Citizen. They have much fewer worlds in their universe, (they state on their website the game will launch with 100 planets), but it looks like you will have more to do on those worlds. The creators are cooking up a rich galactic lore, there will be professions, an economy and events that players can influence, basically a scaled-up version of traditional MMORPGS. While this intrigues me, I have concerns here too. Will there be a decent variety of goals and gameplay, or will most of the content turn out to be "Kill x amount of such-and-such", "Find and talk to so-and-so", "Gather x amount of materials"? And with the players supposedly having a big influence on galactic commerce and events, will the creators be able to keep the few from ruining the experience for the many?

I'm going to keep an eye on both games, and see what develops. I suspect, or at least hope, that they will both be good in their respective genres. When they both finally release, and if they both live up to their respective hype, I think I may wind up alternating between both. I might play Star Citizen when I want to be part of some serious action and important events, and I might play No Man's Sky when I'm in the mood for laid-back exploration.

What do you guys think? Both likely to succeed, both likely to flop, or is one looking better than the other?

World of Warcraft Paintings

I actually haven't played World of Warcraft in a while, due to lack of funds, and an increasing lack of interest, but I still love going through all the screenshots I've taken to remember my exploits by.

Tonight I thought I'd show all the framed paintings I've discovered in W.o.W. There are quite a few different portraits scattered all over, did I miss any?

Valentine's Day (Sort of)

Sorry this is late, I got held up doing homework, then I wanted to watch the original Psycho before bed (because too much homework can drive you insane, you know).

Anyway, in (late) honor of that lovely couple's holiday, I thought I'd transcribe a couple of paragraphs from a Psycho promotional poster I saw in the Bonus Features of the DVD.

First of all, I must warn you that PSYCHO is designed to be as terrifying as possible. Do not, however, heed the false rumor that it will frighten the moviegoer speechless. Some of my men were doomed to disappointment when they hopefully sent their wives to a preview. The women emerged badly shaken but still vigorously vocal.

To learn how false the rumor really is you have to come to the theatre  and listen to the screaming. A few may mumble incoherently, but they will definitely not be speechless. Be sure to bring your wives, a miracle may occur.

Alfred Hitchcock, encouraging happy marriages! ;)

 

 

 

Have a Seat 2

I've added more World of Warcraft sitting screenshots to Pinterest:

Have a Seat...

Screenshots of my World of Warcraft characters sitting in various chairs. To see more, check out the Pinterest board!

In Gilneas

At Gallywix's Pleasure Palace in Azshara.

In Blackfathom Deeps

In Zangermarsh (in retrospect, I think this is supposed to be a bed)

If Bane were an animal, what would he be?

When all these videos are watched...you have my permission to leave.

Floor Faces

I realized I haven't been at my abstract photography in awhile, so I thought I'd take a couple of pictures of my bathroom floor that I thought I could make something of.

I saw hints of a face here, so I used Photoshop's paint bucket tool to fill in what lines I could, then I used the pencil to fill in the lines. 

 When I started filling in the lines here, at first I was picturing a vulture's head, but as I was connecting the segments, I realized it could also be a vole eating something.

More Tolkien Numbers

Here's the best versions I could find of "The Misty Mountains" and other Tolkien songs.

A pretty good A Capella version; I understand why they didn't use the whole song in the movie, but it's still a shame we didn't hear the whole thing.


An Ocarina version


A deeper bass version; took a bit of getting used to, but I like it overall.


What they might have done if they extended the movie version.



A follow-up to the previous one, with verses from The Fellowship of the Ring (the book, not the movie).


Another version of Song of the Lonely Mountain, the number sung by Neil Finn in the closing credits of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, not written by Tolkien, but based on "Misty Mountains".



The "Song of Durin" from the book Fellowship of the Ring,


All the verses of "Misty Mountain", done by a woman

The Hobbit Cartoon Soundtrack

I spent New Year's Eve with a couple of friends watching the Special Edition The Hobbit parts 1 & 2.

One of my favorite parts is the dwarves' song Misty Mountains. I've been on the lookout for artists that really justice to the songs from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and over the next week or so I'll be posting the best I find. This week we have the soundtrack from the animated Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit. It's not on iTunes, and as far as I know it was only ever released on vinyl. I imagine this person has a record and recorded it digitally from there.

Enjoy!

I'm on Pinterest!

So now that I'm back from vacation, I thought I'd let everyone know I'm on Pinterest. I'll be showcasing my own stuff there, plus whatever other interesting things I find.

To start with, here's what you can do with that bratty Elf on the Shelf now that Christmas is over...

Click here for more!
Follow Leland's board Elf on the Shelf on Pinterest.

The Reason for the Season

Sorry I missed last week's post, I got caught up in other things. But I thought I'd share a couple of videos that capture the true spirit of Christmas for me. Hope everyone has a good holiday season!