.@carolinekwan gives @BootsRiley his flowers for maintaining radical optimism despite how fucking awful everything is in the world. His work is not rooted in cynicism. There is an optimistic vibe to his work that makes a viewer feel like things can and will change for the better.
A good day to remember the profound care Disney poured into Atlantis.
Let's talk about The Creation of Atlantean. 🌊
To build the world, Disney hired Mark Okrand, the linguist who also created the famous Klingon and Vulcan for the Star Trek series.
Okrand created a fully functional, learnable language. He designed it under the narrative premise that Atlantean was a "root dialect" or a "Tower of Babel" language, the ultimate mother tongue from which all human languages evolved. To achieve this ancient, foundational sound, Okrand primarily utilized Proto-Indo-European roots.
The actual visual characters (the glyphs) were created by comic book artist Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy. Mignola designed the unique script shown on the chart.
In the lore of the film, the language is written in a system called 'boustrophedon', meaning it is read from left to right on the first line, right to left on the second line, and continues alternating back and forth, mimicking the movement of an ox plowing a field.
Brad Silberling (who directed Casper and Lemony Snicket) once told me that this is why test screenings for family films are basically impossible.
Your audience is kids but the actual ticket-buyers are suburban moms who think 95% of the stuff kids actually enjoy is inappropriate.
Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.
The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.
What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.
Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.
In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.
The Knicks winning a championship while the World Cup cultural exchange is happening might be the legitimate antidote to the individualistic nihilism that’s poisoned so much of our country for the last decade or so
People want community. They want whimsy. It’s fun to have fun
Fact: He traveled there for his cooking show & when they tried to block this one episode, he said he would pull his entire show from the network & this was the first time the world ever saw behind the walls in Gaza 2013
Modern Family star Ariel Winter shows support for Palestine and Lebanon on Instagram
“israel is now doing to lebanon exactly what it has done to gaza for the last year”
Hard truth…
I can speak freely because I’m 65 years old and my pocketful of fucks is seriously depleted.
Working as a paralegal at various studios in LA for thirty years…I had the opportunity to observe studio executives closely.
They’re generally a slippery and clueless bunch who shouldn’t be allowed near anything remotely creative…but the new regime at Paramount is straight up evil.
I assure you.
These soulless bastards have nothing but contempt for a show about grace and redemption and the struggle against fascism.
ATLA is a mystery to them.
They. Do. Not. Value. The. Franchise.
Here are the 117 Democrats who voted with Republicans against Rashida Tlaib's Lebanon war powers resolution.
Thomas Massie was the one Republican to join 91 Democrats — who all bucked party leadership — in voting for it.