Asstd. Misc., etc.

Stuff that should get out on bits, but otherwise has no rhyme or reason:

• Into the Spider-Verse was very cool. Also, I find that I keep thinking that it's scored a lot more like The Matrix than many other movies. The score is there for specific set pieces, it has themes running through it, but otherwise it's just not there until it's needed. I liked it, and I think it's a really good score, but it reminded me a lot of the way the music for The Matrix went.


• You know how the common word for fox in French is a euphemism because foxes are generally tricksters and its a bad idea to invoke them on yourself? I wonder how much the Miraculous Ladybug folks are consciously playing into this, given that we have two fox-based characters, one hero, one not. The character named after the Latin name for fox? Villain. The one named after the euphemism? Hero.
  
  Makes you think.


• I think I've leveled up somewhere along the way, in that there's a proper chair and couch being put into my living room soon. We'll have to see how it rearranges the floor plan, but I feel like I've crossed a threshold somewhere, and it's a little scary.


• I'm taking my own advice and working on a writing project that I don't really believe has much of an audience, but that I like the idea for and keep coming up with things that can go into it, and so we keep going.


• It would be so much nicer if the people at work could pay better attention to the pronouns they use about and around people. I'm getting ever more caustic about people who have been around me long enough to read the name badge, or my email signature, and still persist in using the wrong set of address.


• I'm beginning to come around to the idea that my technical prowess at work is entirely due to the fact that I was encouraged to experiment and provided the tools with which to do so at an early age, which let me subsequently learn how to interpret errors and make educated guesses about where in interfaces features and functions might lie. For other people, who seem to have been raised in the idea that the computer is an expensive black box that does things at random and caprice, the idea of the machine not working is closer to terror than "let's see what happens." Perhaps in some other generation, knowing how to fix your own vehicle would be the same sort of situation.


• Teachers, stop using leveled reading systems as anything other than evaluative measures about works. Because even when I, and a caregiver, say that reading for enjoyment is more important than reading for level, the children absorb the message that they have to read at a narrow band around their level, and it stifles them in ways you do not see.