LTR WTF LOL

On January 13, 2016January 13, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

0b6622fce10fd4eb2d2d03ed66c87c74.400x254x1.png I’m not convinced this is actually a terribly important or interesting insight for anybody other than me, but it’s been on my mind for the last couple of days and I wanted to get it written down before it slipped away.

My son is four. He’s in preschool now– real preschool, which means that I can’t just go get him if I’m home and bored in the afternoon any longer, which hit me the other day while I was heading to the car to do just that. There are, I don’t know, eleven or twelve other kids in his class, something like that.

He has four friends. Now, at his age, “friendship” is obviously a really fungible concept, but there are two kids from his previous day care who are still showing up at our house (and vice versa) every once in a while and there are two kids in his preschool class who he seems to be part of a mutual admiration society with more so than the rest of the kids. That’s not to say that he doesn’t play with the others, of course, but these kids clearly are getting more attention than the others. And, interestingly, they give me more attention than the others, too. I’ve been dropping the boy off lately, and generally walk with him to his classroom, and one of the kids has been insisting that he also gets a hug before I can leave. The other one seems to be more of a priority during the after-school program despite being in his class, but she too insists on me paying attention to her a lot of the time before I am allowed to take ~~her~~ (him! Him! Christ, I’m only getting my own kid.) home– either that or he’ll drag me over to her to have her tell me something about their day.

What’s gotten into my head is that he’s at least in theory at the point where he might know some of these kids for a very, very long time. Now, I’m not friends any longer with anyone who I knew as far back as nursery school, but I was through college or so, and my oldest friends now are people I met in middle school or late elementary. But part of the deal at Hogwarts is keeping their clan together– I get the feeling that a lot of the kids that eventually transition out of there are graduating, meaning that they’ve been with mostly the same kids for a bunch of years. So it’s possible that he’ll be forming lifelong friendships earlier than I did, especially if we’re able to afford to keep him at this school. I have– most people do, I imagine– my own relationships with the parents of some of my friends who I’ve known for a really long time. And it’s interesting that we’ve gotten to the point with him where I can look around at the kids he knows and go “Which ones am I going to have to buy high school graduation cards for?”

In, like, 2030 or whatever.

Nah. No way I live that long. Never mind.

Creepy Children’s Programming Review: SPECIAL AGENT OSO

On December 13, 2015December 13, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television6 Comments

oso

This is, I believe, the fastest I’ve ever written one of these things, as my son just discovered this terrible program last night. I banned it forevermore before he went to sleep, only to get up this morning and discover him watching it again, apparently because my wife overruled me. I shall have my revenge, I swear it. Because Special Agent Oso is godawful, and I will not have any of its stupid songs running through my head.

Lets start with the theme song, which is like 20 minutes long. First of all, Oso’s last name is Special. Oso Special.

GET IT IT’S A PUN DO YOU GET IT HE’S OSO SPECIAL THAT’S A JOKE DO YOU GET IT.

Oso is a special agent for some unnamed agency, and the names of the episodes always contain James Bond references, which is the only interesting thing about the show, because it’s not like any of the kids watching the show will get any of them so they’re clearly the result of the writers trying desperately to entertain themselves. This special agency hires stuffed animals– yes, Oso is a stuffed bear, and the theme song specifically describes him as such. He’s not a real bear. He’s an animated toy. What dark magic allows his limbs to move is also left unclear.

At any rate, the episode always starts with Oso doing some secret agent shit, which would be cool if it weren’t for the part where Oso does not know how to do even one thing. It’s amazing that he can even breathe given how dumb the show represents him as. But they’ve got him doing all sorts of stuff. He was in freaking outer space in one episode:

At some point the show will cut away from Oso doing his secret agent shit and find some kid on Earth who has a completely random problem. This problem is always terribly minor on a level reminiscent of Super Why. At that point the doohicky on his wrist will vibrate and Mr. Dos will let him know that he needs to drop everything and go solve this kid’s problem. This is true no matter what he is doing or where he is. Including outer space. Go help this kid find the library or tie his shoes or whatever. LEAVE OUTER SPACE FOR THIS.

You may wonder how they find the kids who have the problems, because these kids never actually contact the agent themselves. It’s because this horrifying organization has the entire world under drone surveillance. Think I’m kidding? I’m not kidding:

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The drones, who are always watching you, tell a floating space station that there’s a kid with a minor inconvenience, and then Oso is notified. He finds the kid and then begins asking questions that make it clear that he has no idea what the hell he’s doing and shouldn’t be a secret agent. For example, on TV just now, he asked what a circle was. Secret agents should be able to identify circles.

And then the worst part happens. He asks his chest computer, who is called his Paw Pilot, what his “three special steps” are to solve the kid’s problem. There are always three steps, and, underpants gnome style, the second is always “do the thing.” For example, if the problem is you need to find a book at the library, the second step is “find the book.” Need to wrap a gift? The second step is “wrap the gift.” It’s fucking weird.

Also fucking weird? The floating animated head that is the Paw Pilot sings a terrible song and looks like nothing so much as Mystique giving birth:

Let’s pause for a moment to let that image sink in.

…

So, yeah. Initially he will know literally nothing about how to solve the problem without help, but spoiler alert: he’s gonna solve the problem, whatever it is. He solves the problem, Paw Pilot sings another terrible song, and then something about whatever he just did helps him with whatever his special agent shit was at the beginning of the episode.

They also always manage to contrive some way to have a 10-second countdown at the end of the episode as Oso is trying to solve the problem. Is Oso trying to write his name on a library card? 10 SECONDS UNTIL THE LIBRARY CLOSES. Is Oso trying to wrap a present for someone’s little sibling? MOM WILL BE DOWNSTAIRS IN 10 SECONDS. Kite Day starts in 10 seconds. It’s never anything where could ever possibly matter if the thing he’s doing takes 12 seconds. Ever.

I hate this show.

The things they tell me

On September 8, 2015September 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching9 Comments

I do a little activity with the kids at the beginning of the year where I ask them to tell me ten facts about themselves. I just rediscovered the pile of papers and I thought I’d share a few of them.

Someone did not get the message that the facts were supposed to be true, perhaps. I’m translating this as “My brain is a ruler, I play two guitars, and my cat has three ears.” One of them maybe, all three? Somebody missed the memo.

Hmm. I’ve been pondering this for a couple of days and don’t know what a “nethfil” is.

A surprising number of them wanted me to know their favorite superheroes; they’ve got me figured out already:

Crossing my fingers that #9 here is just an omitted plural and not a favorite food or something:

And this one gave me a favorite villain. I also like #4, which thus far I find to be accurate. She’s been trying to get me to call her “Bacon” instead of her actual name.

Trying hard.

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And I will be the last:

I strongly enjoy colorful language:

Because “blue” is too generic:

Some of them are impressively talented:

And some of them have crazy people as parents. There’s no way this one can see over the steering wheel:

Some of them are sad and/or scary:

FullSizeRender This could be an abusive parent or it could be a haunted house. The question is which I’d actually prefer. The haunted house, right? It’s the haunted house.

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Do the math. Mom got pregnant in middle school, apparently. Mental note to keep a close eye on this one.

And the worst one:

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Sigh.

In which I have a shitty kid

On September 3, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting9 Comments

Shut up, that’s a pun.

No, really. My kid got suspended from preschool for two days today because he’s continuing to shit himself. The following expresses both my reaction to and willingness to deal with this situation at this time.

The end.

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: SLUGTERRA

On August 11, 2015August 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television7 Comments

images I’m actually pretty sure I… like this one? We have a new hotness in the Siler household, the latest of any number of new hotnesses, and this time he’s plucked a thing called SLUGTERRA out of the Netflix queue to mildly obsess over for a few weeks. SLUGTERRA is interesting; it’s the first show he’s ever really liked that I thought “Oh, this show is designed to sell kids a bunch of dumb shit,” except since we watch it on Netflix we don’t see any commercials and so– ha!– we evade Disney X D’s(*) capitalist clutches. That said, before I realized the show was designed to sell kids shit, I’ll freely admit that I thought Man, this would make a fun turn-based video game.

So there’s that.

Anyway! The premise. It’s weird. The show is set… underground, I think? Maybe under the real world? And there are people, but also trolls (they’re blue!) and whatever the mole dude is:

They’re called “slugslingers.” They shoot at bad guys with guns.

The ammunition for their guns is slugs. These dudes:

When the slugs get shot out of guns, they twirl a little bit and then they can spin a web, or set themselves on fire, or freeze stuff, or turn into spinning blades, or any bit of nonsense you can imagine, and sometimes they punch each other out of the way, and sometimes they just explode, which seems kinda lazy, and they’ve only got one of each kind of slug that they have and so once they’re shot I guess they just wander back to their owners for some reason. There’s probably something complicated behind it because this show has a Goddamn wiki but my kid is four so he’s not too into the details. Oh, and also they ride around on mechanical animals. There was this one episode where a dude was riding a robo-snake. I approve of robo-snakes.

The sound design, believe it or not, is the coolest thing about the show. The little slugs make cool noises when they’re being fired at each other. I like the sounds they make.

There are bad guys. This is Dr. Blakk. Yeah. Blakk.

Ooh, scary. This is Dr. Blakk’s henchman. His name is– I am not making this up– El Diablos Nacho.

large_size_Slugterra_009_D5 — Your name is a REALLY stupid name.

He’s actually scarier-looking than Dr. Blakk, but his name is Nacho and there’s a grammar error in the first two words of his name and plus there’s no Spanish in this world anyway so why the hell is his name El Diablos Nacho and I refuse to worry about it.

(See the little red canisters on his shirt? And the blue ones on the good guys up above? They have to slam the slugs into those before shooting them, then put the canisters into the gun, then fire the shot. It’s very 1800s. I want to know how the hell this ecosystem evolved, and who realized you could shoot these things.)

It’s a fun show. I like the characters, and the setting is pleasantly weird, and like I said the sound design is stellar. I just can’t get behind calling a dude El Diablos Nacho, though.

(*) Why is that space in there? Because if you take Disney X D’s name and you write it without a space, WordPress turns it into Disney XD, which isn’t a word, and wait, is that why it’s called Disney X D? How do you say that? And how do you turn off the substitution in WordPress? OMG OLD.

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: THE SUPER HERO SQUAD SHOW

On June 20, 2015June 20, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews6 Comments

I was all ready to do a review of Avengers Assemble! when the boy noticed The Super Hero Squad Show on Netflix, and he hasn’t watched an episode of anything else since. There were only two seasons of this show for some reason, and both seasons are on Netflix. I think we’ve watched everything at least once by now.

This is actually a pretty good show, believe it or not. The premise: There are two cities, Super Hero City and what I believe is called Villainville, and they’re separated by a giant wall. All the people and all the superheroes live in Super Hero City, and the villains do villain stuff so that the heroes have to fight them. The first season is obsessed with finding and controlling little broken bits of a magic sword and the second season is all about what happens when the sword gets put together and is a lot more cosmic in tone.

There’s a rockin’ theme song, too. It has no right to not be a Bowling for Soup song. Check it out:

The cool thing about Avengers Assemble! was how seriously it took itself– and there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll still be writing a piece on that show soon enough. The Super Hero Squad Show takes absolutely nothing seriously, and that’s the genius of the show, because it knows it’s goofy as hell and runs with it. Particularly fun are the portrayals of Captain America and Thor; Cap (who is a side character, surprisingly) is convinced he’s still in the 1940s and talks like a dad from a sitcom from that era, and Thor has the Norse nonsense turned up to 12– the episode from Season 2 where Beta Ray Bill is introduced is especially funny.

Hulk calls the Falcon “Bird,” which absolutely never ever stops being funny.

My one beef with the show? It occasionally kinda treats its female characters like crap, and flat-out sexual harassment is a bit more of a theme than it ought to be, in that sexual harassment is a thing that happens and it shouldn’t ever be. There’s a bit where Mr. Fantastic is proud of Ms. Marvel for having a good idea and he kisses her on the cheek as a reward. It doesn’t surface all that often but when it does it’s really jarring and annoying, and Ms. Marvel is frequently a part of it; she’s frequently portrayed as a ditzy girl and it’s really obnoxious. She ought to be Captain Marvel anyway, dangit.

(It’s a boys’ show, you say? Shut up, I respond. Boys need to see females who aren’t doormats and aren’t going to take time during world-saving to squawk “You think I’m cute?” like Starfire does to Human Torch at one point. Boys need feminism too, goddammit. And that’s before we get to the part where girls watch superhero shows too. Even if no women or girls ever watched the show, the show needs to portray women better anyway.)

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: BOB ZOOM

On May 13, 2015May 13, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews26 Comments

bobzoom_toalha I don’t know what to do with this one.

I hesitate to call BOB ZOOM the new hotness; more like a passing fancy– the kid noticed it and insisted on watching it a few times and then it disappeared from Netflix like a bad Brazilian dream. Bob Zoom is an ant. He does not, in any noticeable fashion, ever zoom anywhere, and the provenance of his last name is unclear. Then again, the show is Brazilian, and translated from Portuguese, and I’m really tempted to ascribe all of the weirdness to the fact that the show was originally written for a Brazilian audience. But I’m not convinced. They find this shit weird too, right? They have to.

Start off with this: the ant’s name isn’t Bob Zoom. It’s Bobby. They never once call him Bob, ever. I originally wondered if this was also an artifact of translation, and the show was originally called Bob y Zoom, and Zoom was some other character, but there’s no sign of him anywhere and I’m not sure y actually means and in Portuguese anyway. But here, watch the intro to the show. His name’s Bobby!:

There’s no actual storyline to BOB ZOOM; there are (well, were) two episodes on Netflix and they’re entirely composed of songs. Bob himself doesn’t do much of anything. Some of the songs are fairly normal; there’s the alphabet, and they do a version of BINGO that isn’t far from the American standard but has entertainingly been translated from English to Portuguese and then back to English again. There’s a Maori song called Epo I Tai Tai é, and I dare you to head down the Internet rabbit hole that trying to figure out what that translates as will lead you to, because it’s terrifying.

And then there are what I assume are a couple of traditional Brazilian children’s songs, and that’s where the show gets weird. Well, not immediately. The song about the cow named Barnabe who is in love with another cow is fairly catchy and fun and normal:

Your foot’s tapping, right? And you’ve already got it sorta memorized? That’s how kids’ songs are supposed to work.

I give you Mrs. Cockroach:

Now, before I say more, let me point out that my wife works with an actual Brazilian national and he has never heard of this song. Which is comforting, because make fun of the lying poor person isn’t something that I’ve gotten an impression is a big part of the Brazilian psyche, and this song vibes all sorts of creepy and very probably racist in some sort of coded Brazilian way. And the animation is messed up, too; Mrs. Cockroach spends the occasional moment in the video looking seriously depressed and sad and then puts on her strong face, fully aware that the white children in the back of her car are going to keep making fun of her no matter what she tries to do.

And that’s before we get to what are obviously translation issues: her shell being hard as steel seems difficult to connect to her class ring, for example. But this song, and one more that keeps the weird but takes away the creepy and the “Wait, is this racist too?” element, definitely put BOB ZOOM high among the ranks of weird shit that I would never have been exposed to if I hadn’t had a kid.

Ah, what the hell, I’ll give you the chicken song too. It will haunt your dreams. Enjoy:

Creepy Children’s Programming Review: OCTONAUTS

On March 29, 2015March 29, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television21 Comments

6630bc3207651991e913e0e48d119eeeaa360e59 So here’s the new hotness: Octonauts, a show about British (mostly) animals (mostly) who live underwater in a giant octopus and Do Science. Most of them, as I said, are various flavors of British, and their accents are region-specific. Then there is the one with the southern accent (and by “southern accent,” I mean “southern US”) and what might be an attempt at a Mexican accent, maybe, since the character’s name is Peso? Only they’re all done by British voice actors, and they are perhaps done by British voice actors who have never met southerners or Mexicans, because the southerner (“Tweak,” the rabbit) sounds like the worst stereotype of a toothless Mississippi white-trash hick you’ve ever heard and the Mexican accent sounds so un-Mexican that I thought the character was supposed to be Asian at first.

Here are the Octonauts. They are so, so, so British, even the ones who aren’t British.

You’ll recall I said they were mostly animals. Note the plant on the right. His name is Tunip, but I thought it was Turnip until seeing it in print just now. The rest of the characters have personality and agency; Tunip and his other plant-based lifeforms appear to be either vegetable-based Oompa Loompas or actual slaves, and they really don’t fit into the rest of the show very well. It’s bizarre.

At any rate: Every episode involves the Octopod tooling around in the ocean and dealing with some sort of sea animal’s problem, or sometimes the sea animals are the problem. The animation is kind of cool and the ocean backgrounds are really neat even without the massive, Thomas the Train-level Britishness.

So goddamn British.

There’s a weird colonialism thing going on here, too: the white … polar bear? in the middle up there is Captain Barnacles, who has the Britishiest of the accents, and he’s in charge. He’s supposed to come off as this nineteenth-century naval captain dude. In practice, this means that he assumes in any situation that whoever he’s dealing with will understand and assume that he’s rightfully in charge and what he says is the best thing for everyone. Even if it’s a indigenous culture species of animal they’ve never seen before, obviously everyone ought to just agree with what the white animal thinks. He’s the Captain! Don’t you understand what that means?

Then there’s always a song at the end. It’s the Creature Report. It lives in my brain now, and I hear it all the time, everywhere I go, no matter what, forever. Let it be in your brain now:

I like the show. It makes me crave crumpets, and I don’t know what crumpets are, but I like it. That said, if I try to drift off to sleep one more night with the Creature Report running through my head, I will kill a substantial portion of the Midwest’s population.

No big deal.