Tesfa does a funny walk around the kitchen.

Me: You should apply to the Ministry of Silly Walks for a grant to develop that further.

Tesfa: I don’t get it.

Me: It’s from a TV show. I can find you the clip on youtube to watch it.

Tesfa (with all the disdain of a teenager even though she is only seven): No. I really don’t think I’d be interested in that.

Sad trombone sound.

So we finally finished all of MLP:FiM. All four seasons. I haven’t seen Equestria Girls and have no interest in seeing how to make a bunch of hypersexualized dolls out of horses, so I can’t comment on that (other than, I guess, that dig there).

There’s a level where I don’t mind MLP:FiM. I like that Tesfa can watch a show filled with differentiated females who each have diverse interests (reading, animals, fashion, sports, parties). I like that there is silliness because I like Tesfa to know that she can be silly.

But..

I saw this in either This Film is Not Yet Rated or an article about the ratings system (can’t remember exactly) about a violent movie that, without editing, the director(s?) kept submitting and resubmitting to the ratings board until the reviewers were desensitized to the violence and gave it a lower rating than they were going to give it initially. Having spent, by this point, full days of my life watching MLP:FiM, I feel like that: desensitized. The first episode, I thought Rainbow Dash was so snarky, which reminded me of an article (that again I can’t find) about what poor role models Disney live-action shows were, where the characters are super-sarcastic and over-the-top, rather than genuine and caring. Then Zecora. Is anything on the show as problematic as the tokenism/Magical Negro-ism of Zecora? But, having seen the episodes so many times now, those things, and others, which stopped me in my tracks the first time through, they’re just background now. I ignore them and move on. That isn’t good.

(And also, in Season Four, Pinkie Pie goes from being ebullient to simply manic, to the extent that I would actually be worried about her mental health, if she were a person and not a cartoon pony.)

But, what’s been bothering me now, more so than bratty behaviour and racism, is Twilight Sparkle. The end of season three, she becomes a princess. Uggggggg. The show already has three princesses. It’s not like there was a dearth of princesses that the show wanted to address so that they could get a toehold in on the princess-market. The pro is that Twilight got to be a princess through hard work, not through marrying in and becoming just smiles and waves and flawless hair, bland with zero personality (sorry Kate, but you know it’s the truth). But still, why? Why does children’s entertainment need to give me another princess? Why couldn’t Twilight have become a scientist or a wizard or the mayor or something that wasn’t princessy?

My only princess consolation is that I have now drilled it into Tesfa’s head that you can’t just be a princess. You have to be a princess who does something. So she is a princess who saves animals. She says I am a princess who spends too much time on the computer. Geoff, luckily, has escaped being regnified, which is a word I made up because I am a princess so I can.

Maybe because it reminds me of undergrad or all the programmers I worked with at my old government job, and definitely because it was free and I don’t want to proof-read, I watched the first episode of Silicon Valley this morning. The game they play in the closing scene reminds me of Rashig, which was a big, orange, plastic dice found at a group house that rather than the six had the word RASHIG on it, and the game was to roll the dice and should it land on RASHIG, everyone would yell RASHIG!. Not the most strategic game, but a game nonetheless.

Sometimes I think I should have been a programmer. I am not the best programmer and when I do program I generally use it as a very rough hammer and bang on the code until I get it to do what I want, but sometimes, I still think I would have been good at it if I had enjoyed it. And then maybe I could learn how to do it properly, like how I never made header files for my c code. Maybe that’s important.

But still, at a low because of dull weather and sore throats, I think I could have made some app that people care about, create that way instead of this way, which is not profitable, but the only thing I am good-enough at that I don’t hate, like sitting at a desk job programming. Realistically, I know I’d hate that, but in the last month, three people I know have been hired by google, so I guess it’s on my mind.