Running Commentary 7/22/2024

Hello,

The Olympics kick off this Friday! As I mentioned, next Monday I'll be taking off from this newsletter, but the Monday after I'll be back with my thoughts about the Games.

I'll also have my thoughts on the reveals from TennoCon, which I don't have time to fully write down this weekend.

Anyway...

Watching...

The Acolyte

• This finale did well to wrap up Osha and Sol’s story, bringing a sad but somewhat inevitable end to Sol. His final insistences that he did nothing wrong were a really great bit of acting from Lee Jung-jae; it doesn’t come off like he has no regrets about what happens on Brendock, rather it comes off like something he’s told himself for year, like he hates what he did but can’t think what he could have done differently. I can see a lot of showrunner Headland in this, contemplating her (as she insists, unknowing) role in aiding Harvey Weinstein in his crimes.
• Osha and Mae’s story isn’t resolved nearly as well. As I watched the mind-wipe of Mae I was just very confused; it seemed like a very contrived way to keep her alive, which I suppose it kind of is since the latter half of the episode gets fully into setting up a second season with her and Rwoh going after Osha and Qimir. As it stands, Mae is now a narrative non-entity, demoted from being merely a one-note antagonist. Osha was already a narrative non-entity, and hasn’t been given any appreciable agency still. There’s a real problem with these cipher characters: Rey and Reva and now Osha; sometimes if you put off characterizing someone too long to keep the mystery you run out of time to do so. If we jumped right in knowing that Osha left the Jedi because she couldn’t give up her hatred of Mae for supposedly killing their mother, I think she might have played better.
• One last time: fight scenes are excellent. We even got a little spaceship action this episode, too.
• I feel like we’re missing a lot about Rwoh and the Senate’s conflict. Obviously from our perspective we can see Rwoh’s point a bit, since we know that, by the Clone Wars, the Jedi have become so much an arm of the Senate’s will that it leads to their downfall, both driving Dooku away from the Order and to the Sith and forcing the rest of the Order into an ill-suited military role. Rwoh doesn’t know this specifically but she probably knows that the Republic can’t fully be trusted to stay true to the Light. On the other hand, she’s not dealing honestly with them, hiding Qimir’s involvement and blaming Sol for something that, at best, she only can speculate he did, and we’ve seen throughout this show that honesty really is the best policy.
• I have my doubts that we’ll get a second season. The Acolyte is, to coin an analogy that will drive a big part of my full review, the Dr. Anthony Fauci of Star Wars shows: impressive in certain moments, with a rabid online hate campaign obscuring actual serious deficiencies. The mysteries of this season have been resolved, I can’t imagine replacing Lee Jung-jae with Rebecca Henderson in the main cast will be an improvement, and I don’t trust the show to finally become about the Sith in a second season, despite Plagueis’s mid-finale tease. Like Solo, I predict this will be another underperforming screen project forced to continue its plot threads in books and comics.

Bird of the Week

Like other middle-American states, Michigan has a state fair, where farmers gather to showcase their livestock, produce, and handiwork. Ours is not as big a deal as that of Minnesota and Iowa, but we have one. But unlike those other states, we also have the Detroit Auto Show, which I'd argue is the real Michigan showcase. Every year, automakers come together to show not just what they make but what they're going to make. Concept cars are the highlight, always looking cooler than the cars on the road. By the time a car gets engineered to be economical and reliable and easy to make, it just turns into a car. The concept car is the car before all that happens. I have, growing up watching that process, come up with the notion of "concept birds". These are birds that look like cooler, sleeker versions of other birds: waxwings to cardinals, grackles to crows, barn swallows to bluebirds. It's not a perfect metaphor, but it gets the point across. But one of the classic examples of the concept bird is bigger than that: a whole sort of bird that looks like the cooler early version of another whole sort. Gulls are fine, but have you seen terns? Like this week's bird, the Sandwich Tern?

Terns are fish-eaters, like their close cousins the gulls. They look much like gulls, but sleeker, with longer, thinner wings and tapered tails, and generally somewhat smaller overall. They typically have an almost chickadee-like black cap. Terns are found on seashores, around lakes and rivers, or even in marshes, depending on the species. The sea-terns feed by flying out over clear water and then plunge-diving after their prey (catching a fish about one-third of the time).¹

The Sandwich tern is widely distributed, being found on beaches around the Atlantic and western Indian oceans. It is one of the “crested terns”, so named for the blue jay-like tuft of feathers coming off the back of their heads (which, now that I’m writing this, I realize isn’t really visible when they’re flying, as I depicted mine doing. Sorry about that.) It can be distinguished from other similar terns by its yellow-tipped black beak (except in South America, where the “cayenne” population sport entirely yellow bills.) Like most larids, Sandwich terns will form large, mixed colonies with similar species (such as the royal tern and black-headed gull, whose nesting season corresponds with their own.) They nest on low-lying islands, laying a few eggs in a scrape. The nests are both far more exposed and more closely-placed to one another than those of other seabirds; it seems that sandwich terns particularly depends on nesting near larger seabirds to keep their own eggs safe.²

The Sandwich tern, in both its common English name and in its scientific name (Thalasseus sandvicensis) is named for its type locality: Sandwich, a town in Kent, England, located near the eastern end of the English Channel. The town’s name derives from an Old English phrase meaning “market town built on sandy ground”; the better known Norwich was a northern market town.³ Besides this tern, Sandwich also leant its name to the Hawai’ian Islands (Which James Cook called the "Sandwich Islands", hence why sandvicensis is the species name for so many Hawai’ian birds)⁴, as well as, most famously, to a dish composed of prepared items served on bread, such as the roast-beef-on-toast served to John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich.⁵ Thalasseus is Greek for "fisherman", and derives from the Greek word for the sea⁴, and was first applied to the crested terns by the German zoologist Heinrich Boie, who is better known for his work in herpetology.

Curation Links

From boiling lead and black art | Eddie Smith, Practically Efficient

A look at the history of how mathematical equations have been incorporated into printed/typed text. It’s a hard thing to accomplish, given how complicated equations can be compared to plain English text, with subscripts, superscripts, and complex overdrawn symbols and frames abounding.

Every Olympic & Paralympic Mascot | Graham Stark

[VIDEO] To get in the mood for the upcoming Paris games: a look back at the mascots of previous Olympic and Paralymic games through the years. If you like this, Stark has another video about Olympic logos you might enjoy. (1 hour 19 minutes)

A Dose of Antacids, a Quaint British Bay, and a Public Relations Fiasco | Yannic Rack, Hakai Magazine

"The experiment was meant to test a potential solution to climate change called ocean alkalinity enhancement. By raising the alkalinity of the seawater, Planetary hoped to coax the ocean into absorbing more atmospheric carbon dioxide and slow global warming in the process...For [Senara] Wilson Hodges, the secretive test rang alarm bells. She quickly found that others in town were equally concerned. How could they sleep soundly while an unknown company was pouring chemicals into the sea, potentially harming the local marine life? Was Planetary’s science even sound? And why were they only finding out now?"

Foxhole | Timothy Zahn, Baen

[FICTION] Excerpted from the anthology Battle Luna. “Something has been uncovered on the Moon that might have great scientific and economic importance. The Lunar colony is a mining colony with only internal security capabilities. Nobody had even considered that there might someday arise a need to defend the colony from the Earth! But that day has come.”

See the full archive of curations on Notion