The Nerdy Teacher's Classroom

Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster is a great game, with a great story and rightfully deserves the moniker as THE Final Fantasy Game You Should Play. It's also prick of a game with a trophy that relies on RNG, which should qualify the team for "Slapped across the face with a rotting halibut."

Writing something is difficult. Nothing can diminish that. It's an act of pure fucking will, dogged determination, boundless creativity, time, patience, frustration, joy, madness. If you can do it, you are a rare breed and should be respected for it.

BUT!

If you're creating a movie/show/novel and at the end produce something that makes no sense, PROVIDING SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION, MAKING ANOTHER MOVIE/SHOW/NOVEL OR RELYING ON SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS TO EXPLAIN WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS HAPPENING MEANS YOU HAVEN'T DONE A GOOD ENOUGH JOB! YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME! THE STORY SHOULD MAKE SENSE AT THE END!

Episode 1: The Phantom Menace - weak

Episode 2: Attack of the Clones - meh

Episode 2.5: Tartakovsky's Clone Wars - So solid. Superior to the "new" Clone Wars. A damn shame it's no longer an official part of the saga.

Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith - meh

Episode 3-and-a-bit: Solo - meh, but I don't dislike it as much as I used to. The "real leader" of Crimson Dawn reveal is still dumb. It doesn't matter if it gets revealed how, it's still a dumb plot choice.

Episode 3.99: Rogue One - Solid. The best thing since the original trilogy.

Episode 4: A New Hope - Solid

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back - Solid

Episode 6: Return of the Jedi - Solid

Episode 7: The Force Awakens - Meh

Episode 8: The Last Jedi - Weak. Which is a shame because it has potential to be something solid.

The Mandalorian and Grogu isn't a "standalone" movie. Standalone means that it stands alone, unconnected to anything else.

Look at the title of the movie. That connects it to The Mandalorian series.

Look at the supporting characters. They connect it to the wider Star Wars franchise.

And maybe the reason you hate people criticizing the thing you love is because they show it's flaws.

It was fine. Disney made a movie based around a successful series that appeals to fans of cute aliens doing cute things and badass space warriors being affectionate paternal figures. It's not the most inventive movie in the franchise, but it's not offensive in the least. There's plenty of moments where an audience will laugh because Grogu is such a little scamp. You'll get your tickets worth if you're going to see a movie about the title characters.

Here's where I get annoyed, though. Disney's 2 big properties (Marvel and Star Wars) seem incapable of doing a proper stand alone movie. If you're going to watch something new, you're practically required to have prior knowledge on earlier films and series. That's kind of expected for The Mandalorian and Grogu: it's in the name after all. But one supporting character was from Rebels, another was from The Clone Wars, another was from The Book of Boba Fett and one was from the 2008 Clone Wars movie. Yes you can watch it without knowing the specifics of when these characters showed up, but you're inevitability going to do a search to find out who they are. A proper "stand-alone" movie shouldn't need any of that. I hold up Rogue One as the best example: you need to know the vaguest of details of the Star Wars universe, but you can watch it and understand the story without having to reference Wookiepedia everytime a new character shows up.

It's a fine Star Wars movie. Not as good as Rogue One nor the original trilogy, maybe on par with Attack of the Clones or The Force Awakens. It's fanservice for people who like The Mandalorian series, and will sell toys and Happy Meals to fans and kids. Will it win awards? Special effects maybe. Maybe practical effects. The story feels like a stretched episode or condensed season. The CGI is pretty. The opening credits impressed me the most: it has an old war/action movies feel to it. It's not the greatest, but it's what fans will want. The average viewer will be left in the dark for a lot of things, though.

It's good. Plenty of both The Mandalorian and Grogu. Grogu does cute things, the Mandalorian does cool things. The overall story felt like it was a season's worth of ideas condensed into a movie. Visually, it looks great; one of the best shot/animated Star Wars movies yet.

-My thought process doesn't work in straight lines. I takes weird turns and sometimes "stutter" when I'm trying to sort something out.

- I can carry multiple conversations, can respond to someone's comment without breaking stride, but don't like to meet any one person's gaze.

- Yes I fumble and bumble my words, but (according to some) when I go into "sell" mode, I'm flirty and charming.

- I don't really want an official diagnosis on why I am the way I am. It'd probably explain a lot, but at nearly 37, I know how I am and how to work with it.

Big milestone for me. I've been surrounded by music since birth but it took until my late teenage years to start curating this library.

Before my teens, I listened to what was on and never really thought about or controlled what I was hearing.

By high school, I was listening to "the only the best of classic rock." Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones. Basically what you'd hear on any classic rock station, but I was choosing it.

In university, I expanded my tastes to the big bands of the 1990's and some of the 2000's. Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam. I don't get too wild, but there's growth.

By the time I graduate with my Education degree, I've read Our Band Could Be Your Life. All bets are off. I've been given permission to listen to things that aren't "popular." I learn to listen to the bands that inspire the bigger bands I like. The Replacements, Minor Threat.

By my mid-twenties, my tastes have grown past big electric guitar riffs. Punk, jazz, swing, folk, singer-songwriters. Seatbelts, Soil & Pimp Sessions, Fugazi, Django Reinhardt, Plumtree. Good music isn't limited to a single genre.

In the first half of my thirties, I bring my attention back home. There's so much great music in the world, and so much of it comes from Canada.

In the second half of my thirties, it's time to round things out and fill in the gaps. Complete discographies, buy one-offs or box sets of singles, find the ghost albums I've been chasing.

There's never been a hard and fast rule, aside from "Listen and grow." Starting somewhere and adding has always been the game. Where I'll go after 20,000 songs isn't decided yet, and honestly, I'll probably never decide.

And contributing to a Pogues/Shane McGowan tribute album too (20th Century Paddy).

The last couple years have been rough for me as a substitute. Between being refused a job that for all purposes should have been mine (in my eyes and everyone I talk to), to being passed over for another job in favor of someone a hell of a lot less experienced, to dealing with a system that doesn't reward loyalty or seniority, things have sucked. And because of that, for the first time in my 14 year career as a teacher, I stepped back and asked, "Why am I doing this?"

Part of it is because I still love the job. While students continue to be students, complex cases become more and more normalized and the expectation of teachers keep getting heaped up, I still love this job. There's a major sense of accomplishment when a student shouts at me during the lunch rush, "Can't you just come back and explain Shakespeare again? I don't understand what a Tiber is." Or someone asks if they can talk to me, I get unloaded on and they walk away more confident in themselves because I just listened and encouraged them. And when a graduate gives me a letter at the end of the year thanking me or asking for advice on how to go for their teaching degree. Fuck all the politics and downtown dealings, the blatant favoritism and utter disregard for the people actually making a difference in student lives; that sort of stuff sustained me.

But it's getting rougher these last years. So these last few months, I've done the drastic (for me) thing and started looking for a change. There's still issues to deal with, but I'm in the process of going for my Masters in Education, specifically for the Psychology and Education of Students Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired. There's a whole lot of backstory as to why I chose that, but it's safe to say that it's been something in the works since before I started teaching.

I have a couple more years ahead of me slugging it out as a substitute, but the weight of everything has gotten a lot easier to handle. Getting to be a student again is something I've always kept as a possibility, and really, this isn't as drastic a career change as going into counseling (yeah, that was an option on the table). The random grab-bag of experience I've built up is actually pretty appropriate for what comes next and at the end of the day, it's still teaching. I just work with smaller groups and don't have to translate Mark Antony's pipe bomb of a speech into Cape Breton vernacular.

Aspect of Lucifer + push (Poisidon) + breach (Posidon) + lightning (Zeus) + idk what else = fuck absolutely everything in range. It was completely unfair to stand in a corner and just bully anything that got nearby.