My Daughter's Graduation Granted Me Second Sight
🖐 The Friday High Five #121
Welcome to this week’s Mullet edition of the Friday High 5.
Business in the front: The 5 things I loved this week, free for all to enjoy.
Party in the back: A deeper exploration of something on my mind, for supporters.
Business in the front
Rogue One
Vibe: Keeping the Andor good times rollin’
Deets: This week I rewatched the last episode of Andor and immediately fired up Rogue One. Though Andor was conceived to retroactively set the table for Rogue One, actually saying that feels dismissive of Andor. Andor is brilliant without Rogue One. Andor is brilliant without even Star Wars.
Viewing Rogue One knowing what we now know, understanding subtext that previously was unknown to us or didn’t even exist, is a whole new experience. Even more so than rewatching A New Hope in light of Rogue One. Andor concludes in such a way that Rogue One feels like a 2-hour coda of the Andor experience. If fits. And, incredibly, it makes both halves better.
Rogue One was a top-5 Star Wars movie before Andor. Is it weird that I want to move it higher based on something external to the film? I dunno. I definitely need to revisit my probably overthought Star Wars rankings though.
This:
It was really hard not to lead with this. Putting it second is me attempting to fly casual.
It feels very surreal that 1000 people have given me their email address because they want to read my next thing. Especially since I don’t cover pop culture from a traditional POV.
I’m not the fastest-growing pop culture newsletter or the biggest. I write heartfelt pieces that frequently feature penis humor.1 The bullseye of that Venn Diagram sometimes feels impossibly small.2
Turns out over 1000 people(!) dig that vibe. Feels pretty great.
Silo: S2
Vibe: Atmospheric scavenging and boring politics
Deets: Season 1 ended with such a memorable cliffhanger, Season 2 was almost bound to disappoint. It didn’t have to be that way, though. Because the Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) part of the story is straight fire. Unfortunately, Silo is equally interested in showing us people we don’t care about.
Turns out there’s a lot of machinations involved in running underground bunkers full of humanity’s remnant. The books did a much better job with this part of the narrative. The show feels like Game of Thrones lite. People plot. People die. The plotting never really makes sense, and the deaths are weightless because you just don’t care. All you want is to get back to Juliette.
Here’s a random ranking of recent post-apocalyptic shows:
The Last of Us* (I haven’t finished S2 yet so this may change, based on the disturbance I’ve felt in the nerd discourse.)
Station Eleven
Fallout
Silo
CNN
Retro-looking Bluetooth controllers
Vibe: It’s the 90s all over again but without cords.
Deets: I mentioned a while back that I was enjoying playing with the RetroPie my brother built and configured for me. It’s loaded with NES and SNES games from our childhood. I fell deep down a Tecmo Bowl-shaped hole.3
I’ve been using PS3 controllers, but the rechargeable batteries no longer recharge. Time for an upgrade. 8BitDo is the premier manufacturer in the retro third party controller market—which seems like being the king of a very small hill—but I gotta say. These controllers are dope.4 Feel like the old SNES controllers but even better.
The new controller hasn’t stopped my wife from beating me senselessly in Tetris 2. Alas.
Bad Sisters: S2
Vibe: Black comedy sisterhood hijinks
Deets: Bad Sisters is a hilarious, often moving portrait of Irish sisterhood that also involves much attempted murder. It somehow walks a narrow line between drama, comedy, and murder mystery without tipping into parody. S1 was one of my favorite watches in recent memory. I heard somehow/somewhere that S2 was not as good. Was disappointing in fact.
I don’t know what those people were talking about. S2 is great.
We’re only halfway into the season, so plenty of time for this car to go skidding off the road. But frankly I’m just happy to be bumming around again with the delightful Garvey sisters. Even if it doesn’t reach the heights of S1, I’m glad S2 exists.
Party in the back
That heading is a bit of a misnomer. This will be a ‘Very Special Episode of the High 5,’ falling somewhere between Jessie Spano get hooked on caffeine pills and Will Smith realizing his daddy don’t love him in terms of trauma, real and imagined.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched my daughter graduate high school. It was long and boring. You’d think after several hundred years of this5, they’d have upped the program. Listing off ~400 kids by name and watching them individually walk onto a stage, shake somebody’s hand, and sit back down is not riveting. It’s also not any indicator of the skills they’ve accumulated in all that schooling. Everything I watched my daughter do was stuff she’d mastered by preschool. What has she been doing for the past 12 years? (Please don’t answer that.)
You know what would’ve made it exciting: Randomness. Mystery. What if every kid had to grapple with something they should’ve mastered in middle school? Imagine if a student had a math problem thrown at them on their way to the stage. “Quick—what’s 5 times 2?” You could even inject a little variety. Spelling questions. Geography. What about dodgeballs? You can’t tell me this wouldn’t make the ceremony at least 1000% more interesting.