Blog/newsletter by David 29 Sunset •
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April 30, 2020
I’m not running out of things to do; I just have a lot fewer options. So goes life during the pandemic. No hanging out in the library for a couple hours in the late afternoon. No spending Saturday at the zoo. Now, I stay home with the Co-Pilot and Little One, and, invariably, we choose a movie.
April 24, 2020
There’s a popular YouTube channel that my Little One will watch every opportunity she can. It’s called Come Play With Me and has more than 7.4 million subscribers. A brief search suggests it’s a wildly profitable channel, with Social Blade giving a low-end estimate of $68,000 monthly income.
For the uninitiated, the channel is essentially a soap opera in the form of imaginative play acted out by two girls controlling dolls mainly from Disney toy lines. The two dolls at the center of almost every episode are the “child” versions of Anna and Elsa from Frozen, though in this universe, the children are named “Anya” and “Elsya” to distinguish them from the adult versions. Other dolls show up here and there, too — the “adult” Anna is Anya’s mother, the “adult” Elsa is Elsya’s mother, and occasionally we see Kristoff, Barbies, LOL figurines, and more.
I’m not the target demographic, but I think the show is attractive to young children because A) it features recognizable characters (the use of which would be an interesting test of fair use) and B) it’s exceptionally well-edited despite the ultra-low-budget production value.
April 17, 2020
Michael Jordan was a great basketball player. I’m not about to truther that he transformed the NBA, let alone argue that being the best player on six championship teams in eight seasons is less than incredible.
However, on the eve of The Last Dance, an ESPN documentary that has already prompted a bunch of retrospectives on Jordan’s career that mark him as the most important basketball player of all time, and will almost certainly prompt another avalanche of canonizing takes, it’s worth trying to head off at least one myopic line of discussion: Whether Jordan would have dominated today’s game, or, for that matter, if today’s stars would have dominated the NBA of Jordan’s prime.
