Technically The Reason The Pevensies Were Told They Wouldn’t Return To Narnia After Certain Adventures

Reading The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe with my son on Easter Tuesday and he was so shocked and confused and bereft when Aslan died. Then we had to stop for a very gloomy lunch before we could read the next chapter, and it hit me that he was getting a better understanding than anything we could have taught him about what the disciples went through on Easter Saturday. I mean, we had just been talking about it three days earlier, but of course when you know there's a happy ending coming, you don't really feel it. And Aslan was finally here, after all this hope and expectation, and he was meant to make everything all right again 😭 He'd even already made the connection to Jesus when the witch's gang were kicking and hitting and jeering at Aslan, but he never in his wildest dreams thought he would become alive again! The joy and wonder and absolute glee he felt in the next chapter — he figured it out just before it happened because he cottoned onto the homage — preached the whole thing more eloquently than I could ever have hoped. And oof, if I didn't feel it all with him, too, as if for the first time ❤️ Well played, Mr Lewis, well played.

Also yesterday I caught him saying "I say!" so a positive experience all round 😃

do you think prev is older or younger than you?

Reblog if you've found friendship because of your fandoms.

What are some of your favorite fictional teams and crews? Groups of characters whose relationship is founded on the goal of accomplishing something together. They might become close friends and important presences in each other's lives--or just finishing the mission without biting each other's heads off might be a win--but either way, they have to work together and use each other's skills. I love this type of dynamic--tell me yours!

blind fic exchange!

a detective wakes up to the most beautiful woman he's ever met

a man dreams of death, and only his brother can help him

a new kindergarten teacher and the shenanigans of his peculiar students

happy reading ♡

Thank you for the recs! I ended up picking the third one, and it was really cute! I'm not familiar with the fandom, but I enjoyed the first chapter.

“You’re a hacker Skye, not Seal Team Six”

Give it two years Miles

(insp)

Mini-Review: Jet Lag: The Game

An American travel competition series, each season features a contest that sends players to achieve a geographical objective in different parts of the world, some of which are inspired by board games. Whether it's teams traveling to to US states to claim a Connect Four-style row or column, circumnavigating the globe via air travel, playing tag across western Europe, or driving the vertical length of New Zealand, players will race against each other and the reliability of transit to get the win.

Imagine: you are an adult, collapsing into a hotel bed after a long day of getting lost on the public transit of your vacation city. You're about to stream something funny and not difficult to follow—maybe Nailed It!, maybe Taskmaster—when you companion interjects, says they've been watching this really fun travel race show, and starts a playlist where a quartet of people in predawn darkness run away six seconds into the video, and suddenly you're watching people race to circumnavigate the world?

That was my introduction to Jet Lag: The Game.

Each season is a self-contained game, and they mix it up: the first season (which, for some reason, is the second playlist on YouTube) is a game of "Connect Four" across America, where teams must "claim" four states in a horizontal or vertical row by traveling to each one and completing challenges, while the second game is a race to circumnavigate the globe, and the third season is a game of tag across western Europe, primarily using train systems.

Sidequest-like challenges are an integral part of these games. In most of them, players must unlock coins or money (as in a video game) to have the in-game balance to buy tickets, or unlock information about opponents, etc., so the series is never a straight race. The challenges vary by season and location, but include things like:

Logic or trivia challenges

Go to a museum for half an hour and tell the camera 5 fun facts you learned

Eat a menu item at McDonald's you can't get in the US

Get 1000 feet from any building

Get a hole in one in mini golf

Find [animal] at [local attraction famous for animal]

Make cheese

Cursed! Listen to Tom Lehrer's "Element Song" on repeat until you reach the next city [over an hour away]

Cursed! Only take trains that leave at odd-numbered times

Acquire any food produced in your current state and mail it to your family

Explain the birds and the bees to a bird or a bee

Ride a horse

Get goosebumps while at least one goose is in the camera frame

Because the challenges are random (usually drawn from a shuffled deck of cards), it adds tension to the games: the player or team needs money/coins/points in order to travel, or thwart their competitors, and there's a real risk that they'll fail because it's physically impossible or there's not enough time to complete.

If you, like me, are wary of YouTubers™, worry not. The focus here is the game, and the players do a decent job trying not to bother other people: most faces of passers-by are blurred, players try to set up in out-of-the-way corners when filming, and when they need to interact with people, like at a customer service desk, the camera is usually pointed at the player. There's also a lot of being very polite to customer service, drivers, and others they interact with. You can see them get strange looks sometimes, but overall they do a good job of trying not to be Social Media Personalities™ disruptively.

And the players themselves also seem to be nice people to watch; they'll send "curses" or other interruptions when the game allows for it, but there's no out-of-game interpersonal unpleasantness that makes it into the show. Also, one player, Ben, consistently wears the brightest, most funky clothes. He has no camouflage in a crowd, but who cares.

Final comments: Highly recommend. It's fun, safe for most ages—swears stronger than "damn" get bleeped—and you can tell that a lot of planning and thought has gone into game development to balance things. If you like the idea of race-type reality shows combined with good attitudes and sportsmanship, you'll probably enjoy this.

Subtitle availability: English closed captions are available and very well-done, sometimes including different font colors to indicate different people in conversations, and some excellent phonetic spellings of mispronunciations! However, for the first two seasons (Connect 4 and Circumnavigation), only auto-generated captions on YT are available.

Where to watch (USA, as of December 2024): YouTube (playlists link [X]) and Nebula (which was partially founded by the game's creator)—which also has recap/discussion podcasts, and series outtake video tarting with season 8, and the service gets new episodes a week early.

Start watching with: The friend who introduced me started me with the first playlist that shows up on YouTube, Circumnavigation, so I feel like if it worked on me, it'll work on others. But if that doesn't appeal to you, starting with either the next playlist—Connect Four Across America (which is actually the first season) or the third season, Tag Eur It, would be good. I started my parents on Tag Eur It, a game of tag across multiple European countries, because I think it's got one of the strongest hooks of any early series, explains the rules very quickly, and the immediate urgency (runner must run; chasers start to follow soon after) draws you in very quickly.

But really, starting anywhere will work. However, because the creators sometimes reference outcomes from earlier games, especially when they are playing near the location of previous games, I recommend watching any similar-geography games in order (Tag 1 before Tag 2 or Hide and Seek, and New Zealand [Race to the End of the World] before Australia).

Status/Frequency: There are currently 11 complete seasons on Youtube (12 on Nebula), and so far new seasons premier roughly 3-ish times a year, with most seasons lasting 5-6 episodes, and episodes tend to be 30-45 minutes each. As of this review, there is no indication that this is likely to change anytime soon, and the 12th season premiers this month.

Click my “reviews” tag below or search “mini review” on my blog to find more!

Agents of B.A.R.B.I.E. -> Skye (a.k.a. Daisy Johnson)

This Barbie is an Inhuman!

sophie hatter finally lives out every customer service worker's dream of retaliating to a mean customer AND telling them they suck and then when she thinks "wow standing up for myself was really liberating" she gets a curse put on her literally five minutes later