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Friday, October 13, 2017

Chapter 2: The Beautiful Truth / Mirrornet Down



When Cedar Wood™ enters the Royal beauty pageant, she inspires Apple White™ to spellabrate the true meaning of beauty.
Ashlynn is sitting with her new Rebel friends, and asks if anyone wants to go shopping after school. When the others agree, Cedar jumps in - she can't, because she joined the Royals Beauty Pageant, but she didn't tell anyone because she thought that they thought it would be silly. "But I love being awesome, empowered girls!"




Raven gives her support; After all, following your own destiny means doing things you truly want to do!

That's considerably less hamfisted than how the franchise will get later. "Where Princesses are Powerful" was so obviously manufactured, hokey and market-tested to death to vaguely allude to girl power and feminism, it shot itself in the foot instead of being organic, with instances like .... well, the rest of the series.

Say what you will - and there are plenty of areas for criticism in this franchise, as this entire recap presents - but the variety of girls' personalities and work ethics wasn't really an issue besides needing more visual diversity.

Ashlynn was a princess who ran a shoe store! Raven didn't enjoy evil, but Faybelle did! Lizzie was capricious and worked on being kinder!

During the practice session, Mrs. Her Majesty, The White Queen instructs them on how to be incredibly limited by instructing Cedar to always smile and to wear uncomfortable shoes.

Much like their dolls here, in the physical realm.


They got better.

The discussion question is "Why is looking good more important than anything?"

Apple doesn't care, Briar isn't paying attention, but Cedar is not having that in her school. I'm taking the transcript from the wikia;
Now, wait just a splinter! I thought this pageant was about what it means to be a beautiful girl! Not painful shoes!
 Not silly smiles! Real stuff! Like being smart, and graceful, and—whoa! 
[she falls off the stage and onto a drum, then bounces back onto the stage] —and-and the beauty inside of us!
Whiplash (2014) dir. Damien Chazelle.

Apple realizes that Cedar is right, and the next shot is of her looking in a photo album of her winning awards.

They give out awards for being an obnoxious person?

Cedar approaches her and apologizes for what she said, but Apple reaffirms that she's right, and together they work on reinventing the contest to talk about what it means to be an awesome girl.

And by reinventing, I mean that only a short bit of the pageant is shown, with Apple getting the spotlight and Cedar saying nothing else, because brown girls can only speak up in practice and not on the main stage.

At least they get pretty outfits?

It was a pretty good episode until that point. Sure, the student body would have needed to hear it from Apple to be convinced, but why couldn't Cedar have gotten a line and then have Apple finish the statement?

I can tell it was no one's intention to come off so unintentionally insensitive, but Apple's good nature overshadowed, yet again, someone who isn't privileged like her.


Mirrornet Down



The students panic when the MirrorNet goes down at school and rally together to find the unhexpected culprit behind the crash.
The internet is down and people are in a panic!


I'd scoff, but I'm the same way.

Cedar can't update her MyChapter, Ashlynn can't go on .... I dunno, Illusiongram, and share shoes she found, and Briar can't let people know about a new band.

Of course, there's always one person going "Just talk to people in person," and today that person is Raven.

"Thomas Edison was a witch!"

But because everything is digitalized these days, they also submit homework though the Mirrornet.

As an aside, why don't they just call it the internet?

 If all the mirrors in this world are the equivalent of smartphones, tablets, and I guess just giant talking smart pieces of glass, how is the Evil Queen trapped in one? Is she trapped in the equivalent of a 50's - era industrial computer?

When Mattel integrates IT and computer talk into their franchises, sometimes it works (Boo York, Boo York; Elle Eedee says she 'interfaces' with people and that's not a bad twist on the phrase, and in Monster High 2.0, Monsters have their own TCP/IP protocol and OSI model! As someone who graduated with an AS in Network Infrastructure, I can't help but think of how they make it work.)

I'm also looking for a job. Hit me up. I'll be happy to be your diversity hire.

Anyway, Professor Rumpelstiltskin is back at his shenanigans, and has an assignment that can only be turned in via the Mirrornet, by the end of the day. Or, more specifically, probably a Blackboard-esque program.

So now Raven cares.

They go to the Tech Club, where Dexter says that it looks like someone is hogging all the bandwidth. At the risk of going too technical, it's not really down in that instance; Just very slow.

 And with the amount of students that use it, I can see how it would slow to a crawl. All the access points in the school would probably end up going throughout one router eventually, because routers are how you move information from one wide area network to another, and Book End probably use the same router to talk to other routers.

For example; we have a device from Verizon - it's a switch/access point like thing that takes our information and sends it to a layer three device - a router. And that router is connected to other routers, which is connected to switches and computers, which puts information in front of someone else!

 Slow internet =/= down.

Anyway, Dexter tells Humphrey Dumpty to man the controls back in their very large tech room, "To put it all back together again."

Clever.

Dexter now goes around turning off various student's uploads (Daring) and downloads (Melody) in progress. Considering the upload/download speed for such a large school would probably be in the 90 or 100 GBs lane - We're residential and ours is 25 GB, which is a vast improvement over what we had before - individual students aren't likely to be hogging the bandwidth unless they were uploading about 200 videos a second.

He also stops Blondie's download to her Mirrorpad by ... unplugging a cable. Mirrorpads are wireless. So did he unplug the access point, which only allows you access to a LAN?


 In fairness, she seemed to be downloading a lot of videos, and those would be more costly than a few megabytes of mp3 files. Not enough to suck up a line of bandwidth intended for hundreds of people though.

But that doesn't solve the problem, as Briar says that the 'net is still very slow.

Leave it to the (second) best girl to make sense.

 Also, how can only a certain section of girls not get access? It seemed to be working fine for Blondie, Melody, and Daring. That's not an infrastructure problem...at least not in the way they think. Someone is manipulating the ... how do these kids say 'Intranet'? Which is a private network using web technology.

Considering 'blackboard' applications are still web applications - this would be more a problem with a single website than anything. And apparently, that website's home base is on the grounds of the school...

Dexter says that they'll have to go to 'the source' of the Mirrornet. The internet has no 'source', but I get the point, and kudos to actually having him try to solve the problem elsewhere before immediately fumbling around with things like switches and routers at the core.

Fun fact, though, there are five or six people who have 'keys' to the internet.

Shock of shocks, guess who is messing with students' education again.



The girls threaten to tell the headmaster unless he gives them more time to study. Honestly, why didn't they do this test before the deadline unless it opened two hours before the net went down? Not that this is any of their faults, but I always did my take-home tests pretty quickly in case of nonsense like this.

Well, not of gremlins disconnecting infrastructure services, but general technology going down.

I've always liked Ashlynn's pose here.
 Frankly, when it comes to the idea of a 'one, supreme fairytale', my first thought was always Cinderella, not Snow White.

Apple thinks it's only fairest that he fixes what he broke, and since it looks like this wiring closet was poorly organized, he's left to get constantly electrocuted as he tries to put everything back together again instead of, maybe calling a technician.

Dance, goblin, dance, you never had a chance.


I liked this episode, more for the fact that I got to use what I learned in school more than anything else, and seeing Dexter take an active role that isn't pining after Raven is nice. It's also good to see Ashlynn hanging with her girls instead of just with Hunter.


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