As a child, we would hear television on in our background. People love television, especially when they can see it, and it's bright. But if we wanted the remote, it was very rarely given. Our mother encouraged us to play the piano, or go to Lions meetings with her. Talk to the neighbors. Any of that. But we liked television. At a young age, one of our favorite ways to torment our mother when we were able to sneak the remote was to play Judge Judy. We didn't really like Judge Judy, but we would certainly use her tactics to argue with our mother about things when she was trying to control our behavior. Here is the Judge Judy wikipedia page, from which we learned a few things we didn't know about the history of the show. After winning the right to watch television via a 7-year battle of tormenting our mother and sister with Judge Judy, our favorite set of programs changed weekly. For one week, it was Playhouse Disney, now Disney Junior, and their Handy Manny, Mickey Mouse sequence. No matter how much our brother told us we watched these shows too much, we hadn't gotten to as a child so we refused to stop. Here is the wikipedia article for Handy Manny, which was usually our favorite over Mickey Mouse, both because of the music, and because he speaks Spanish, and ... well, the things that voice could probably do ... yes we were a strange kid. and no, not the sexual things either. We like music, and will probably do a post about that as well, but firmly believed that if he tried to sing anything other than either “Hop up jump in” or “fix it right” he'd probably have a beautiful voice. There was one episode of this particular show where Manny gets to see his nephew, and we spent the whole day after we watched that episode cripplingly sad because ... we didn't understand why at the time but we hadn't seen our nephew in 3 years. There was one time my dad was around for a couple weeks between business trips, and showed us a toy of Handy Manny and all the tools. But we were told we were too old to have that toy and that we should really be watching other shows by now, despite the fact that by age 7 I didn't even barely know what other tv shows were. With Mickey Mouse, things were a bit different. we were a bit more secretive with that one and would only watch it when both of our parents would go to meetings or be out of the house, and our brother was home. Our brother didn't really pay attention to us as much as they did and we were grateful for that because we did at least a little bit need to learn our own way. Here is the mickey mouse clubhouse wikipedia article, from which we learned that this show doesn't exist anymore, which is incredibly sad. It ended in 2016. Luckily, there are many other tv shows out there to watch. Such as Dragon Tales, a show aired by PBS Kids and possibly some other places that are loosely connected to PBS. We don't really understand how that all works. We enjoy this, because no matter how bitter one is, no matter how angry you get, one can sometimes just do with a little bit of dragon magic. We also enjoy the diverse characters, and the littles in the system enjoy learning what's right and wrong from other kids instead of being told about it by the system caregivers. Here is the Wikipedia article for Dragon tales, from which we learned that most of the producers wanted to use it as an educational show. We are enormously grateful to our school that they did not ruin this show for us by trying to shove it into classwork like it belongs there. Other similar shows we enjoyed as a kid, and sometimes still do because we're plural and we have kids in our system, include Arthur, another PBS show. We enjoy this one because it has a lot of different characters, though must state that Muffy has got to be one of the most unfortunate names you could give a character. I don't remember her actual name, but Muffy! Very unfortunate. In any case, this one is cool also in part because the littles get to see why yelling at each other is wrong, unless it has to be done. Here is the wikipedia article for Arthur, from which we learned that Arthur was an aardvark and also that this tv show was once a book. You learn new things every day I suppose. By age 12 to 13, our mother had gotten us to watch, and conditioned us to like, if possible, the most annoying and stress-inducing show known to man: the Bold and the Beautiful. We will vehemently resist the urge to go into various long and boring paragraphs about the show's timeline, despite the fact that Farren is scrolling it like a computer display across the headspace. We will simply stick with saying that this is a soap opera about rich people being assholes to rich people. Dammit, we'd gone almost an entire post without a curse word. Humph. Well, that one was deserved, we will find a better descriptive word ... hmm. This show is about capitalists being capitalists to capitalists about capitalist things, in which a fashion company and a ... we still don't know what Spencer does, but basically they get entangled into this giant, multigenerational love dodecahedron of spiraling doom. Here's the link, if for some actual reason you want to hear about this craziness. Thankfully we don't watch it anymore, we started actively avoiding her for tv time a year in. Here's the wikipedia link for the bold and the beautiful. Ow, I just read that article for the research of this one, and my head hurts like someone's just stuck twenty axes into the back of it. If I never have to do that again, it will be too soon. Elena After we freed ourselves from our mother's headache inducing soap opera, we decided it would likely be better for our mental health if we cast out the trash with something possibly way worse. And that something was? the very few episodes of Family Guy downloaded onto an old iPod and then transferred to my computer before iPods stopped allowing you to do that as easily. After we watched all those, we pretty much shut off all television for 6 years because we didn't have regular access to it. We had 2 televisions, and one was always being used by our mother, the other by our brother. After we moved out, we started watching more Family Guy again, and decided that despite it being crude, we liked some of the comedy. It became a coping mechanism for hard days. here is the Family guy wikipedia link. Now that things have settled, we watch a variety of shows. Our littles enjoy Dragon Tales still, linked above, and Arthur, also linked above. We will occasionally still watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse if we want to, but rarely do we watch Handy Manny anymore. Our 7 to 8 year olds enjoy The Loud House, a Nicolodian show about a family of 11 kids. They enjoy it mainly because in a way we're a family of over a dozen kids, all making various noises or things happen in the headspace at all different times of day. Here is the wikipedia article for the loud house. There are probably many other shows, but finding all the links and making sure we inserted them in here correctly has been ... annoying on this brain. We may go into more tv show stuff later, but it may not be for a while.

Plans for the Future

As we've done in the last couple posts, we present today's Plans for the future segment. Coming up next on here will be some bonus updates and arbitrary musings, a post discussing our favorite books, followed by a break in the all about us streak to discuss why were not talking about books on a platform meant for that, followed by a post about our favorite music.

Credits

We hope you have enjoyed this mind bending link filled fabrication of a post. Post written by Kayla, Nicole, Lilian, Eva, Elena, and Martha. Research completed by Kassadie, links inserted and placed by Cascadia. Post edited for spelling and structure by Farren.