On Saturday night, a new friend of mine hosted a PowerPoint party for his 25th birthday. Technically speaking, I didn’t make a PowerPoint, I made a… marp.

I wrote about something that I had long been wanting to research in more depth and already loved to enlighten people about: the time Angelina Jolie offered to act as human bait to help catch African warlord Joseph Kony. This obscure pop culture moment is my personal Roman Empire, and I’m happy to now be able to come correct after seriously reading up on the sequence of events.

Kony 2012 was actually a phenomenon that I (thankfully?) missed out on. But this particular story from the aftermath of that documentary never fails to draw me in: a lawyer is given the incredible responsibility of sniffing out and prosecuting human rights abuses all over the globe, and abuses that responsibility to get closer to American actress Angelina Jolie. In a nutshell.

I grossly underestimated how long it would take to research and write this, thinking I would simply summarize the handful of tabloid articles I had read about it previously. I only budgeted an hour or two for researching and writing this entire thing, and then of course spent two hours tabbing through several Wikipedia pages and generally letting humanity’s collected knowledge of this event wash over me. I love the internet.

This left me with approximately zero hours to write the actual presentation, so I banged it all out in a frenzy, not even proofreading it. I was able to do this much faster than would have been possible using PowerPoint or Keynote or Prezi so, thank you, marp. I would have really liked to include some photos and especially maps, but by the time I got all my words down I was already pretty late for this birthday party. Hopefully someday I get the motivation to go back and fill those in, which will truly take the presentation to the next level. For now, enjoy!

Edit Sept. 2024: I have since fixed some typos in the slides. I still need to add photos and maps.