A courtroom drama/murder mystery with plenty of plot twists and revelations, so much so that it’s almost not believable. I mainly appreciated the honest depiction of the Korean-American immigrant experience, and the challenging lives of parents of children with disabilities. There’s a huge gulf between entertaining the thought that your life might be better without your afflicted child, and actually murdering the child, but in the logic of a high-pressure “parents-must-be-saints” society, the former makes you guilty of the latter. This book does a good job of exposing the flaws in that logic.
I got into the original Neon Genesis Evangelion series sometime in the mid-2000’s. Always been a fan of the creative creature designs and gory action, but never really got what was happening from a story perspective. When the Rebuild series started in the early 2010’s, promising a more accessible and clearer story, I watched the first film and decided to wait for the rest before bingeing them together. A decade later, the series is complete and I finally revisited this world.
It kind of felt like one step forward, two steps back for me: while this version does explain some plot elements earlier, it also adds so many new ideas that the net result is just as confusing as the original series. I’m also not a huge fan of the CG “2.5-D” animation style, especially in the latter two movies, which just looked like a fluid simulation exercise at times.
Overall, I think it’s skippable… better to just rewatch the original series.
I was building the 404 page for this site and a random idea occurred to me. I know that from a 404 message, you should always link back a valid page, usually the home page, but then I thought it’d be fun to link to a random blog post also.
I came up with a component that scrolls through a random selection of items with an animation like a slot machine. Svelte has some pretty cool features for supporting transitions and animations, so I wanted to learn more about that.
You can play with the final result here.
As a TODO for myself, maybe I’ll extract this as a reusable component and publish it.
This series is a collection of short animated films set in the Star Wars universe, without any concern for continuity. I wasn’t too hot on the first season, in which every episode was made by a different Japanese anime studio. Consequently, I found it monotonous, because many of the films had the same samurai feel. No offense to samurai.
Season 2, on the other hand, is much more diverse. I’m glad they expanded the palette to include animation studios from around the world. A highlight was “Screecher’s Reach”, with its painterly animation style, and horror-like journey into a dark cave.
The me of today would like to believe that the me of 10 years ago, i.e. the perpetually single me, would have felt kinship with Keiko Furukara, the protagonist of this book. She’s happily unattached, and bristles against all of the people around her who disapprove of her menial job and lack of relationship status.
On the other hand, if the me of 10 years ago had taken a different path, had not found a partner, who would the me of today be? I fear I might have ended up like the angry and deeply unpleasant Shiraha, Keiko’s foil. He is basically what we would call an incel, although I’m not sure if that label is meaningful in Japanese culture.
It’s a fine line between accepting yourself despite not fitting in, and blaming the world for not accepting you. I commend this book for putting me on both sides of that line.
I’ve always preferred the more “mainstream” parts of the MCU over the offbeat energy of the Guardians series. This third one is my favourite of the trilogy. Rocket’s backstory is effectively dark and tragic, and especially hard to watch if you’re an animal lover, like me.
A collection filled with the type of true crime article that I regularly save to Pocket. I probably wouldn’t recommend reading the book cover-to-cover, but I had to because it was a library loan. In my opinion, it would be better enjoyed by cherry-picking an article from time to time, when you’re in the mood for some moral indignation.
But beyond the morbid point-and-judge tone that’s typical of true crime, I do appreciate that Keefe offers empathy and compassion towards his so-called “rogues.” This is especially evident in my favourite article.
“Loaded Gun” explores the past of a mass shooter. Twenty years before the crime, she shot and killed her brother, in what may or may not have been an accident. I especially liked this article because Keefe inserts his first-person ruminations on the ambiguity of what happened, and what the ambiguity means.
The Star Trek vision of time travel usually involved restoring the “correct” timeline after some mishap, and preserving the way that things are “supposed” to be. In the time travel story of Paper Girls, the forces that support timeline preservation are painted as villains, and the act of changing history is seen as a charitable act, a sort of temporal wealth redistribution where the advances of the future are shared with the past. I don’t think I agree with the ethics of this position, but it was an interesting inversion of what I’ve seen before.
My favourite parts of the story involved the teenage girls meeting adult versions of themselves. Because of my age, I identified more with the “guest stars” than the main cast, and found myself wondering what I would say to my younger self. I kind of wish that Paper Girls had offered more answers to this question, beyond “Keep in touch with your friends.”
