NYT Essay On Reinvention of "Garfield" Strip

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/magazine/garfield-twitter.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 I remember when "Garfield" first began running in the local Knight-Ridder paper.  I got the volumes as they came out.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the quality of the strip slowly declined over time.  Jim Davis hired a bunch of writers to help him churn out ideas.  Then J.D. decided to author (With help, of course!) another strip, "U.S. Acres".  The comic strip "U.S. Acres" was a flop and it was exactly at the same time that J.D. pulled the plug on "U.S. Acres" that "Garfield"'s quality nose-dived.  It was almost as though the staff from "U.S. Acres" had been transferred to the "Garfield" team and had somehow contaminated the ideas process.  In my mind, nothing symbolized the cratering of the quality more than when the character "Lyman" was eliminated.  Lyman had been Jon's housemate and owned the dog Odie; and, as such, provided a more reliable quality of humor than any non-housemate character could.  Odie staying while Lyman got canned was a nadir that the strip never recovered from.

books I keep forgetting about

• The True Believer:  Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
• Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm
•  Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System
  by Alec Karakatsanis
• The Night Manager by "John Le Carre"
• Neko Gari Zoku no Osa (The Chief of the Cat-Hunting Tribe) by Jun Maeda
  

Yet ONE MORE Example of Why Jeff Bezos is a Crony Capitalist

Wall Street Journal quoted in POLITICO's Playbook:

“When Amazon.com Inc.’s venture-capital fund invested in DefinedCrowd Corp., it gained access to the technology startup’s finances and other confidential information.
“Nearly four years later, in April, Amazon’s cloud-computing unit launched an artificial-intelligence product that does almost exactly what DefinedCrowd does, said DefinedCrowd founder and Chief Executive Daniela Braga. The new offering from Amazon Web Services, called A2I, competes directly ‘with one of our bread-and-butter foundational products’ that collects and labels data, said Ms. Braga. After seeing the A2I announcement, Ms. Braga limited the Amazon fund’s access to her company’s data and diluted its stake by 90% by raising more capital.
“Ms. Braga is one of more than two dozen entrepreneurs, investors and deal advisers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal who said Amazon appeared to use the investment and deal-making process to help develop competing products.”

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2020/07/24/reopen-schools-but-no-gop-convention-489877

Anime News Network Posts

Welcome to the Isekai, Otome Game Villainesses

by Kim Morrissy

Begonia, I Hardly Knew Ya 

by Jean-Karlo Lemus & Monique Thomas, Nov 19th 2020

 

 

Jun Maeda's Debut Novel is a Queer Romance about Depression

by Kim Morrissy, May 28th 2021

 Neko Gari Zoku no Osa (The Chief of the Cat-Hunting Tribe)

Regarding Makoto Shinkai

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4vl8Xb_kU4
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• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_9IFy0_QGA
• 
   
•  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQFu-ayzmFw
• 
   
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A15EoUqPEoc

• One of the best scenes in all of film: Spirited Away's Train Scene (Miyazaki, not Shinkai)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LazFbJxk0Y
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When Older Drugs are Better Drugs

Pharmaceutical firms want doctors to use the newest medications on the market—but that’s not always the right choice.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-older-drugs-are-better-drugs

Ghost Messenger (Korean animated movie)

1. ~6:30 before title is shown
2. So the child is living with his grandfather?
3. ~22:40 So the mother disappeared into some trap?
4. 34:00 Is Grandpa even real?
5. 41:45 The guy's arm heals/reappears.
6. ~50:10 So the child and his mother are shamans?  Is Grandpa a ghost?
7. ~54:00 So Grandpa *was* some sort of spirit.

• So, apparently, this movie is an extended commercial for a Korean comic book.  Because of that, I am rating this at 8/11; I would otherwise might have rated this at 10/11. 
  
  I was wrong.

• https://fast.animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=128615 

Shelter AMV & Gigguk's review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzQ6gRAEoy0&list=TLPQMDkwMTIwMjAFQmbjWE4D4A&index=2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4FoWyUBpQw&list=TLPQMDkwMTIwMjAFQmbjWE4D4A&index=27