I was _really_ hoping that VDare’s public implosion would net Sailer some kind of tax evasion charge at least but alas…

I’m baffled as to why people are getting so excited over the 50th anniversary of a show that was cancelled 25 years ago but I guess everyone is entitled to their hobbies!

It turns out that “you can’t take it with you” is not just a cute saying but the simple truth. My goal is that when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil I will leave my kid nothing but a cell phone, a chefs knife and a cast iron skillet to dispose of.

This graph is astonishing. The people that bang on about “natural birth” and “women have been doing this forever without help” need to be forced to stare at this until their eyes water.

Yeah, we simply live in the world Akira made, and a lot of the movies that came in its wake were reactions to it that made a point of trying to do things better. Similarly, we showed The Matrix to our kid and it was sorta like showing a fish an award-winning documentary about water.

In fact, worth allowing: it _still_ looks great. The story that it was entirely animated at 24fps turns out to be somewhere between an exaggeration and a lie, but Otomo and company were _extremely_ clever about when to use more frames, and the art direction is just insanely good.

I think the movie just _barely_ holds it together on pure vibes and style, but you have to just ignore the multiple ways in which the plot is insane, and the implicit endorsement of nationalistic Japanese militarism is... not great, bob.

But a thing I didn't know at the time was that it had the Game of Thrones problem: Otomo was only 2/3rds of the way through writing the manga when the movie deal came together, so they were very much winging it through the ending there.

I think it's hard to see it now in anything close to its original context. In 88, cyberpunk was still a niche genre in the English-speaking world, budgets for animated movies in Japan were generally _much_ smaller, and most Americans' experience with anime was Robotech. It landed like a bomb.

Oh somewhere in the middle of there: Tetsuo: <accidentally kills his girlfriend because he's lost control of his nightmare cyborg body> <five minutes later> Tetsuo: <somehow fails to kill Shikishima or even bite off his hands despite being made primarily of teeth for a while>