S02 E02: Alloying Adults with Animation 📺
S02 E02: Alloying Adults with Animation 📺
book reviews, tech history, and anime
🗺 Personal Update
I began this month in Florida and flew to San Francisco after getting jabbed at my trusty local Walgreens. I've been here since and have been spending time with friends, playing tennis, and not eating for 72 40 hours. Though, more adventures in the mountains and desert are in the horizon.
🎨 Artifacts
I'm back on the book review train! First up we have a review of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. This book is polarizing, left me with a strong desire to learn more about philosophy, and implement many of the ideas presented — all signals of a good book IMO.
Next, we have a couple more around the sphere of tech & computing history. Here's a review of Hackers by Steven Levy and one of The Innovators by Walter Isaacson.
I was inspired to read these after seeing this post on stitching together mental instruments by reading clusters of interrelated books. I hope to read a few more about the topic of computing history and eventually write a post summarizing my gleanings by weaving together multiple perspectives into a tapestry of understanding.
🌊 Life Reflections
I recently started watching Attack on Titan (AoT), which is (according to Ranker) currently voted as the best anime show of all time. I haven't been this enthralled by a show in a long time and yet again, it's an animated show that takes the cake.
Like many 90s kids, I had an anime phase in my youth that didn't stick as a long-term interest. Like video games and Twitter, it's just too good and I know my younger self would've gotten obsessed if I hadn't pulled the plug. Though, my recent late-night binges of AoT have made me wonder: what is it about anime that makes it so enjoyable?
Before I get any further, I'd like to dispel the idea that anime is for kids. It's an irrational bias that people have since they might have watched cartoons as a child and now consider anything animated as childish.
Saying all anime is childish is like saying all watercolor paintings are childish because you used to fingerpaint in kindergarten.
— answer-questions on Reddit
The fact is that many of the most well-known anime shows are not for kids since they explore dark and complex themes. The first episode of AoT itself messed me up for a while — I can't imagine how a child weaned on The Fairly Odd Parents would react.
Animation
I've written about Avatar: The Last Airbender in the past, but there's a tangible cultural difference between western anime like ATLA and a Japanese-influenced anime like Attack on Titan. The canonical comparison here is America's Pixar vs. Japan's Studio Ghibli. Both cultural contexts manage to express the raw power of the human spirit through well-crafted characters and narratives.
Animation as a medium has a far more expressive canvas for an artist to realize their vision. Every detail can be tweaked to impart the ambience that the creator is looking for — including art style, music, pacing, characters, lighting, general vibe, etc. This control over the final product takes a greater level of skill to perfect but can lead to masterpieces. This explains the wide variance that makes bad anime terrible and good anime amazing.
Another factor is that the creators don't need to cater to the egos of famous actors who could strong-arm the direction of the project. The most user-facing contributors to an anime are the voice actors, who are criminally underrated. How else can you explain one of the main voice actors of Pixar's most acclaimed franchise being more well known for her second life as a whimsical historical writer?
As a form of escapist entertainment, anime is a medium that can't be beat. You might relate to the character's internal struggles, but their external circumstances are sometimes so absurd that it's comical. There might be some level of distance from reality needed for content like this to be truly compelling — the stories you see are divorced from real life so you feel free to fully immerse yourself in the plot without drawing mental parallels to your own life.
As an American, it's also a welcome escape from traditional western media. Don't get me wrong, most forms of media can be great, but anime holds a unique spot in culture. When inundated with western media, the focus on dialogue, story, and viewer immersion in anime is a welcome change of pace.
I've only scratched the surface as there's so much more to the difference between western & eastern media, the manga origins of anime, and the bizarre subcultures that exist. For now, I'll enjoy having a show to look forward to every night and know that my worries will melt away into the world of the Titans.
🍯 Best Finds
👾 Tails: Tails is a tool that I recently discovered for protecting your privacy online. It's an operating system installed directly on a flash drive that can be plugged into any computer that supports USB and wipes all user-data when you shut down. It's free and comes with privacy software by default like Tor, PGP encryption, etc. I recommend this video as a primer.
📝 Mailbag #2 by Tim Urban: A delightful look into the mind of one of my favorite writers. Every single question answered has a unique perspective or insight to consider.
📝 Why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too by Pieter Levels: I tend to take a terrible amount of time to reply to messages, emails, or requests from those I don't consider kin. This is a feature, as Pieter Levels describes in this post. Here's a video with more actionable ways to become 'unreachable'.
"Prioritizing responding to DMs from strangers if my girlfriend is sitting next to me and wants a hug, or my friend wants to go for a walk, or I haven't called my parents in a week, or there's a critical bug on my sites. It'd be stupid to."
🎧 Tyler Cowen on the Lex Friedman Podcast: Tyler Cowen is a genius — no doubt about that. He's open-minded, curious, and can seemingly present an eloquent counterfactual to anything. This episode in particular challenged a lot of the ideas I've internalized like the demonization of bureaucracy and crypto maximalism.
🎧 The Complete History and Analysis of Bitcoin by The Acquired Podcast: I've stopped compulsively checking Bitcoin prices but will be forever blown away by its impact on the world and am always yearning for more information. This 3 hour behemoth is the most comprehensive resource I've found on learning about the history of this insane movement.
👋🏽 Conclusion
I actually have a lot more to say about the topic of anime, so I plan to write a more thorough post on my website soon. In other news, I've started supplementing algae. Expect an experiment write-up in the May 2021 edition of this newsletter!
Adiós ✌🏽
— Thot