Weekend Reads: Studio Ghibli's Storytelling, Gundam, Richard Donner (RIP), Trump vs. Big Tech
Recommended weekend reading material for July 10, 2021.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
One of my new favorite newsletters is Animation Obsessive. In a recent issue, they attempt to explain what makes Studio Ghibli’s storytelling so unique and amazing.
The way Miyazaki makes films is both widely documented and little known. At its core, it’s about process rather than planning. Miyazaki’s goal is to bring into the world beautiful films that he says already exist. He can’t see them fully, and even he doesn’t know how they’ll end. So, he leads the group struggle to find the film, starting with his own snatches and snippets of ideas.
Related: Hayao Miyazaki’s powers of observation are no joke.
In light of Netflix’s recent release of Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway, of James Whitbrook offers an overview of the long-running Gundam anime franchise.
As you might have gathered, Hathaway might be the start of a new movie trilogy, but a few things are going to be lost on you if you’re diving into it as your first taste of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. This story in particular is wrapped up in a lot of context from some of the most famous pieces of the wider Gundam franchise, which means watching it can come off as a little intimidating. If you are intrigued by the idea of diving into this fascinating universe and are keen to do some research beforehand however, we’ve got your back — and thankfully, that’s actually become a bit easier recently.
Richard Donner, who directed such classic movies as Superman, The Goonies, and the Lethal Weapon movies, died earlier this week at the age of 91.
[U]nlike so many filmmakers of that period who crossed over from one medium to the next, Donner stuck to the essential elements of his TV roots. He kept his films friendly and digestible. He thought in neatly delineated episodes even when he was making an oversize superhero saga. And his most successful movies lent themselves to sequelization with an uncanny facility because Donner had a sixth sense, bred from his work on the small screen, for creating characters who were broadly outlined enough that they could just keep going.
Rock n’ roll has traditionally been about dissent and rebellion, but how does that work in a country that’s as repressive and authoritarian as China?
Rock music quickly exposed my glaring Western bias upon my arrival in Beijing. My American upbringing had steered me to a pretty ethnocentric assumption: that in a totalitarian government, defiance would exhibit itself as bluntly and topically as in the United States, just with additional concealment. I pictured singers gathering in secretive, riotous speakeasy spaces and clubs, railing against conformity and the omniscience of the Communist Party. In other words, something that slotted into the West’s notion of protest. But those looking for such dens of iniquity in China will be looking for a long, long time.
Rock n’ roll isn’t the only way to rebel in China, however. You can also try doing as little as possible.
A generation ago, the route to success in China was to work hard, get married and have children. The country’s authoritarianism was seen as a fair trade-off as millions were lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many young Chinese fear they will be the first generation not to do better than their parents.
They are now defying the country’s long-held prosperity narrative by refusing to participate in it.
Trump has sued Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, claiming that their censorship (i.e., kicking him off their platforms for inciting the January 6 insurrection) violates the First Amendment — and has caused trillions of dollars in damages.
Trump’s lawsuits make a long-shot argument that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube each have a status that “rises beyond that of a private company to that of a state actor” because they “increasingly engaged in impermissible censorship resulting from threatened legislative action” and willingly participated “in joint activity with federal actors.” He asked for orders finding that the companies’ banning of Trump and other users “are a prior restraint on their First Amendment right to free speech.”
Via The Factual.
Thought #1: It’s disgusting, though not at all surprising, that despite being a former President, Trump apparently has little-to-no grasp of how the First Amendment works. (Sadly, he’s not alone in that ignorance.)
Thought #2: It’s so fascinating when conservatives and Republicans, who traditionally consider government regulation of the private sector to be anathema, suddenly begin calling for — wait for it — government regulation of the private sector.
Thought #3: This XKCD comic should be the final word on this “controversy.”
Given the controversies surrounding Parler and Gettr, Casey Newton wonders if a conservative social media network can ever really exist.
Lots of questions about social networks are hard. This one isn’t. If you create a place for people to upload text and images, you have to moderate it — and moderate it aggressively. You have to draw hard lines; you have to move those lines as society evolves and your adversaries adjust; you have to accept difficult trade-offs between users’ well being and their right to express themselves.
Apps like Parler and Gettr offered their conservative users an attractive mirage: a free-speech paradise where they could say the things they couldn’t say elsewhere. It never seemed to occur to anyone that such a move would only select for the worst social media customers on earth, quickly turning the founders’ dreams to ash.
One of the web’s biggest flaws is “link rot,” i.e., links that become broken and disconnected, or even redirected, because websites shut down or reshuffle their content. Link rot is getting worse as people increasingly rely on websites for vital information.
People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary — they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren’t stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web — the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks — diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.
The problem isn’t just for academic articles and judicial opinions. With John Bowers and Clare Stanton, and the kind cooperation of The New York Times, I was able to analyze approximately 2 million externally facing links found in articles at nytimes.com since its inception in 1996. We found that 25 percent of deep links have rotted. (Deep links are links to specific content — think theatlantic.com/article, as opposed to just theatlantic.com.) The older the article, the less likely it is that the links work. If you go back to 1998, 72 percent of the links are dead. Overall, more than half of all articles in The New York Times that contain deep links have at least one rotted link.
Via Frontend Focus.
If you have a vintage Atari console, and you want to keep it in good working order, then you definitely don’t want to get on Bradley Koda’s bad side.
Most of Koda’s customers adore him. He’s a skilled service technician with an encyclopedic knowledge of Atari systems. He helps customers put the joy back in their joysticks with fresh replacement circuit boards. He has been known to diagnose complex Atari ailments over the phone. He even occasionally produces his own fresh runs of crucial replacement parts when his vintage stock runs dry — most recently a brand-new AC adaptor for the Atari 2600, to replace his customers’ malfunctioning 40-year-old power bricks.
But even those who love buying from Koda admit that they experience a slight tingling of animal fear every time they order from Best Electronics.
Via kottke.org.
From the Blog
The Cure is one of my favorite bands of all time, if not my absolute favorite band. But alas, I’ve never seen them live. Perhaps someday I will, but until then, I can enjoy this AI-enhanced version of their Show concert film from 1993.
Robert Smith and his bandmates are at the top of their game here as they tear through the usual hits (“Pictures of You,” “Just Like Heaven,” “Fascination Street,” “A Forest”), play some older songs (“The Walk,” “Let’s Go to Bed,” “Primary”), and perform most of the Wish album, including stellar renditions of “Open,” “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea,” “End,” and “To Wish Impossible Things.”
I love every phase of The Cure, from their early post-punk scrappiness to the elegiac nihilism of Faith and Pornography, from the skewed dance music of Japanese Whispers to Disintegration’s majestic melancholy. But I discovered The Cure circa Wish, so that phase of the band has always had a special place in my heart.
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