Weekend Reads (Dec 9): Godzilla, Comixology, HTML, Messi, Chocolate
Recommended weekend reading for December 9, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
With a new Japanese Godzilla movie in theaters and a Godzilla-inspired show currently airing on Apple TV+, Sam Barsanti reflects on the different cultural approaches to the iconic movie monster.
Monarch and the recent American movies (the 2014 Godzilla, 2019’s Godzilla: King Of Monsters, and 2021’s Godzilla Vs. Kong) are largely about the awe-inspiring majesty of Godzilla, with humanity just politely stepping out of the way so he can battle whatever other big monster he needs to battle—to the point where it’s almost a novelty that a character in Monarch suffers from Godzilla PTSD. Everyone else has just more or less accepted that mankind shares the planet with these “Titans” (as they’re called in that canon), and they do their best to live their lives with that knowledge.
In Japan, though, Godzilla has always had more metaphorical depth, for one wholly unsurprising reason. The original 1954 Godzilla movie famously presents the monster as both a retribution for mankind’s use of the atomic bomb (since he was created by radioactive energy) and a physical embodiment of the destruction caused by the bombs.
I finally watched the original Godzilla movie earlier this year, and I was surprised by how tragic it felt, especially when compared to the campiness that’s often associated with the franchise and the bad-ass spectacle of the American movies. It’s all good in my book, because Godzilla’s awesome, but his malleability is certainly fascinating and even unique, I think, among movie franchises.
And earlier this week, I watched the latest Godzilla movie, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, which I loved: “[I]t takes almost everything that’s beloved and celebrated about the Big G’s various incarnations, distills it down to its purest essence, and delivers a story that’s filled with as much heart and human drama as it is with kaijū spectacle.” (I’m not the only one who loved it, either; Godzilla Minus One is now the most successful live-action Japanese film in U.S. box office history.)
Gemma Gracewood interviews cinematographer Atsushi Okui, who worked on The Boy and the Heron, the latest film from master animator Hayao Miyazaki.
Okui has now been the director of photography and head of digital imaging for Miyazaki’s films since 1992, when he moved from Asahi Productions to Studio Ghibli to oversee Porco Rosso. Over time he has encouraged the renowned animation house to adopt digital animation tools for a more immersive big-screen experience, bringing the CG team fully into the room for production meetings that had been long reserved for artists.
“I’ve worked on a lot of films with Miyazaki, and each time the most important job is creating something that matches what’s inside of his head,” Okui explains of his role. “So I do what is called the ‘finishing work’; by the time the material has come to me it already has the imagination of the artists and animators, and I have to work out how to bring that all together. Whether we can recreate the images inside of Miyazaki’s head, or even if they’re different, as long as we can surpass his expectations then that’s okay. That’s what we’re aiming for.”
Hollywood actors have voted to officially accept a new three-year contract that SAG-AFTRA brokered with studios back in November.
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said, “I’m proud of our SAG-AFTRA membership. They struck for 118 days to grant the TV/Theatrical Negotiating Committee the necessary leverage to secure over $1 billion in gains, along with the union’s first-ever protections around AI technology. Now they’ve locked in the gains by ratifying the contract. SAG-AFTRA members have remained incredibly engaged throughout this process, and I know they’ll continue their advocacy throughout our next negotiation cycle. This is a golden age for SAG-AFTRA, and our union has never been more powerful.”
Earlier this year, actors spent four months on strike to protest, among other things, streaming residuals and AI’s impact on the film and TV industry. Some actors, however, including Justine Bateman and Matthew Modine, voted against the new contract, claiming that its AI provisions don’t go far enough to protect actors from being exploited.
The 2023 Game Awards were held this week, with Baldur’s Gate 3 winning “Game of the Year.” The show also included a slew of new game announcements, including a new title from Metal Gear’s Hideo Kojima. However, the awards show has been criticized for not acknowledging the layoffs that have rocked the video game industry in 2023.
At this point, you cannot talk about how amazing 2023 has been for the quality of games released this year without also mentioning how it’s been utterly disastrous for the people who made them. But that’s exactly what Geoff Keighley did during this year’s Game Awards.
The numbers vary, but estimates say anywhere between six and seven thousand workers have lost their jobs just this year. No level of studio size or success has been spared. And those who have been let go are now being forced to contend for an ever-dwindling number of open job postings.
Sometimes, the internet can still be an amazing place. Twitter user @laurenancona was recently watching a 25-year-old X-Files episode and became fascinated by a song that played in the background. The resulting Twitter thread, in which she tries to track down any info on the song and its origins, is filled with enough twists, turns, and revelations for any Mulder and Scully adventure.
’Tis the season for year-end reviews and recaps. For starters, Bandcamp, Consequence, Treblezine, NPR, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork have begun publishing their lists of 2023’s best albums. Additionally, Pitchfork, The Guardian, Paste, and Treblezine have published their lists of 2023’s best songs.
As for movies, The Reveal recognizes the year’s best movie posters, including The Creator and Cocaine Bear.
And looking ahead to 2024, The Playlist has posted their list of next year’s most anticipated TV series. And naturally, they’ve posted their list of 2023’s best TV series.
Related: My own year-end list of 2023’s best songs will be published on January 1; here’s my list of 2022’s best songs. And I’m currently working on my lists of 2024’s most anticipated movies, TV series, etc., while be published later this month.
Susana Polo pays tribute to the comic-reading app Comixology, which was shut down earlier this month. But it wasn’t without its drawbacks.
The great digital media scarcity problem applies here, too. If your local comic shop refused to sell Saga because the cover featured Alana breastfeeding her infant daughter, you could go to the shop the next town over, or mail order a copy from the next state. When Comixology decided not to sell Saga #12 in 2013 out of an overabundance of caution in respect to Apple’s own monopolistic App Store rules, you couldn’t get a digital copy of it from a competitor because there weren’t any. And if Saga hadn’t been one of the most popular books on the stands at that time, with a passionate audience willing to raise social media hell, Comixology and Apple might not have relented and allowed its sale. A smaller title could have been SOL.
Eric A. Meyer reflects on the 30th anniversary of his very first HTML document, a web-friendly version of the “Incomplete Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode Guide.”
Its last-updated date of December 3, 1993, is also the date I created it. I was on lobby duty with the CWRU Film Society, and had lugged a laptop (I think it was an Apple PowerBook of some variety, something like a 180, borrowed from my workplace) and a printout of the HTML specification (or maybe it was “Tags in HTML”?) along with me.
I spent most of that evening in the lobby of Strosacker Auditorium, typing tags and doing find-and-replace operations in Microsoft Word, and then saving as text to a file that ended in
.html
, which was the style at the time. By the end of the night, I had more or less what you see in the archived copy.
Via TLDR Web Dev. This brings back some fond memories of my own first forays into HTML, which involved writing uppercase HTML tags in Notepad while referencing a photocopied HTML tutorial that a friend had given me.
Web development has come a long way since then, with new technologies, platforms, design approaches, and methodologies. And yet, the core of web development hasn’t really changed all that much in the last three decades. Sure, there are lots of new tags, CSS and JS are in the mix, etc., but I’m still just writing code in a text editor, much like I did back in the mid ’90s.
After leading Argentina to win the 2022 World Cup, Lionel Messi — arguably the greatest soccer player of all time — surprised everyone by agreeing to play in America. And in the process, he’s driven up domestic demand for the sport.
For reasons that have been bandied around for decades (lack of goal scoring, not as violent as football or fun as basketball, status as a foreign import), the United States, the world’s most lucrative sports market, had never fully embraced the beautiful game. Recently, however, the sport has seen impressive growth, and with the U.S. hosting three major international tournaments in the next three years (Copa America in 2024, the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025, and the grandest of them all, the World Cup, in 2026), it’s sure to attract even more fans. But Messi is an accelerant. With the most revered and influential athlete on the planet playing in Miami for at least the next two years, still performing at the top of his game — he won another Ballon d’Or as the world’s player of the year, his eighth, in late October — the U.S. is now a soccer nation. A fútbol nation.
Via NextDraft.
Finally, a word of warning for my fellow chocolate lovers: Weather conditions have affected cocoa and sugar production around the world, leading to increased prices and dwindling supplies.
The heavy rain creates swamp-like conditions on the roads and causes the flowers to fall off the cacao trees before they can bud. Even worse, the overly wet conditions breed fungi that can cause cocoa pods to turn to black mush. This is known as black pod and has led to Ghana having its lowest output in 13 years and Ivory Coast its lowest in seven years.
At the same time that cocoa plants are struggling, there is also a sugar shortage at play. El Niño, a climatological phenomenon that periodically affects weather patterns, is largely to blame for reduced sugar crop as well.
Several major confectioners, including Hershey and Nestlé, have announced plans to raise their prices. I’d suggest stocking up, but let’s be honest… if you’re anything like me, then a chocolate stockpile isn’t going to last very long at all.
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