Productivity Talk: My Inner Ned, My Inner Homer

When I have a really successful week followed by a slack one, it’s like New Me seeing Old, More Successful Me across the backyard fence. New Me struggles to assemble a pool while Old Me happily trims the bushes.

“Hidely-ho, neighborino!” says Old Me.

“RRRAAAAAUGH!” screams New Me as the pool explodes.

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Can’t Make Kid’s Programs Like This Anymore (…And Probably Shouldn’t!)

Quick: name something you can’t put on your TV network for six-year-olds in the United States. “Guns and excessive violence?” That’s old news. “Racism?” Uh, we hope that’s old news. Here are two categories I propose: “things that are nightmarish” and “things that are really gross.”

Let that sink in. Two categories that dominated children’s TV in the 90s and left a long shadow seem to be fading away.

(Also, if you are a kid, please don’t read this, or my PG-13 blog in general.)

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The 5 Most Futuristic Covers Of All Space-Time

Some albums, books, or other cultural artifacts look very “of their time.” Others—at least in retrospect—look like downright time-travelers.

And a recent impulse buy has graced me with the most bizarrely timeless cover art I’ve ever seen.

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Running Around in Video Game Levels You’ve Completed Already For No Apparent Reason (and Then Also Looking at Maps)

It’s a time-honored tradition.

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Hide No More: The Masquerade Trope in Fantasy Fiction (And How Elatsoe Kills It)

When people recommended the young adult novel Elatsoe to me, it was never as a quirky take on a fantasy world. That’s what it is, though: a modern America with spirit summoners, vicious vampires, and fairy children as its typical citizens. Magic is a known factor that makes travel convenient, complicates crime scenes, causes fantastical global warming.

Rather, the book was introduced to me as a story about grief, healing, and ghosts that features a Native lead. This is also a true statement about what Elatsoe is. What interests me about the discrepancy is how people don’t see a need to mention the setting, bizarre though it may be. Seemingly nobody is saying, “Brace yourselves, because this story has kind of an unusual world…”

That must be because the setting’s not so weird after all. Not since approximately 2005.

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Pretty Strong: Ultimo, Manga Heroes, and Gender Roles in the Early 2010s

Recently I finished Ultimo, a manga which history will remember only as a footnote in Hiroyuki Takei’s career that weirdly has Stan Lee’s name on it. While I didn’t finish it back in the day (when, after many delays, it petered out into a ‘meh’ conclusion), I was always captivated by its high ambition, its sleek art style, and its sheer charm. Take Ultimo himself: his design strikes me as effortlessly cute, cool, and beautiful at the same time.

Cuteness and coolness. Beauty and strength. Today I notice that for Ultimo’s character, these are not contradictions. If anything, his beauty is implied to be the reason he embodies ultimate power and goodness.

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