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aldebrn.me
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@aldebrn.me
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“Humans are weird. I try, really I do, to get you guys. But I’ve got golden-age tech from a half dozen civilizations on this station, and y’all burned them down rather than just relax and enjoy it.” —Argus, *Kitty Cat Kill Sat*
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aldebrn.me
*Loving Vincent* from 2017 left me speechless. Every frame is an impressionist oil painting. Literally a moving painting. An absolute delight.
December 10, 2025 at 3:10 AM
aldebrn.me
*Nobody* was amazing, a moving painting in many scenes!
December 10, 2025 at 3:03 AM
aldebrn.me
Another model of positive masculinity
December 5, 2025 at 2:39 PM
aldebrn.me
Reposting one of my models of positive masculinity
2018 post from @DrSoxion: Someone: "is EVERYTHING toxic masculinity? What's an example of masculinity that ISN'T toxic?" Me: Photo of Sig Curtis and Major Alex Louis Armstrong, two muscle-bound men from Fullmetal Alchemist anime, shaking hands
December 5, 2025 at 2:37 PM
aldebrn.me
Moss Roberts saying “there’s no daily life or domesticity in Romance of the Three Kingdoms” sent me to a list of other genres like chuanqi (short stories) and this collection, “Tang Dynasty Tales: a guided reader, vol. 2” is so my jam—footnotes like a string of jade!

books.apple.com/us/book/tang...
(The Tale of the Supernatural Marriage at Dongting) by Li Chaowei translated by Meghan Cai During the Yifeng reign (676–679), there was a scholar, Liu Yi , who failed the imperial examination and was going to return to the shores of the Xiang [River]. He remembered that there was a native of his township who was sojourning in Jingyang [County], and so he went there to bid him farewell. When he had gone six or seven li [two or three miles] a bird flew up and frightened his horse, which galloped off to the left of the road. Only after another six or seven li did it stop.” There are nine footnotes in this segment! There are also original Chinese characters for several proper names (embedded as images 😒)
November 21, 2025 at 2:46 AM
aldebrn.me
Ah, a note. Thunderbolt Fantasy mostly plays straight the trope where women are either ❶ demons or ❷ "good wife, wise mother"

Even though we have amazing literal demonesses, badass warriors, and questing maidens, they mostly fall into the “in the end, evil” or “in the end, a caregiver” category
Elaborately-dressed swordswoman with long black hair under a tall dashing hat adorned with roses and butterfly wings, and enormous brocade collars around her face. It's Tan Hi aka Dān Fěi ("Vermillion Kingfisher") A woman in ethereal white-and-pastel-purple robes, long white hair in Chun-Li-style double-buns, a cape billowing around her, holding a small blade. It's Katsu Eiraku aka Xiē Yīng Luò ("Scorpion Necklace") A women in a brilliant blue collared dress and long black hair with gold clasps in it, with a blue-and-gold zither on her back, standing in front of raging water It's Mutsu Tenmei aka Mù Tin Mìng ("Harmonious Destiny") A woman with white hair braided and coiled into pointy buns at the side of her head, and bangs interrupted by two thick black horns, wearing richly-embroidered robes that come up into a mask (like a Covid mask) covering her nose and mouth, big green eyes staring icily. It's Uraina aka Wū Lěi Nà.
November 9, 2025 at 4:57 PM
aldebrn.me
25 days later, after four seasons and three films, I finished the main Thunderbolt Fantasy series (there are a few manga and novels). Wow. The art and storytelling grammar of glove puppetry is so fresh, the fantastic Urobuchi plot leaving no trope unsubverted. 5 of 5 stars. To 40 more years of Pili!
Half of an alabaster face, serene half-closed eyes under white swirl eyebrows, long white hair and white robes flying around, saying, "Until we meet again, my friend". It's Byakuren aka Bái Lián.
November 9, 2025 at 4:31 PM
aldebrn.me
I love spring in the Bay 🌸

(Seek says this is India hawthorn aka Hong Kong hawthorn, which are perfect names)
Cluster of beautiful pink semi-double blossoms against lush green leaves.
November 9, 2025 at 3:31 PM
aldebrn.me
I often ask myself the same thing, Mutsu Tenmei.
An elaborately-dressed woman warrior, wearing a blindfold and with an ornate guzheng (zither) strapped to her back, stands in an eerie green fog, saying "Are we really in the Demon Realm?" It's Mutsu Tenmei (aka Mù Tiān Mìng) from Thunderbolt Fantasy.
November 9, 2025 at 6:21 AM
aldebrn.me
Just kidding, my favorite part is definitely Mashiro 🐑 what a boss, friend, partner!

I’d love to read more by Shimizu!!!
A human woman with sheep horns and ears wearing a diagonal-patterned dress and black purse stands in a busy train station looking a bit flustered
October 25, 2025 at 7:03 AM
aldebrn.me
Wesley Robertson (the Japanese slang monthly newsletter person) is coauthor on a new paper analyzing advertisements for men pubic hair removal in 🇯🇵

Fascinatingly, the main machowashing angle is: social responsibility to reduce inconvenience to caregivers when you’re old?
brill.com/view/journal...
Across the 30 websites, we identified four key persuasive discourse patterns as part of their “imaginary dialogue” (Talbot, 2014: 759) with the reader: (1) reducing inconvenience to caregivers as social responsibility; (2) promoting personal hygiene; (3) freedom from self-shaving; and (4) a preference by women for hairless men.
October 24, 2025 at 3:07 PM
aldebrn.me
This is a Night's Lament appreciation account
October 21, 2025 at 4:18 AM
aldebrn.me
I often think about this scathing critique in Anna Wiener's brilliant ethnography of Hacker News in www.newyorker.com/news/letter-... the faux-erudition isn't limited to HN and I try to remind myself to root it out in my own thinking and writing
The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari.
October 19, 2025 at 7:25 PM
aldebrn.me
Who's your favorite Jedi? (Wrong answers only)
October 18, 2025 at 12:02 AM
aldebrn.me
Never liked apocalypse stories but tried "Last of Us" after watching this lecture, "Why apocalypse stories feel different now" www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rvY... and didn't like it either so I was so surprised at how much I liked My Daemon anime! A fantastically well-told story.

9/10.
"My daemon" in pink–purple pastels with the initial "M" shaped by Kento holding Anna A post-apocalyptic Japanese railroad crossing—the brilliant sunset and beautiful autumn colors contrast sharply with the derelict train and building. Kento ducks under the bar to prepare to cross the tracks A surreal scene showing a daemon-encrusted building looming over three small scared kids looking up at it. The soft purple pastels make my heart seize up every time A brilliantly psychedelically-colorful kaiju with an orchid and theater mask face stares at the dazzling gold fish sculpture of Shachihoko (that are found at the top of some Japanese castles like Nagoya Castle and Osaka Castle)
October 16, 2025 at 4:57 PM
aldebrn.me
Because I look at individual stocks so irregularly, a thing I do is instead look at a chart of the name in question divided by the sector, in this case, NFLX÷XLK (XLK is the 70~odd tech companies in the S&P 500)—because often with these headlines, the name moves in line with its sector.

And—
TradingView chart of NFLX/XLK from March to now, with a box highlighting the month of July where the line crashed 17%. Same chart, with a box since Friday showing the collapse is -6.7%.
October 4, 2025 at 9:13 PM
aldebrn.me
Saw on FinViz and my heart dropped

'New: Introducing “Why Is It Moving?” - lightning-fast, AI-driven explanations of stock moves'

⚰️ not them shitting on the entire thesis of "Black Swan" 💀 paying an AI to tell you "Treasuries rise on Hussein capture" in the morning and the opposite by lunchtime 🫣
“TO BE WRONG WITH INFINITE PRECISION We harbor a crippling dislike for the abstract. One day in December 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured, Bloomberg News flashed the following headline at 13:01: U.S. TREASURIES RISE; HUSSEIN CAPTURE MAY NOT CURB TERRORISM. Whenever there is a market move, the news media feel obligated to give the “reason.” Half an hour later, they had to issue a new headline. As these U.S. Treasury bonds fell in price (they fluctuate all day long, so there was nothing special about that), Bloomberg News had a new reason for the fall: Saddam’s capture (the same Saddam). At 13:31 they issued the next bulletin: U.S. TREASURIES FALL; HUSSEIN CAPTURE BOOSTS ALLURE OF RISKY ASSETS. So it was the same capture (the cause) explaining one event and its exact opposite. Clearly, this can’t be; these two facts cannot be linked. Do media journalists repair to the nurse’s office every morning to get their daily dopamine injection so that they can narrate better?” Excerpt From The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto) Nassim Nicholas Taleb
October 3, 2025 at 7:13 AM
aldebrn.me
[CW: WW2 war crime.]

Les Grandes Grandes Vacances (2015) has no right to go this hard. It's very much a kids show, but its frank depictions of war, of being a refugee, then running and scattering as Messerschmitts gun down you and your fellow civilians…

Worth the watch—streaming on Prime.
A mom is holding her two young children as the dad puts on a brave smile, "Come on, maybe the war will be over before the end of summer" Big bro is holding little sister, who looks up at him, asking "Tell me, Papa is going to die at war? Like grandpa?" An aerial view of a country road and bridge full of people and carts and wagons. A German fighter is flying down the road and strafing. War crimes. A man, a woman, three children, and a small pig walk down a road in the countryside in the aftermath of the bombing, wrecks of busses and carts. The bright ligne claire style contrasts heavily with the theme.
September 16, 2025 at 3:24 PM
aldebrn.me
Manga page. A black-haired uniformed boy sitting in a chair, looking up befuddled at a girl? (judging by the uniform) wearing a big rectangular cardboard box on their head with cat ears and a hugely-smiling cat face drawn on it, pointing a big gun at his face, her leg up on a desk behind him. The cardboard cat head says "See you in hell, baby!" and she shoots him, "bam!", party poppers going off everywhere as he tries to duck and roll in pain
September 11, 2025 at 2:42 AM
aldebrn.me
Episode 6, "Null Island", of Yao-Chinese Folktales youtu.be/aO-ylV9FHW8 hit me squarely in the demographic 🤩🤤 the vibrant colors, the ocean's vastness, the sky's moods, wow
A painting of the ocean below a setting sun, hella dramatic, blue sky, gold and orange, swirling clouds Sea cliffs, sheer rock but also moss-covered flat areas, under blue blue skies with white white clouds. Two people are walking down some rough steps. A tilted view of the beach from ground level. Must be sunset because the clouds are purple. Two people are building a weird contraption on the mostly empty beach. Nighttime. A person standing at a rooftop balcony looking out at a dense urban jungle.
September 9, 2025 at 10:41 PM
aldebrn.me
Aaron Brown (author/ex-chief risk manager at a major hedge fund) writes about this socially-constructed reality aspect a lot, for both creating assets (investment banks) & trading them: they’ll take the bad data in stride

From lol www.oreilly.com/library/view... ch. 4, section “Playing the game”
“Similarly, we don’t want some people taking direction from one person, while others follow a different leader. We play a game, pick a leader and everyone is supposed to go along. We don’t know how to always get the best person for the job, but we need a process to select someone. When elections and other social mechanisms for enforcing agreements break down, no choice remains other than war. Remember that the game doesn’t mean we don’t care about justice in a trial, or choosing the best person in an election, or who is right or wrong in a war. The first two games at least are designed to find the right outcome if it can be done. Getting the right outcome, however, is less important than being fair to all sides (which is the only way the losing side is going to accept the verdict), and being fair is less important than delivering a clear answer.” Excerpt From Financial Risk Management for Dummies Aaron Brown This material may be protected by copyright.
August 9, 2025 at 3:24 PM
aldebrn.me
My Aranet4 CO2 monitor goes everywhere with me and I show it to everyone as soon as I start getting that carbon dioxide headache (usually when it’s at 900 or more)

So many places that could be better ventilated are instead nausea-inducing (and potentially infectious-disease-laden)
CO2 reading of 841 ppm in a Yayoi Kusama mirror box art exhibit with pink and yellow and neon cyan tentacles coming out of the floor and ceilings CO2 reading of 2168 ppm on a Japanese high-speed train CO2 reading of 2208 in a packed gym CO2 reading of 1173 in a hotel in the tropics
August 2, 2025 at 4:59 AM
aldebrn.me
The sudden realization angle is my story too! It was Ben Orenstein posting some years ago:

“You can passively consume hundreds of articles and podcasts and learn far less than shipping one side project a year. … I think it's much, much, harder to ship a project and not learn a ton. …” (and replies)
“You can passively consume hundreds of articles and podcasts and learn far less than shipping one side project a year. … I think it's much, much, harder to ship a project and not learn a ton. ESPECIALLY if that project is product.” Someone else: “Agree wholeheartedly. But consuming theoretical knowledge (without practical application) is still important.” Ben: “Meh.” Another response: “True, but you need 2 have some1 better than yourself give you feedback in order 2 improve. Practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent” Ben: “Disagree :)” https://mobile.twitter.com/r00k/status/902918202077970432
July 29, 2025 at 2:24 PM
aldebrn.me
I was not ready for the first page of Dr Hartman's *Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America* archive.org/details/scen...

I 💯 recognize myself in what she's asking—how am I participating in scenes that Douglass describes? en.wikisource.org/wiki/Narrati...
The "terrible spectacle" that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery was the beating of his Aunt Hester. It is one of the most well-known scenes of torture in the literature of slavery, perhaps second only to Uncle Tom's murder at the hands of Simon Legree. By locating this "horrible exhibition" in the first chapter of his 1845 *Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass*, Douglass establishes the centrality of violence to the making of the slave and identifies it as an original generative act equivalent to the statement "I was born." … I have chosen not to reproduce Douglass's account of the beating of Aunt Hester in order to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave's ravaged body. Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity—the oft-repeated or restored character of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical language usually resorted to in describing these instances—and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. What interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes. Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance? What does the exposure of the violated body yield? Proof of black sentience or the inhumanity of the "peculiar institution"?
July 29, 2025 at 1:49 AM
aldebrn.me
Read the two volumes of Ami Uozumi's Pink Candy Kiss on Viz www.viz.com/vizmanga/cha... and

And so blown away I immediately pre-orderd next two volumes

Then bought all five Japanese volumes on BookWalker.jp. About to read with translator app

When new favorite thing explodes in your life, 🎇🧠🧨🤩💘
Two portraits. Above, Takara, long light hair, quietly smiling and looking off, in a plaid shirt. Below, Ema, short dark side-parted hair, facing forward but looking off to the side, in a floral top. Very emotive. Tall page split into halves, and then the second (left) half split again into halves. The first (right) half is Ema. Dark hair and dark blouse sandwiching her skin. She looks stunned. The two thinner halves is Takara. Two very narrow views of her face, first pained with eyes open, second ashamed? Disappointed? Eyes closed and looking down. Super emotive. Watercolor chapter cover. Two women wearing kimono sitting in a tatami room next to a garden in summer (fruits bowl, fan). A cat sits meowing at Ema. A car drives off, an empty facade of a house. Ema, short side-parted hair blowing in the wind, looking sad, disappointed, holding up a curled hand, an abortive wave? Pure emoting.
July 29, 2025 at 1:37 AM