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April 2023 News

April 2023 Gwern.net newsletter with links on TODO

April 2023’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, March 2023 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.

Writings

Books

Nonfiction:

Fiction:

Film/TV

Live-action:

Animated:

  • Suzume (2022; Makoto Shinkai. Now my favorite Shinkai movie. Where most Shinkai movies leave me feeling alienated by the sentiment and emotional manipulation and fetishization of the highschool romance-drama, as well as increasingly stale magical-realism or ‘Shinkai sky’, Suzume swerves left from expectations, and its portrayal of a nontraditional family of aunt & niece is his most genuine work. Nor does it fail to deliver a lot of action & adventure, and enjoyable animation—in particular, watching the cats, I felt sure that whoever was responsible for that must love cats. (Although I am still a little puzzled how the stable time loop is supposed to work: how does the chair get damaged, if Suzume gives it to her younger self in a time loop?) It is regrettable that despite well-earned initial success, that Suzume doesn’t seem to be sticking. I blame the name in part for that: it is one of the worst and least memorable anime movie names ever. Even a literal translation like “Suzume’s Locking Up” would have been better than just “Suzume”. when someone asked me two years later “had I had seen Suzume?”, I drew a blank—that Ghibli movie or TV thing no Westerner ever watches…?—“no, that movie a few years ago” [walking motion with fingers]—“oh, the chair movie, yeah, it was great!”)

Music

Touhou:

Vocaloid:

MLP:

Doujin:

Misc: